Reality on Radio

THE DOCTOR FUTURE SHOW
KSCO, SANTA CRUZ, CA 1080AM

Interview - Physicist Nick Herbert on the latest Nobel Physics Prize on Bell's Theorem, Quantum Entanglement, and Non-local Reality

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http://futurepeak.net/audio/DrF604_20221011_NickHerbert.mp3 

Quantum physicist Nick Herbert is our special guest for the full two hours of today's show, speaking about the latest Nobel Physics Prize on Bell's Theorem, Quantum Entanglement, and Non-local Reality. He and John Clauser, one of this  year's awardees of the prestigious prize, were colleagues together in the Fundamental Fysiks Group back in the 1970's, when this line of research was being explored.

Nick makes the point that Bell's Theorem was ignored back in 1964, when it was first espoused, not because it was bad science, but because it was looking at Reality, not theory, and physicists at the time considered Reality out-of-bounds for physics research.

 So today we'll be taking a fresh look at John Bell's work, faster-than-light signaling, quantum encryption, quantum teleportation, making entangled photons, quantum computers, creating reality with our thoughts, and wondering whether consciousness is our reward for...'collapsing the wave function'?!! Enjoy!

The Reality Prize

Esalen Seminar on the Nature of Reality Poster

THE REALITY PRIZE

 In the late 1970s, Esalen Institute co-founder Michael Murphy decided to invite physicists down to Big Sur to see what might happen. One of Mike's speculations was that “Perhaps a new kind of inspired physicist, experienced in the yogic modes of perception, might emerge to comprehend the further reaches of matter, space and time.” So it happened that physicist Saul-Paul Sirag and myself found ourselves leading workshops on quantum mechanics for Esalen guests and holding yearly invitational conferences for selected scientists focused mainly on the theme of Irish physicist John Stewart Bell's non-locality theorem for quantum-entangled systems.

Quantum theory is one of our most successful mathematical tools for understanding the behavior of Nature at her most basic level. This theory has never made a wrong prediction and some of its results agree with experiment up to 13 decimal places. However its success is marred by what one might call The Reality Crisis. Though I have struggled with this theory for more than fifty years, I cannot tell my son Khola a simple story about how the world works on the quantum level. And neither can anyone else.

Quantum physicists represent the world in two ways depending on whether the world's being looked at or not. Waves of possibility when not looked at; And an actual particle when we look. Plus physicists don't really know what “looking” means — an embarrassing situation called “the measurement problem”. Wanna stump a physicist? Ask him (or her) what they think it takes to turn many shimmering quantum possibilities into one hard quantum fact.

Oddly enough, The Reality Crisis (physicist's inability to tell a good quantum story) does not hamper at all our ability to use this wonderful tool to make successful predictions. So, for the most part, practical physicists have consigned “thinking about reality” to the philosophers, to physicists who have already made their mark in the world and to amateurs (from the French word “to love”) who have no reputation to lose. “Do not keep saying to yourself if you can possibly avoid it,” warned physicist Richard Feynman, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will go 'down the drain' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.”

To explain how one particle becomes actual is puzzling enough, but the stakes are raised once two particles are involved, especially if they happen to be created in a state of “quantum entanglement”. Then, when unlooked at at least, the two entities do not possess their own attributes. Only the union of the two is in a definite state of being, until a measurement is made. Erwin Schrōdinger was the first to point out the peculiar nature of entangled quantum systems and to comment that this strange mode of being was what most distinguished the quantum world from everyday stuff..

But in Schrōdinger's day, entangled quantum systems were hard to come by. So quantum entanglement, for the most part, remained a theoretical curiosity, if it was even mentioned at all.

That all changed in 1964, when a physicist named John Stewart Bell, whose hobby happened to be quantum reality, discovered, during a sabbatical leave from his day job at CERN accelerator, what is now know as “Bell's Theorem.”

