The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It - Scientific American 15.10.

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QUANTUM PHYSICS

The Universe Is Not

Locally Real, and the
Physics Nobel Prize
Winners Proved It
Elegant experiments with entangled light have laid bare a
profound mystery at the heart of reality

By Daniel Garisto on October 6, 2022

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The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It - Scientific American 15.10.22, 00(27

John Stewart Bell (1928–1990), the Northern Irish physicist whose work sparked a quiet revolution in quantum physics.
Credit: Peter Menzel/Science Source

One of the more unsettling discoveries in the past half century is that the universe is not
locally real. “Real,” meaning that objects have definite properties independent of
observation—an apple can be red even when no one is looking; “local” means objects
can only be influenced by their surroundings, and that any influence cannot travel
faster than light. Investigations at the frontiers of quantum physics have found that
these things cannot both be true. Instead, the evidence shows objects are not influenced
solely by their surroundings and they may also lack definite properties prior to
measurement. As Albert Einstein famously bemoaned to a friend, “Do you really believe
the moon is not there when you are not looking at it?”

This is, of course, deeply contrary to our everyday experiences. To paraphrase Douglas
Adams, the demise of local realism has made a lot of people very angry and been widely
regarded as a bad move.
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The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It - Scientific American 15.10.22, 00(27

Blame for this achievement has now been laid squarely on the shoulders of three
physicists: John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger. They equally split the 2022
Nobel Prize in Physics “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the
violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.” (“Bell
inequalities” refers to the pioneering work of the Northern Irish physicist John Stewart
Bell, who laid the foundations for this year’s Physics Nobel in the early 1960s.)
Colleagues agreed that the trio had it coming, deserving this reckoning for overthrowing
reality as we know it. “It is fantastic news. It was long overdue,” says Sandu Popescu, a
quantum physicist at the University of Bristol. “Without any doubt, the prize is well-
deserved.”

“The experiments beginning with the earliest one of Clauser and continuing along, show
that this stuff isn’t just philosophical, it’s real—and like other real things, potentially
useful,” says Charles Bennett, an eminent quantum researcher at IBM.

“Each year I thought, ‘oh, maybe this is the year,’” says David Kaiser, a physicist and
historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “This year, it really was. It was
very emotional—and very thrilling.”

Quantum foundations’ journey from fringe to favor was a long one. From about 1940
until as late as 1990, the topic was often treated as philosophy at best and crackpottery
at worst. Many scientific journals refused to publish papers in quantum foundations,
and academic positions indulging such investigations were nearly impossible to come
by. In 1985, Popescu’s advisor warned him against a Ph.D. in the subject. “He said ‘look,
if you do that, you will have fun for five years, and then you will be jobless,’” Popescu
says.

Today, quantum information science is among the most vibrant and impactful subfields
in all of physics. It links Einstein’s general theory of relativity with quantum mechanics
via the still-mysterious behavior of black holes. It dictates the design and function of

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The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It - Scientific American 15.10.22, 00(27

quantum sensors, which are increasingly being used to study everything from
earthquakes to dark matter. And it clarifies the often-confusing nature of quantum
entanglement, a phenomenon that is pivotal to modern materials science and that lies
at the heart of quantum computing.

“What even makes a quantum computer ‘quantum’?” Nicole Yunger Halpern, a

National Institute of Standards and Technology physicist, asks rhetorically. “One of the
most popular answers is entanglement, and the main reason why we understand
entanglement is the grand work participated in by Bell and these Nobel Prize–winners.
Without that understanding of entanglement, we probably wouldn’t be able to realize
quantum computers.”

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

The trouble with quantum mechanics was never that it made the wrong predictions—in
fact, the theory described the microscopic world splendidly well right from the start
when physicists devised it in the opening decades of the 20th century.

What Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen took issue with, laid out in their
iconic 1935 paper, was the theory’s uncomfortable implications for reality. Their
analysis, known by their initials EPR, centered on a thought experiment meant to
illustrate the absurdity of quantum mechanics; to show how under certain conditions
the theory can break—or at least deliver nonsensical results that conflict with
everything else we know about reality. A simplified and modernized version of EPR
goes something like this: Pairs of particles are sent off in different directions from a
common source, targeted for two observers, Alice and Bob, each stationed at opposite
ends of the solar system. Quantum mechanics dictates that it is impossible to know the
spin, a quantum property of individual particles prior to measurement. When Alice
measures one of her particles, she finds its spin to be either up or down. Her results are
random, and yet, when she measures up, she instantly knows Bob’s corresponding

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The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It - Scientific American 15.10.22, 00(27

particle must be down. At first glance, this is not so odd; perhaps the particles are like a
pair of socks—if Alice gets the right sock, Bob must have the left.

