The little-known story behind the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
> Wu might have been hesitant to discuss evidence of entanglement because throughout the 1950s and 1960s, such quantum-foundations work was stigmatized as junk science. Back then, explains David Kaiser, a professor of physics and history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the idea of using an experiment to prove or disprove theories about quantum physics or to test for local hidden variables was “not even an inkling” for most physicists. Researchers who explored questions about entanglement often disguised their research because backlash could stymie a promising career.
I suspect their are similar things going on today, like astronomers who want to look for signs of intelligent life but packaging it as something more mundane
The Copenhagen Interpretation isn't a theory, it it is an attitude.
I'd heard of the hate before but it was so baffling to witness. I left a comment asking for explanations to my above observation and received no replies. As someone who's personally very interested in this type of research, it kinda terrifies me.
Having said that, as someone outside the field who peeks in every once and a while, it does seem like a lot of foundations research (that gets noticed at least) is about constructing flashy abstracts out of simple linear algebra. The interesting stuff always seems to belong to another field, like computation, error correction, encryption, etc. Combine this with many physicists' distaste for philosophy, and you'll get the current attitude towards foundations.
Obviously the easiest way to provoke thought within the skeptic is to ask, “If it is within the realm of possibilities for the human race to invent a driver allowing interstellar travel, why shouldn’t an extraterrestrial race also be capable of it?”
I would assume someone would counter with the fact that extraterrestrial life hasn’t been discovered. A question to often revisited. For all we know extraterrestrial life surrounds their inhabited planets with strict ingress and egress policies.
If you think about how some scientists responded to speculation about Oumuamua you can see how they were nervous about speculation that could be sensationalized.
What about if SETI@home had been programmed by aliens, so we all thought we were looking for them, but the code would never find them? :)
If I collapse the wave function on one entangled particle, is the other entangled particle collapsed as well?
So I would say you are missing something.
Its that they have opposite states when you collapse them. So collapsing one doesn't collapse the other. Its just that when you collapse one (by measuring it) you can know the state of the other (even if it's on the other side of the universe).
The real "spookiness" is that the particles don't have a predetermined state "underneath" their superposition. When you collapse one its odds of being heads or tails are 50/50 up to the moment you collapse it. And when you collapse it you know what reading you will get when you collapse the other one.
I don't know if this is a mathematical deduction or something empirically verified. Technically when you measure one particle the wave function of both collapses, because now you know what the properties of the other particle are.
But it could be like a pair of dice that always land on opposite faces. When the first die lands, the fate of the second die is sealed and it's no longer in a "superpostion" despite the second die still tumbling around in the air. I strongly suspect this is the case, because otherwise, like you said, you could transmit information faster than light, breaking relativity.
Any superluminal signalling method proposed using entanglement has to explain which assumption of the no-communication theorem it's negating, otherwise it's breaking the known laws of quantum physics. Also, explain why nobody's noticed this effect in the lab before and sold it to high frequency traders and then won the Nobel prize.
What I propose is to switch between deterministic and indeterministic process, the former encoding 0, the latter encoding 1. Maybe indeterministic process counts as more than the classical information. Also since it's indeterministic, it has a small chance of miscommunication. Since communication isn't precisely certain, maybe the theorem treats it as failure.
"an entangled state (e.g. a Bell state) is prepared using a Bell circuit or gate by Charlie, a third person. Charlie then sends one of these qubits (in the Bell state) to Alice and the other to Bob. Once Alice obtains her qubit in the entangled state, she applies a certain quantum gate to her qubit depending on which two-bit message (00, 01, 10 or 11) she wants to send to Bob. Her entangled qubit is then sent to Bob who, after applying the appropriate quantum gate and making a measurement, can retrieve the classical two-bit message." (emphasis mine)
Alice physically transmits her qubit to Bob, so it's not superluminal and doesn't break the no-communication theorem.
In other words you can't detect the event of the wavefunction collapsing.
*More precisely, the act of handing one of them a message causes that one to communicate some random message to the other.
A mathematician who worked a few doors down from Einstein and produced era defining result in physics. The connection between symmetry and conservation. Noether's theorem to this day is one of the most profound holy shit moments in many physicists education.
Her life was been cut tragically short.