The Bell Experiment

 

Imagine a source S of polarization-entangled photon pairs A and B. Photon A is sent to Alice and photon B to Bob who each have a device that measures photon polarization. One of the important features of a quantum measurement is that Alice cannot just ask “what properties does her A photon actually possess?” but must make a choice of what attribute to ask about and which attributes to leave unknown.

Quantum attributes come in complementary pairs (and often triplets). If you ask about position, you forego finding out about momentum, a discovery attributed to Heisenberg, known as “the uncertainty principle”. Photon polarization happens to be one of those quantum attributes that is triplely uncertain, so when Alice chooses to measure one photon polarization plane, she necessarily forfeits all knowledge of the other two polarization planes.

At both Alice and Bob's stations, imagine a clock face that represents the direction that the two experimenters choose to interrogate their photon's unknown polarization. If Alice chooses to ask at 12 o'clock, a PLUS in her detector means that her A photon polarization is Vertical (V); a MINUS means that its polarization is Horizontal (H).

Two features of this system are typical of an entangled state:. 1. No matter what their clock settings, each observer always gets a random sequence of PLUSs and MINUSs; 2. Whenever Alice's setting is the same as Bob's, if Alice gets a PLUS, Bob will always get a MINUS and vice versa. Their results are said to be 1. Perfectly random and 2. Perfectly anti-correlated.

Since polarization-entangled states were almost non-existent in 1964, nobody really knew if this would actually happen to Alice and Bob, but a simple quantum calculation gives the result quoted above.

Physicists “represent” an unobserved quantum system by a mathematical entity called a wavefunction. I carefully use the word “represent” rather than “describe” because we don't really know what the real relationship is between the wavefunction and the actual world, another embarrassing situation called “the interpretation problem”. Physicists know how to use the wavefunction to correctly calculate (the probability of) all experimental results but they don't really know what the wavefunction means.

So what more does this magnificently useful but utterly mysterious wavefunction say about the Alice and Bob experiment?

First: Quantum theory says that whatever happens is entirely independent of the distance between Alice and Bob. If they are in the same room, as in most practical physics experiments, the results will be exactly the same as if they were ten thousand light years apart, separated by vast interstellar distances.

Second: While unobserved, the wavefunction does not assign any polarization attribute to either Alice's or Bob's photon, but when Alice measures her photon, using a clock direction of her choice, her photon instantly acquires a definite value, AND SO DOES BOB'S PHOTON even though Alice and Bob might be separated by galactic distance. This instantaneous connection, if it is real and not just confined to the theory, violates all the norms of modern physics.

Alice's apparently instant action on Bob's photon has gotta be faster than light (goodbye Einstein) but that's only part of the trouble. This interaction, unlike any we are familiar with in physics, is not diminished by distance. Furthermore, this Alice-Bob intimacy is not transmitted by any field we know of-- it just happens. Alice's action on Bob's photon is, in brief, unmitigated, unmediated and immediate.

Physicists label such alleged behavior, as “non-local”, a tame word that conceals their deep intellectual loathing for an unholy abomination, for a deeply unnatural act. In the world of physics, a “non-local interaction¨, if such a thing ever occured, would be a mortal sin against the Holy Ghost. Non-local interactions are, in physicist's minds, comparable to believing in voodoo, which, come to think of it, is alleged by its practitioners to behave somewhat “non-locally” too.

Third: But what about Einstein? If Alice has access to a non-local interaction, can she and Bob exchange signals faster than light using entangled photons? Since quantum theory describes all experiments perfectly, it can easily answer this question. And the answer is NO. No superluminal signaling is possible using entangled photons. What forbids this is the randomness of each individual event which exactly smothers any alleged non-local Alice-Bob connection.

So what did Bell do with this strange situation? He went against Feynman’s warning about trying to tell a story about what's really going on. Bell's Theorem is not about quantum THEORY, not about quantum EXPERIMENTS, but about quantum REALITY.

Bell tried to imagine the most general model of reality that he could think of, using the term “hidden variables” to make his guesses amenable to mathematical calculation. He imagined all the influences that might go into forming Bob's polarization measurement and left out just one: Alice's choice of what to measure. If Alice's choice is allowed to influence Bob's result, that would imply the existence of a real (we're talking about reality here) non-local interaction in Nature.

