"My thesis advisor thought it was a distraction from my work in astrophysics," he recalled, but undeterred, he wrote to Bell, who encouraged him to take up the idea. Clauser realized he could resolve the long standing Bohr-Einstein debate if he could create the right experiment. In 1964, the Northern Irish physicist John Bell proposed a theoretical way to measure whether there were in fact hidden variables inside quantum particles. In 1935 he dismissed this element of quantum entanglement - called nonlocality - as "spooky action at a distance."Įinstein instead believed that "hidden variables" that instructed the particles what state to take must be at play, placing him at odds with his great friend but intellectual adversary Niels Bohr, a founding father of quantum theory. The fact that this occurred instantly contradicted Einstein's theory of relativity which held that nothing - including information - can travel faster than the speed of light. Quantum entanglementĪccording to quantum mechanics, two or more particles can exist in what's called an entangled state - what happens to one in an entangled pair determines what happens to the other, no matter their distance.#photo1 "I used to wander around his laboratory and say 'Wow, oh boy, when I grow up I want to be a scientist so I can play with these fun toys too.'"Īs a graduate student at Columbia in the mid-1960s, he grew interested in quantum physics alongside his thesis work on radio astronomy. "The truth is that I strongly hoped that Einstein would win, which would mean that quantum mechanics was giving incorrect predictions," the 79-year-old said, speaking by telephone from his home in Walnut Creek, just outside San Francisco.īorn in Pasadena in 1942, Clauser credits his father, an engineer who designed planes in the war and founded the aeronautics department at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, for instilling in him a lifelong love of science. But when he carried out his work in the 1970s, Clauser was actually hoping for the opposite result: to upend the field and prove Albert Einstein had been right to dismiss it, he told AFP in an interview.
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