In October, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics to three quantum physicists-Alain Aspect, John F.
Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger-whose work confirmed this troubling phenomenon.
Ulf Danielsson, a professor of theoretical physics at Uppsala University in Sweden and secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physics, refers to the fact that this phenomenon of an instant quantum connection between particles across vast distances isn't accounted for in classical physics of the everyday world.
In other words, they proved Einstein wrong.
A Threat to Special Relativity → Entanglement, as it was first suggested in the 1930s, encroached on the idea of "local realism," which can be boiled down into two statements. First, realism states that all particles have definite properties for all possible measurements. Second, locality says that communication between particles can't happen faster than the speed of light.
The instantaneous action of entanglement challenged at least one of these premises, maybe both. To Einstein, via its challenge to locality, this instantaneous nature represented a threat to one of his key principles of special relativity: the fact that nothing can travel faster than light.
Einstein thought that rather than violating local realism, entanglement and its "spooky action at a distance" indicated that quantum physics was incomplete; he believed that elements connecting the variables of one particle to another would eventually be found. The elements that he and other physicists believed to be missing came to be known as "local hidden variables." The work of Clauser, Aspect, and Zeilinger is so groundbreaking because it conclusively proved that hidden variables don't exist.
Confirming Quantum Physics Is Complete
This story is from the January - February 2023 edition of Popular Mechanics US.
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This story is from the January - February 2023 edition of Popular Mechanics US.
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