Using this one assumption, Bell calculated a set of inequalities that the EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS of any local model of reality must satisfy.

Guess what? The results predicted by quantum mechanics do not obey the Bell Inequalities. Therefore REALITY MUST BE NON-LOCAL. Bring out your crosses and holy waters, folks. The witch doctors is loose!

The reception of Bell's remarkable proof, which was published in 1964, in an obscure and rather short-lived journal, was a resounding silence. John Clauser, then a graduate student at Columbia, discovered Bell's Theorem in 1969 and wrote him about the possibility of doing an actual experiment to check whether the quantum predictions were correct. Bell reported that this was the first comment on his paper he had yet received—more than four years after its publication.

You often hear it said that when Albert Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity,  only six people understood it. In truth, there were probably lots more than six. But it is fair to say, that when John Bell published his now famous paper, ONLY SIX PEOPLE CARED. John Clauser was one of them.

For the next part of the story I quote David Kaiser's “How the Hippies Saved Physics” which discusses Clauser's accomplishments in great detail.

“Clauser, a budding experimentalist, realized that Bell's theorem could be amenable to real-world tests in a laboratory. Excited, he told his thesis advisor about his find, only to be rebuffed for wasting their time on such philosophical questions. Soon Clauser would be kicked out of some of the finest offices in physics, from Robert Serber's at Columbia to Richard Feynman's at Caltech. Bowing to these pressures, Clauser pursued a dissertation on a more acceptable topic—radio astronomy and astrophysics—but in the back of his mind he continued to puzzle through how Bell's inequality might be put to the test.”

John Clauser lecturing at Esalen

 I first met John Clauser in his lab at Berkeley in the early 70s where he had cobbled together an ingenious device to test the Bell Inequalities using the few entangled photons that a mercury-vapor lamp produces. He hoped he would gain fame by showing that, for this particular system, quantum theory was wrong, and Reality was Local, as Einstein would have guessed. He succeeded however in finding that quantum theory was right, which means, according to Bell's Proof, that Reality must be non-local! This world, all that we can see around us, remains stubbornly local, but is undergirded, at least in the case of entangled photons, by a network of instant invisible voodoo-like connections.

I was introduced to Clauser as a member of Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissman's Fundamental Fysiks Group and marveled at his Rube Goldberg setup for measuring polarized-photon coincidences. (He was using pile-of-plates polarizers, for Gods sake!) In addition to recruiting experimentalist John Clauser, FFG also attracted Henry Pierce Stapp, a Berkeley theorist interested in fundamental questions. All of our later ESNR meetings included Clauser and Stapp as core personnel.

Henry Stapp pushed us to closely examine every assumption that goes into Bell's proof, especially those that seem most self-evident, and Clauser kept us posted on other Bell Inequality tests besides his own that were being planned and carried out around the world.

The title of our Esalen Conference: Esalen Seminars on the Nature of Reality, was neither silly nor pretentious. We really were studying “reality” as physicists might view it, as an attempt to tell a story about what's actually going on behind the wavefunction mystery and the measurement mystery. For our ESNR motto we chose a quote from Goethe's Faust, who was also a passionate seeker of Reality. Attesting to the real strangeness of our quest, Clauser's colleague Abner Shimony dubbed these Bell tests "experimental metaphysics."

Our third Esalen meeting (ESNR #3) in 1982 featured a ceremony sponsored by Charles Brandon, one of the founders of Federal Express, to award both John Bell and John Clauser “The Reality Prize” of $3000 each for their firm establishment through theory and experiment of non-locality as a general feature of the world. Bell's Reality Prize was accepted by French physicist Bernard d'Espagnat since Bell could not be there in person. We assured the participants that this prize was merely the first of many that would be bestowed upon the two of them.

Reality Prize Announcement: Esalen Catalog

 

Unfortunately, John Stewart Bell died in 1990, at the age of 62 of a cerebral hemorrhage.