But go to the street ask the first 100 people you come across to list their top 5 important contributions by woman in maths or physics. What's on it? How many will mention Noether? I'd say about as many as Wu. Less than 1.
Probably few could name many. Maybe it'll be the woman led the team to image the black hole at the centre of the galaxy. Will anyone know her name though? I don't.
Ada Lovelace is better known but not for maths or physics. She was a mathematician of course.
There is definitely a gender bias. But there’s also a “people on the street don’t care as much as physicists think they ought to” bias.
Lovelace gets way too much credit considering there are a bunch of much more important women even just within CS. "First programmer" is egregious IMO (often her label), as if Babbage didn't think to program it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#Insight_into_pote...
In any case, often the opposite of what you are describing happens: women get disproportionately less credit than male collaborators, even when they made bigger contributions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_effect
edit: Stephen Wolfram has this to say about her contributions:
> In his book, Idea Makers, Stephen Wolfram defends Lovelace's contributions. While acknowledging that Babbage wrote several unpublished algorithms for the Analytical Engine prior to Lovelace's notes, Wolfram argues that "there's nothing as sophisticated—or as clean—as Ada's computation of the Bernoulli numbers. Babbage certainly helped and commented on Ada's work, but she was definitely the driver of it." Wolfram then suggests that Lovelace's main achievement was to distill from Babbage's correspondence "a clear exposition of the abstract operation of the machine—something which Babbage never did".[91]
> It was attributed to her, but—as Herschel hinted—Babbage may have had an input; it is impossible to know how much. Most famously, one of her additional notes, G, sets out a table for calculating what are called the Bernoulli numbers, which carry great mathematical significance. Even if she was solely responsible for it, the chart is not a program, but shows the stages that would occur in a pre-programmed machine if one existed.
> Heroes are made, not born. If computer scientists feel they need a 19th-century ancestor, then perhaps Herman Hollerith should supplant Babbage? To tabulate the US census, Hollerith invented eponymous punched cards which are still being used 100 years later—and he also founded a company that became the international giant IBM.
> And as a female role model, the American mathematics graduate Grace Hopper seems eminently more suitable than London’s flighty Victorian socialite. A rear admiral in the US Navy during the Second World War, this programming pioneer gave her name to a powerful supercomputer. Hopper revolutionised the digital world by insisting that instead of forcing people to communicate in symbolic code, computers should be taught to speak English. She also made a permanent mark on the English language—the term “debugging” was coined after she removed a moth that had flown inside some circuitry.
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/science-and-technology/de...
Most people have no clue about mathematics and physics and also no interest in learning about those.
The general public simply doesn’t know about physicists (beyond Einstein and Newton). In fact the general public is more likely to know of Neil deGrasse Tyson than far more influential physicists in the 20th century. Most people aren’t aware of Dirac, von Neumann, Schrödinger, Bohr, Wigner, etc…
If you’re talking about the general public, then she is under appreciated but so is pretty much every other physicist too.
The general public is interested in female contributions to science on the whole. And they would appreciate knowing about Noether. And the physics community by an large does know her.
But that information has not escaped the relatively esoteric setting of physics education.
On top of that I'd be curious how many of those who know of the symmetry conservation link, know of it as Noether's theorem and how many know Noether was a woman. I bet not much! Just speculation.
Again that would be hiding in plain sight in my book.
At the time I wouldn’t have cared anyway. I was bombarded with so many names of people through equations, experiments, etc that I didn’t care if they were a man, woman, or carrier pigeon. I just cared what the result meant and how I could use it. It’s only after the fact, long after I left academia, that I started to see these people as humans with real lives and stories.
It’s OK if mathematicians are obscure in the general population. That’s part of the deal when you become a mathematician. I don’t know many footballers either.
I would much rather the general public filled their heads with basic mathematical concepts, rather than the names of mathematicians. As Feynman said (paraphrasing), knowing the name of something is rather useless if you don’t know anything else about it.
[1] IB curriculum, not exactly a de minimis environment
Noether's theorem is a much more difficult result to teach high school students, because you do need some mathematical maturity before learning it. In the UK, you're taught it in a second year undergraduate course in classical mechanics. So it is not an oversight.