But under quantum mechanics, particles are not like socks, and only when measured do
they settle on a spin of up or down. This is EPR’s key conundrum: If Alice’s particles
lack a spin until measurement, how then when they whiz past Neptune do they know
what Bob’s particles will do as they fly out of the solar system in the other direction?
Each time Alice measures, she effectively quizzes her particle on what Bob will get if he
flips a coin: up, or down? The odds of correctly predicting this even 200 times in a row
are one in 1060—a number greater than all the atoms in the solar system. Yet despite
the billions of kilometers that separate the particle pairs, quantum mechanics says
Alice’s particles can keep correctly predicting, as though they were telepathically
connected to Bob’s particles.

Although intended to reveal the imperfections of quantum mechanics, when real-world

versions of the EPR thought experiment are conducted the results instead reinforce the
theory’s most mind-boggling tenets. Under quantum mechanics, nature is not locally
real—particles lack properties such as spin up or spin down prior to measurement, and
seemingly talk to one another no matter the distance.

Physicists skeptical of quantum mechanics proposed that there were “hidden variables,”
factors that existed in some imperceptible level of reality beneath the subatomic realm
that contained information about a particle’s future state. They hoped in hidden-
variable theories, nature could recover the local realism denied to it by quantum
mechanics.

“One would have thought that the arguments of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen would
produce a revolution at that moment, and everybody would have started working on
hidden variables,” Popescu says.

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Einstein’s “attack” on quantum mechanics, however, did not catch on among physicists,
who by and large accepted quantum mechanics as is. This was often less a thoughtful
embrace of nonlocal reality, and more a desire to not think too hard while doing physics
—a head-in-the-sand sentiment later summarized by the physicist David Mermin as a
demand to “shut up and calculate.”

The lack of interest was driven in part because John von Neumann, a highly regarded
scientist, had in 1932 published a mathematical proof ruling out hidden-variable
theories. (Von Neumann’s proof, it must be said, was refuted just three years later by a
young female mathematician, Grete Hermann, but at the time no one seemed to
notice.)

Quantum mechanics’ problem of nonlocal realism would languish in a complacent

stupor for another three decades until being decisively shattered by Bell. From the start
of his career, Bell was bothered by the quantum orthodoxy and sympathetic toward
hidden variable theories. Inspiration struck him in 1952, when he learned of a viable
nonlocal hidden-variable interpretation of quantum mechanics devised by fellow
physicist David Bohm—something von Neumann had claimed was impossible. Bell
mulled the ideas over for years, as a side project to his main job working as a particle
physicist at CERN.

In 1964, Bell rediscovered the same flaws in von Neumann’s argument that Hermann
had. And then, in a triumph of rigorous thinking, Bell concocted a theorem that dragged
the question of hidden variables from its metaphysical quagmire onto the concrete
ground of experiment.

Normally, hidden-variable theories and quantum mechanics predict indistinguishable

experimental outcomes. What Bell realized is that under precise circumstances, an
empirical discrepancy between the two can emerge. In the eponymous Bell test (an
evolution of the EPR thought experiment), Alice and Bob receive the same paired

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The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It - Scientific American 15.10.22, 00(27

particles, but now they each have two different detector settings—A and a, B and b.
These detector settings allow Alice and Bob to ask the particles different questions; an
additional trick to throw off their apparent telepathy. In local hidden-variable theories,
where their state is preordained and nothing links them, particles cannot outsmart this
extra step, and they cannot always achieve the perfect correlation where Alice measures
spin down when Bob measures spin up (and vice versa). But in quantum mechanics,
particles remain connected and far more correlated than they could ever be in local
hidden-variable theories. They are, in a word, entangled.

Measuring the correlation multiple times for many particle pairs, therefore, could prove
which theory was correct. If the correlation remained below a limit derived from Bell’s
theorem, this would suggest hidden variables were real; if it exceeded Bell’s limit, then
the mind-boggling tenets of quantum mechanics would reign supreme. And yet, in spite
of its potential to help determine the very nature of reality, after being published in a
relatively obscure journal Bell’s theorem languished unnoticed for years.

THE BELL TOLLS FOR THEE

In 1967, John Clauser, then a graduate student at Columbia University, accidentally

stumbled across a library copy of Bell’s paper and became enthralled by the possibility
of proving hidden-variable theories correct. Clauser wrote to Bell two years later, asking
if anyone had actually performed the test. Clauser’s letter was among the first feedback
Bell had received.

With Bell’s encouragement, five years later Clauser and his graduate student Stuart
Freedman performed the first Bell test. Clauser had secured permission from his
supervisors, but little in the way of funds, so he became, as he said in a later interview,
adept at “dumpster diving” to secure equipment—some of which he and Freedman then
duct-taped together. In Clauser’s setup—a kayak-sized apparatus requiring careful
tuning by hand—pairs of photons were sent in opposite directions toward detectors that

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could measure their state, or polarization.