In 2010, John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger were awarded the prestigious (Ricardo) Wolf Prize.

And just last week, the same three men were honored with the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Hearty congratulations to all three of you, O bold and noble champions of quantum reality!

Clauser, Zeilinger, Aspect: Physics Nobel Prize 2022: Quanta Magazine

Automating Quantum Weirdness

Islamic geometric pattern: an example of classical entanglement

AUTOMATING QUANTUM WEIRDNESS

A bowl of spaghetti or an Islamic repetitive pattern is an example of classical entanglement -- things get mixed up. And pulling one strand of spaghetti moves another strand far away. But quantum entanglement is different and difficult to express in ordinary language. When a number of particles get entangled in the quantum way, none of the particles possesses definite attributes. Only the entanglement as a whole possesses stand-alone values. Furthermore, whenever a measurement is performed on any one of the entangled particles, the state of each one of the other particles changes instantly, no matter how far it may be from its neighbors. And quantum mechanics is so delicately arranged that these instant collective changes cannot be used to signal faster-than-light. One way of expressing the entanglement situation is that Nature can communicate faster-than-light (and does so all the time). But humans cannot use entanglement to send signals because they cannot break Nature's "strong encryption" that governs the occurrence of each individual quantum jump.

Quantum entanglement is an unprecedentedly original way of getting things done in the world. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger called it "not ONE, but THE WAY, in which quantum mechanics differs most from classical expectations about how the world works."

Even at this early stage in our understanding of this phenomenon, quantum entanglement has found practical use in quantum computing, quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation as well as in many subtle new forms of optical imaging.

For the development of new quantum devices, human engineers are particularly handicapped because quantum mechanics follows a non-human logic that defies human intuition.

Enter MELVIN the robot.

Like his inventors (Mario Krenn and his colleagues at the University of Vienna), MELVIN thinks only classically. But he is able to design and test hundreds of possible thought experiments carried out with any number of quantum entangled particles. MELVIN was built to simulate the entanglement of photons. So he has at his disposal photon-entangling crystals, beam splitters, mirrors, wave plates, polarizers, holograms and perfectly efficient photon detectors. But quantum behavior is so generic, that any new results that MELVIN might discover for photons can almost certainly be exploited in other quantum systems such as electron spins, cold Bosons and superconducting junctions.

Schematic of MELVIN, the quantum engineer.

The first entanglement experiments (called EPR, after Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen whose pathbreaking 1935 paper first focused attention on the phenomenon) considered only TWO entangled particles. Work on two-particle entangled systems has been very fruitful, leading in 1964 to Bell's Non-locality Theorem, as well as the discovery of many new phenomena, notably quantum teleportation.

Entanglement was extended to THREE particles by Greenberger, Horne and Zeilinger (GHZ) who were able (with 3 particles) to construct a particularly elegant form of Bell's Theorem.

One task of MELVIN is to search for new phenomena beyond simple EPR and GHZ experiments by expanding quantum entanglement into the realm of greater numbers of particles and into higher entanglement dimensions. "Dimensions" refers here to particular particle attributes that participate in the entanglement. MELVIN considers three different dimensions of photon entanglement: #1. Path entanglement, #2. Polarization entanglement and #3. Orbital angular momentum entanglement. Since a particular photon can be both path-entangled, polarization entangled and OAM entangled at the same time to one or more other particles, the number of different allowed kinds of entanglements rapidly becomes astronomical.

But MELVIN is up to the task. He rapidly constructs numerous virtual experiments which are tested against certain criteria set by the experimenters. Most tests fail. But those that succeed become new building blocks that increase the odds that more of the tests will succeed. MELVIN is a kind of Darwinian machine: only the fittest experiments survive. While MELVIN the robot tirelessly produces hopeful candidates, the task of the human experimenters is two-fold: #1. to devise good tests for determining the "fitness" of a proposed experiment and #2. to use human logic to simplify the fit experiments and make them as efficient as possible.

