Physicists Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger developed experimental tools that helped prove quantum entanglement—a phenomenon Albert Einstein famously dismissed as « spooky action at a distance »—is real, paving the way for its use in powerful computers.
October 4, 2022
Physicists Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger developed experimental tools that helped prove quantum entanglement—a phenomenon Albert Einstein famously dismissed as « spooky action at a distance »—is real, paving the way for its use in powerful computers.
Here are mini biographies of the three scientists.
John Clauser
Born in 1942, John Francis Clauser’s earliest memories were of gaping in wonder at the equipment in the lab of his father, who created the aeronautics department for Johns Hopkins, he told the American Institute of Physics in a 2002 oral history.
An electronics buff who built some of the first computer-driven video games at high school, Clauser opted for physics at college.
In the mid-1960s, he grew interested in the ideas of quantum mechanics pioneer John Bell, who strove to better understand entanglement—when two particles behave as one and can affect each other, even at vast distances.
« I thought this is one of the most amazing papers I’ve ever read in my own life, and I kept wondering, gee, where’s the experimental evidence? » Clauser told PBS in 2018.
Clauser believed he could test Bell’s ideas in a laboratory, but was met with widespread scorn by leading physicists of the time.
He proposed the test independently of his thesis work on radio astronomy, and carried it out with collaborators in 1972 while at UC Berkeley.
