Bay Area physicist John F. Clauser and two others jointly won this year's Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for their work on quantum information science that has significant applications, for example in the field of encryption.
Clauser, who lives in Walnut Creek, Frenchman Alain Aspect and Austrian Anton Zeilinger were cited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for discovering the way that unseen particles, such as photons or tiny bits of matter, can be linked, or"entangled," with each other even when they are separated by large distances.
Clauser, 79, was awarded his prize for a 1972 experiment that helped settle a famous debate about quantum mechanics between Einstein and famed physicist Niels Bohr. Einstein described"a spooky action at a distance" that he thought would eventually be disproved. "Most people would assume that nature is made out of stuff distributed throughout space and time," Clauser said."And that appears not to be the case."
"It has broad and potential implications in areas such as secure information transfer, quantum computing and sensing technology," Olsson said."Its predictions have opened doors to another world, and it has also shaken the very foundations of how we interpret measurements." While physicists often tackle problems that appear at first glance to be far removed from everyday concerns — tiny particles and the vast mysteries of space and time — their research provides the foundations for many practical applications of science.
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