MELVIN has already produced some unusual, never-seen-before types of quantum entanglement: partial entanglements, nested entanglements, cyclic entanglements and many more. The beauty of this robot designer is that not only does MELVIN produce exotic forms of entanglement, but he also outputs an exact plan of the hardware that will produce these new entanglements in the lab.

Which leads to a third important function of the human experimenter: #3 to discover new uses, either theoretical. practical or both for the flood of new "quantum lifeforms" brought to life in the lab by this imaginative robot/human collaboration.

A typical experiment designed by the MELVIN/human team

The MELVIN project is just one example of the extraordinary fruitfulness of the notion of quantum entanglement. As they say in show business: "Entanglement's got legs." It's going places.

Which leads to another Shri Nick Predicts.

Shri Nick predicts that either this year (2015) or the next, the Nobel Prize in physics will be awarded to John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger for their pioneer work in quantum entanglement. Such an award will also serve to honor the work of John Stewart Bell whose untimely death denied him this prize.

Remember, you heard it here first.

The Quantum Olympics

Selection of molecules which show quantum interference in matter-wave interferometers. (Graphic by Sandra Eibenberger.)

At the beginning of the 20th century, one of the biggest problems in physics was to understand the interaction between matter and light. Today we possess an impressively broad and detailed knowledge of matter-light interactions expressed in the language of quantum theory.

In 1900, it was generally believed that light was made of waves and that matter was made of particles. This belief was shattered when Albert Einstein (better known for his relativity theories) showed that light in some situations acted like a particle. Einstein's particles of light were christened "photons". Later in the century, Louis de Broglie, the French prince who became a physicist, proposed that particles should possess wave properties. And de Broglie was able to calculate the supposed wavelength of the electron (the lightest of the known particles). He submitted this proposal for his PhD thesis at the Sorbonne. His professors were prepared to reject his thesis on the grounds of preposterousness. But through the intervention of Einstein the prince was awarded his degree which was crowned a few years later by a Nobel Prize when some American physicists at Bell Labs measured the wavelength of the electron which was precisely the value that de Broglie had predicted using his "preposterous" theory.

De Broglie's wave theory of matter predicts that every piece of matter possesses frequency, wavelength and "phase" (whatever these quantities might mean). Not only electrons, but protons, cats, bicycles and you yourself possess wave properties. The catch is that the more massive a particle gets, the smaller the particle's de Broglie wavelength. Hence it becomes more difficult to experimentally demonstrate a particle's wave properties as its mass gets larger.

Enter the Quantum Olympics. Open only to experimental quantum physics. What is the biggest (most massive) particle whose wave properties you can demonstrate in the laboratory?

The electron was the first to show its waviness, later the neutron -- almost 2000 times more massive than the electron -- was shown to be a wave. In the 1990s several large atoms such as Helium, Iodine and Sodium vapors were shown to possess wave properties. And in 1999, someone in Vienna succeeded in diffracting a buckyball -- a soccer-ball-shaped molecule consisting of 60 Carbon atoms.

A Talbot Carpet demonstrating near-field interference from multiple slits

Recently, spectacularly impressive records have been set in the Quantum Olympics. Using a novel matter-wave detection technique developed by John Clauser (of Bell's Theorem fame) called Talbot-Lau interferometry, experimenters from Vienna, Basel and Duisburg-Essen have demonstrated high-contrast quantum interference for a remarkable assortment of complex and increasingly massive molecules culminating with the current winner of Olympic Gold -- molecule "m" shown above.

The 2015 Olympic champ is a "functionalized porphyrin" with atomic formula:

C(284) H(190) F(320) N(4) S(12)

Congratulations to the assortment of clever physicists who showed that this assortment of increasingly massive particles behave like waves as well as like particles.

As admirable as these experiments might seem to the ordinary person, they seem even more remarkable, even impossible to the average physicist. These experiments seem impossible on the face of it because wave interference is a very delicate affair, requiring stability and coherence over large times and distances (compared to the sizes of these atoms). Although it might be possible to observe interference with atoms with very little structure, it should be impossible to do so for buckyballs and especially impossible for the grotesquely complicated molecules pictured above.

