Elegant experiments with entangled light have laid bare a profound mystery at the heart of reality
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.
“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.” 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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