Nobel Prize in Physics Is Awarded to 3 Scientists for Work Exploring Quantum Weirdness

As Daniel Kabat, a physics professor at Lehman College in New York, explained recently, “We’re used to thinking that information about an object — say that a glass is half full — is somehow contained within the object.” Instead, he says, entanglement means objects “only exist in relation to other objects, and moreover these relationships are encoded in a wave function that stands outside the tangible physical universe.” (View Highlight)

Quantum mechanics arose in the early decades of the 20th century, a period often called the Second Scientific Revolution, as scientists tried to understand the inner lives of atoms. Its centerpiece was the uncertainty principle, enunciated by Werner Heisenberg in 1927, which states that certain types of knowledge — of a particle’s position and velocity, for example — are incompatible: The more precisely one property is measured, the blurrier and more uncertain the other becomes (View Highlight)

The catch in Dr. Clauser’s discovery and the quantum mechanical description of this spooky action was that the correlations only showed up after the measurements of the individual particles, when the physicists compared their results after the fact. Entanglement seemed real, but it could not be used to communicate information faster than the speed of light. (View Highlight)