The reason that such experiments should be impossible is that these complex molecules are not rigid objects but possess hundreds of degrees of rotational, vibrational and conformational freedom. They are turning, vibrating, bending in hundreds of different ways. Certainly the waves associated with such a busy, buzzing, bendable object could never be moving coherently long enough to form a clean high-contrast Talbot Carpet such as the figure above in green. So goes the conventional wisdom.

But the conventional wisdom is wrong.

It can be shown (by quantum calculations) that as long as the internal motion of the molecule (no matter how grotesque this motion) is UNCORRELATED with the external trajectory of the molecule, then this internal motion will not destroy the coherence of the external motion. Hence these delicate experiments can even be carried out at room temperature when the internal motion of the molecule is as complicated as Times Square on New Year's Eve. However as the temperature is raised and the internal motion becomes hot enough to emit photons, photons that can perturb the molecule's external motion, then coherence is lost and the molecule's wave properties become impossible to detect.

This intrinsic decoupling of internal motions from the external motions of a complex object reminds me of a similarly engaging problem in theoretical physics: How do cats always manage to land on their feet when dropped?

It would seem impossible for a cat to turn over in midair because of conservation of angular momentum. And whatever could the cat push against to begin its spin? Like the busy, buzzing, bendable molecules, a cat's internal motion is completely decoupled from the trajectory of its center of mass. Yet it turns (as Galileo might have said). The cat turns. And lands on its feet. All without violating a single law of physics. Clever cat.

The Falling Cat Problem (from an illustration in the journal Nature 1894)

My Dinner with John and Mary Bell

Dinner Party chez Pierre and Mary Noyes: March 1988

In his best-selling book How the Hippies Saved Physics, MIT professor David Kaiser describes how the members of an informal, outside-the-mainstream research group in Berkeley (Elizabeth Rauscher's Fundamental Fyziks Group) were able to make significant advances in a then-unfashionable field (quantum foundations) which has since become a respectable and flourishing part of physics.

However, Kaiser failed to mention that along with Berkeley's FFG, a like-minded group at Stanford (ANPA West, founded by Stanford professor Pierre Noyes), was also enthusiastically exploring the once disreputable field of quantum foundations. ANPA (an acronym for Alternative Natural Philosophy Association) was organized by Cambridge physicist Ted Bastin and his friends. The "bible" of ANPA was a collection of essays edited by Bastin Quantum Theory and Beyond which featured papers by David Bohm, Yakir Aharonov, Geoffrey Chew as well as lesser-known quantum-edge explorers). ANPA East was centered in Cambridge while its Western focus was Pierre's group at Stanford.

ANPA West meetings took place mainly in buildings in and around Stanford with an occasional trip into the redwoods to David McGoveran's house in Boulder Creek. The main focus of ANPA West was "bit-string physics"-- the world viewed as a computer program -- and attempting to calculate the value of fundamental constants via a technique called "combinatorial hierarchy". But a glance at the ANPA West Journal (a kitchen-table-top production by Tom Etter and Suzanne Bristol) shows that ANPA West members were also interested in other foundational topics including new quantum logics and Bell's Theorem. [Computer graphics wizard Dick Shoup has scanned and posted all these journals here.]

Physicist Henry Stapp (a prominent FFG member) has called Bell's Theorem "the most profound discovery in science". But despite its alleged profundity, this theorem was dismissed by the majority of physicists as "mere philosophy" and research into its implications was considered to be a "career breaker". For instance, John Clauser's advisor warned him, in effect, that he would never achieve an academic physics position if he persisted in doing a Bell's theorem experiment regarded at the time as an exercise in "mere philosophy".

Clauser's advisor was right -- John never did get an academic post -- but when Bell's theorem finally became fashionable in wider venues than Big Sur's Esalen Institute, Stanford's ANPA West and Berkeley's Fundamental Fyziks Group, John Clauser's trail-blazing work was belatedly recognized with one of the physics profession's highest honors.

