The three physicists are John F. Clauser, 79, of Walnut Creek, California, Alain Aspect, 75, of the Université Paris-Saclay and École Polytechnique in France, and Anton Zeilinger, 77, of the University of Vienna. The physicists honored Tuesday found experimental ways to confirm what had previously been assumed, including the “entanglement” of photons (particles of light) in a phenomenon Albert Einstein famously referred to as “spooky action at a distance.” As the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences put it on Tuesday: “What happens to one particle in an entangled pair determines what happens to the other, even if they are actually too far away to affect each other. The laureates’ development of experimental tools laid the foundation for a new era of quantum technology.” For Clauser, the honor was slow in coming. “This is all for work I did more than 50 years ago,” he said, visibly excited Tuesday morning when he arrived at his home. As a graduate student at Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1969, “I struggled with trying to understand quantum mechanics, unsuccessfully. I didn’t understand what I didn’t understand,” he said. But then he found a paper by the physicist John Bell that suggested that quantum theory and a competing set of theories known as “hidden variables” were inconsistent with each other. Clauser thought, “If there is a difference between the two, it must be controllable.” After Clauser moved to the University of California, Berkeley, he and his colleagues searched storage areas for supplies, found “scrap hanging in the physics department,” and cut metal in a shop. “We had no money to spend, so we had to build everything from scratch ourselves,” he said. The result was a 30-foot-long device that could emit photons—particles of light—in opposite directions. In 1972, Clauser and doctoral student Stuart Freedman — who died in 2012 — reported that their experiment detected entanglement consistent with the predictions of quantum mechanics, according to the academy. Clauser said he was surprised by the result, which contradicted Einstein’s views on quantum mechanics. “Einstein assumed that nature consists of things, distributed throughout space, including bits of information and the like. This seems very reasonable. And, in fact, general relativity is based on it. What the experiments show is that it’s not true,” Clauser said. “You cannot localize pieces of information into a small, finite volume. This simple result then has applications that extend to quantum cryptography and other forms of quantum information theory.” Clauser also said they had not been in touch with officials at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences when the Washington Post called, and that he had learned about the award from a “fan” who had followed his work over the years. A series of media interviews followed. Traditionally, Nobel Prize recipients are not notified in advance and are contacted by phone immediately before the announcement. Zeilinger received a call about an hour before the announcement. “I’m still kind of in shock,” Zeilinger said during a news conference at the academy. When asked by a journalist whether, in 10,000 years, it will be possible to teleport one’s body to another place, he replied that teleporting people is “science fiction”. Clauser reiterated this in his interview with The Post: “I wouldn’t get into a quantum teleporter if it was available.” Quantum mechanics is an area of physics that dates back more than a century and has yielded applications, including transistors and lasers, that people use in everyday life. But the potential applications of the principles of quantum mechanics seem limitless. “This award is an encouragement to young people – the award would not be possible without more than 100 young people who have worked with me over the years.” – Anton Zeilinger during the press conference where he was announced as one of the laureates of the 2022 #NobelPrize in physics. pic.twitter.com/2KASRsmuuQ — The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 4, 2022 As a doctoral student, Aspect improved the efficiency and clarity of Clauser’s earlier experiments, and Zeilinger then explored systems that used more than two entangled particles, the academy said. The three new Nobel laureates have been honored as a trio before, having won Israel’s Wolf Prize in physics in 2010. Eva Olsson, a professor of experimental physics and a member of the Nobel committee for physics, said on Tuesday that quantum information science is a fast-growing field with many potential applications in information transfer and sensing technology. “His predictions have opened doors to another world,” he said, “and have also shaken the very foundations of how we interpret measurements.” The honor bestowed upon the three physicists drew praise from fellow physicist Stephen Bartlett of the University of Sydney, who is editor-in-chief of the American Physical Society’s journal, PRX Quantum. The experiments “brought into focus the most impressive and challenging aspects of quantum physics,” Bartlett said in an email. “In particular, they demonstrate that ‘entangled’ quantum particles behave in a way that is completely contrary to our understanding of how independent, separate objects should behave.” Quantum theory may be strange and notoriously silly, but it is fundamental to modern physics. Frances Hellman, president of the American Physical Society and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley; said the Nobel laureates strengthened the theory through rigorous experiments conducted early in their careers. “This work is now inspiring young people around the world to work on fundamental quantum mechanics and its applications,” he said. At the press conference in Stockholm, Zeilinger said: “The award would not have been possible without more than 100 young people who have worked with me over the years.” Thors Hans Hansson, a theoretical physicist and also a member of the Nobel committee for physics, told reporters that the pioneering experiments “showed us that the strange world of entanglement and Bell pairs is not only the microcosm of atoms and it is certainly not the virtual world of science fiction or mysticism, but it is the real world we all live in.’ The academy’s physics prize tends to rotate among the many disciplines within the grand enterprise of physics, which covers topics as diverse as subatomic particles and the origins of the universe. Last year, the award focused on climate change. He went to Syukuro Manabe of the United States and Klaus Hasselmann of Germany for research on human influence on climate and Giorgio Parisi, an Italian theorist whose work described fluctuating systems at different physical scales. In 2020, black holes were the focus of the academy, which awarded prizes to astrophysicists Andrea Ghez from the United States and Reinhard Genzel from Germany, as well as British mathematical physicist Roger Penrose.
