They Probed Quantum Entanglement While Everyone Shrugged
Among the quirks that my wife chooses to find amusing, I have a habit of waking up extra early every year on the first Tuesday of October. That’s the time when the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announces new recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics. I have been repeating this ritual every year for about a dozen years, waiting—hoping—to hear a particular announcement. This year it finally arrived.
The winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2022, Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger, have been pioneers in the study of , one of the most beguiling features of quantum theory. Albert Einstein and colleagues helped to identify the notion back in the 1930s, only to reject the idea as too outlandish to be true. Thirty years later, physicist John Bell introduced an ingenious way to design an experimental test that might confirm or rule out such strange-sounding behavior.