Although I had corresponded with John Bell at CERN while writing Quantum Reality, I had never met the author of "the most profound discovery in science". I had one chance to meet Bell in 1982 when Saul-Paul Sirag and I invited him to Esalen Institute in Big Sur to receive (along with John Clauser), The Reality Prize, funded by Charles Brandon, one of the founders of FEDEX. It pleases me no end that of all the awards John Bell has since received (including a Nobel Prize nomination shortly before his untimely death in 1990 at age 62) our Esalen Reality Prize was the very first to publicly honor this extraordinary man. John Bell, however, did not come to Big Sur but instead sent a colleague, Bernard D'Espagnat, to accept the Reality Prize.

John Stewart Bell was my hero. I had spent a lot of time reading his papers, arguing with colleagues about his work and even developing my own bare-bones, stripped-down version of Bell's famous theorem. So you can imagine my delight when Pierre Noyes invited me to his home in the Stanford foothills for a seminar by John Bell and a few days later to a dinner party with John and his wife Mary Ross Bell, also a physicist. (This was in March 1988, only a few years before Bell's death.)

I recall very few details of that dinner in '88, except that for me it felt like sitting in an extra chair at Jesus's Last Supper. In John Bell's presence, I felt that close to holiness. One of the most charming aspects of John and Mary Bell was their Irish accents which lent a particular sparkle to their speech. Both John and Mary were brilliant, witty and entertaining. Our table talk was further enhanced by many many glasses of fine wine produced by Pierre's son David (proprietor of David Noyes Wines in Sonoma). Thank you, Pierre and Mary Noyes, for greatly enriching Nick and Betsy Herbert's lives.

Here's my favorite Bell story from those meetings. It took place in Pierre's living room in Bell's seminar a few days before the luminous dinner. In front of the black board, John Bell was arguing a particular point when a Stanford physicist loudly objected:

"But how can that be, John? Isn't such-and-such true?"

To which Bell replied (and you've got to imagine this delivered in a sparkling Irish accent):

"So ye believe such-and-such, do ye? Well. in three minutes, I'll have ye believin' the opposite."

And then, in less than three minutes,  John Bell proceeded to make good his boast.

Wolf Prize for Entanglement Experiments

John Clauser conversing with Mike Nauenberg at UCSC

In how She runs the quantum world, Nature shows off Her crazy inhuman intelligence in a way that continues to baffle the physicist/monks who have learned the math and mastered the
arcane experimental manipulations necessary to "know Her" in the peculiar type of intimacy with Nature known as fundamental physics. In Her physical depths, Nature seems to take a peculiar delight in combining seemingly incompatible opposites with a subtlety and ease that no human designer could have imagined let alone accomplish. Her Universe, for instance, is based on utter randomness at the bottom governed by strict determinism at the top. Bravo! But wait, there's more. Effortlessly She combines in every one of Her creations both spread-out oscillating wavyness and minuscule, unwavering particleness, in a manner that physicists still find puzzling after more than a century of familiarity with Her habits in this regard. How does She manage to do this? As yet we really can't say.

Lately, inspired by a remarkable theorem conceived by Irish physicist John Bell, physicists have turned their attention to a behavior of Nature called "entanglement" in which She is seemingly able to combine in one phenomenon instantaneous faster-than-light influences while strictly maintaining Her coy prohibition: no faster-than-light signaling. Yes to faster-than-light and No to faster-than-light in the same package. Way to go, Mama!

I describe the origins of entanglement in Quantum Reality, and also recommend a very engaging recent book Age of Entanglement by Louisa Gilder.

Entanglement was first uncovered in quantum theory by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 but only directly subjected to experimental test forty years later, first by John Clauser at Berkeley and later in increasing sophisticated variations by several others, notably Alain Aspect in France and Anton Zeilinger in Austria. Recently, these three men were awarded the Wolf Prize for their work in experimentally probing Nature's over-the-top style of match-making. Congratulations, guys!

Anton Zeilinger