Unfortunately for Clauser and his infatuation with hidden variables, once he and
Freedman completed their analysis, they could not help but conclude that they had
found strong evidence against them. Still, the result was hardly conclusive, because of
various “loopholes” in the experiment that conceivably could allow the influence of
hidden variables to slip through undetected. The most concerning of these was the
locality loophole: if either the photon source or the detectors could have somehow
shared information (a plausible feat within the confines of a kayak-sized object), the
resulting measured correlations could still emerge from hidden variables. As Kaiser
puts it pithily, if Alice tweets at Bob which detector setting she’s in, that interference
makes ruling out hidden variables impossible.

Closing the locality loophole is easier said than done. The detector setting must be
quickly changed while photons are on the fly—“quickly” meaning in a matter of mere
nanoseconds. In 1976, a young French expert in optics, Alain Aspect, proposed a way
for doing this ultra-speedy switch. His group’s experimental results, published in 1982,
only bolstered Clauser’s results: local hidden variables looked extremely unlikely.
“Perhaps Nature is not so queer as quantum mechanics,” Bell wrote in response to
Aspect’s initial results. “But the experimental situation is not very encouraging from
this point of view.”

Other loopholes, however, still remained—and, alas, Bell died in 1990 without
witnessing their closure. Even Aspect’s experiment had not fully ruled out local effects
because it took place over too small a distance. Similarly, as Clauser and others had
realized, if Alice and Bob were not ensured to detect an unbiased representative sample
of particles, they could reach the wrong conclusions.

No one pounced to close these loopholes with more gusto than Anton Zeilinger, an
ambitious, gregarious Austrian physicist. In 1998, he and his team improved on

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The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It - Scientific American 15.10.22, 00(27

Aspect’s earlier work by conducting a Bell test over a then-unprecedented distance of

nearly half a kilometer. The era of divining reality’s nonlocality from kayak-sized
experiments had drawn to a close. Finally, in 2013, Zeilinger’s group took the next
logical step, tackling multiple loopholes at the same time.

“Before quantum mechanics, I actually was interested in engineering. I like building

things with my hands,” says Marissa Giustina, a quantum researcher at Google who
worked with Zeilinger. “In retrospect, a loophole-free Bell experiment is a giant
systems-engineering project.” One requirement for creating an experiment closing
multiple loopholes was finding a perfectly straight, unoccupied 60-meter tunnel with
access to fiber optic cables. As it turned out, the dungeon of Vienna’s Hofburg palace
was an almost ideal setting—aside from being caked with a century’s worth of dust.
Their results, published in 2015, coincided with similar tests from two other groups that
also found quantum mechanics as flawless as ever.

BELL’S TEST REACHES THE STARS

One great final loophole remained to be closed, or at least narrowed. Any prior physical
connection between components, no matter how distant in the past, has the possibility
of interfering with the validity of a Bell test’s results. If Alice shakes Bob’s hand prior to
departing on a spaceship, they share a past. It is seemingly implausible that a local
hidden-variable theory would exploit these loopholes, but still possible.

In 2017, a team including Kaiser and Zeilinger performed a cosmic Bell test. Using
telescopes in the Canary Islands, the team sourced its random decisions for detector
settings from stars sufficiently far apart in the sky that light from one would not reach
the other for hundreds of years, ensuring a centuries-spanning gap in their shared
cosmic past. Yet even then, quantum mechanics again proved triumphant.

One of the principal difficulties in explaining the importance of Bell tests to the public—

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as well as to skeptical physicists—is the perception that the veracity of quantum

mechanics was a foregone conclusion. After all, researchers have measured many key
aspects of quantum mechanics to a precision of greater than 10 parts in a billion. “I
actually didn’t want to work on it. I thought, like, ‘Come on; this is old physics. We all
know what’s going to happen,’” Giustina says. But the accuracy of quantum mechanics
could not rule out the possibility of local hidden variables; only Bell tests could do that.

“What drew each of these Nobel recipients to the topic, and what drew John Bell
himself, to the topic was indeed [the question], ‘Can the world work that way?’” Kaiser
says. “And how do we really know with confidence?” What Bell tests allow physicists to
do is remove the bias of anthropocentric aesthetic judgments from the equation;
purging from their work the parts of human cognition that recoil at the possibility of
eerily inexplicable entanglement, or that scoff at hidden-variable theories as just more
debates over how many angels may dance on the head of a pin. The award honors
Clauser, Aspect and Zeilinger, but it is testament to all the researchers who were
unsatisfied with superficial explanations about quantum mechanics, and who asked
their questions even when doing so was unpopular.

“Bell tests,” Giustina concludes, “are a very useful way of looking at reality.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Daniel Garisto is a freelance science journalist covering advances in physics and other natural sciences. His writing has
appeared in Nature News, Science News, Undark, and elsewhere.

Recent Articles by Daniel Garisto

Quantum Physics Titans Win Breakthrough Prize

Physicists Struggle to Unite around Future Plans

Large Hadron Collider Seeks New Particles after Major Upgrade

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