Nobel prize for Physics 2022

This week’s show falls during a very special week for the scientific community. That’s because it is that time of the year when the world celebrates the very best in research and discovery as the Nobel prizes for science and medicine are awarded in Sweden. We wanted to pay tribute to the work of these fantastic scientists, by explaining a little bit about the work the prize winners won for. The physics prize has been won for the subject that Einstein sceptically called, “spooky action at a distance.” James Tytko…

This year's Nobel prize for physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger.

The official citation sets out the awarding of the prize “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.”

Let’s unpack this. Quantum theory is the branch of science that aims to solve the great cosmic questions that have captured the imagination of some of the most brilliant minds. It is the next frontier for scientists seeking to understand the fabric of the universe.

Yet despite the very big questions it endeavours to answer, quantum mechanics describes the behaviour of systems at the atomic scale and smaller. In the quantum world, matter has wave-like properties, in contrast to the more rigid and tangible view of the world posited by classical physics - that’s objects and phenomena we can observe with the naked eye - and set out by Isaac Newton.

Where our Nobel prize winners come in is in their work on a smaller aspect of the overall field of quantum mechanics: the branch called "quantum entanglement."

This is the idea that two particles, even separated by considerable distance, remain in touch with one another and even dictate the properties of the other.

One way to think about this is to imagine being given one of two balls. You are told that one of the balls is white and the other is black. So, by deduction, if you receive a white ball, you know the other ball is black.

But where this becomes interesting is that, in the quantum realm, until one of these particles - or balls - is examined, the properties of the other are not determined. So both balls are effectively grey until one of them is looked at. At that point, one turns white and the other black.

Mind-boggling though this sounds, Aspect, Clauser and Zeilinger conducted the experiments to show that this phenomenon, theorised in the 1960s by Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell, is real. Though why it works, we have no idea. Even Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance".

Nevertheless, quantum entanglement could have many applications for use in the modern world: in quantum computing to help solve complex problems, and in encryption, useful for communications and banking.

Despite this breakthrough, there is much work still to be done in the field. From a theoretical point of view, a new Einstein is needed to blow our understanding of the nature of matter wide open. Progress like this, however, indicates that we’re on the right path...