Also people here seem to be overstating the influence of Noether as a physicist. Yes, her theorem is a profound result in physics but the majority of her contributions were in pure mathematics.
I find this odd. We were taught about Rutherford/Bohr and their work in high school - unless the general public if full of people who haven't gone to school or dropped out before high school, they should know these scientists (even if one may not remember the specifics after a long time).
> "The defining experiment involved cooling Cobalt-60 down to a hundredth of a degree Kelvin, a temperature at which its atoms can be induced to spin in one direction, and measure the number of electrons spun off from the top and bottom of the cobalt mass. If they are the same, then parity is conserved, since that way both the original cobalt atom and its opposite-spinning mirror copy will appear exactly the same. But, if one side emits more electrons than the other, parity would not be conserved, as whichever pole the atoms appear spewing from in the original, they will be spewing from the opposite pole in the mirror reflection, which would be like our clock hand stubbornly insisting on moving clockwise in spite of being reflected."
https://womenyoushouldknow.net/razor-sharp-physics-chien-shi...
Another good one:
> "To test the hypothesis, Wu needed three things. The first was a nucleus that decayed due to weak force (beta decay). The second was that the nucleus must have an intrinsic quantum mechanical spin. The third and the tricky thing was that all the nuclei spins must be made to point in the same direction. So why is this?"
https://www.secretsofuniverse.in/parity-violation-weak-exper...
Richard Feynam wrote quite a bit about the Lee-Yang hypothesis on conservation of partity in weak decay processes and its experimental verification by Wu, that's where I first heard of it, symmetry in physical laws:
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_52.html
Of course, Feynman's lectures were delivered to an all-male audience at Caltech, which didn't allow women until 1970 or so, see the class:
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/na101/home/literatum/publ...
That issue has certainly greatly improved since then.
Go low enough however and you do get strange quantum effect-related formation of Bose-Einstein condensates, and its even stranger newly discovered cousin, the Rydberg polaron:
He studied under Sommerfeld in Munich and then as Born's assistant in Goettingen. He just visited Bohr's lab. https://www.heisenberg-gesellschaft.de/2-student-and-postdoc...
Chien-Shiung Wu found evidence of entanglement in 1949.
This is not mentioned in the 2022 prize.
But in QM, it's more complicated and it isn't a simple subject, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test
It sounds like she should have been awarded the 1957 prize too:
> In his Nobel lecture that December, Yang told the committee and guests how crucial Wu's experiment had been, making a bold statement that the results were due to Wu's team's courage and skill. Lee would later plead with the Nobel Committee to recognize Wu's work. Oppenheimer publicly stated that Wu should have shared in the 1957 prize. Segrè called the overthrow of parity “probably the major development of physics after the war.”
The Aspect experiment and Bell's inequalities are the way we proved how quantum states are very fundamentally entangled. The important part of Aspect's experiment is the space-like separation of the events in the experiment.
She still should have shared the 1957 Nobel Prize with Lee and Yang for their work on Parity.
I don't understand why this article claims that she should have been associated with the 2022 Nobel, other than to generate clicks and engagement.
> As the name suggests, Forever Stamps can be used to mail a one-ounce letter regardless of when the stamps are purchased or used and no matter how prices may change in the future. Forever Stamps are always sold at the same price as a regular First-Class Mail stamp.[0]
[0]: https://about.usps.com/news/fact-sheets/forever-stamp-facts.....
Well, folklore or not, I know someone who specializes now in moving labs from one building to another. She told me the exact same story, except than in her case the problem was to get the machine out ( some kind of accelerator as well, and it had been built on premises). She had to make a hole in the wall too!
This is tragic, but I can't help but think it would make it would make a heartbreaking movie, especially tied with her work on entanglement.
edit: To be fair, I think the article goes down this route as well
> Entanglement emerges from the most rigorous branches of mathematics and physics yet has poetic appeal. Abner Shimony, a philosopher and physicist, called it “passion at a distance.” Entanglement offers the wild notion that once certain particles or systems interact, they can no longer be described independently of one another.
And that Wu designed and conducted and was excluded from the prize.
2022 was too late, as Wu passed in 1997.
Oppenheimer and others also said she should have been included.
Read the Fine Article, to bring back a Slashdot-ism.
Even today, experimental (rather than theoretical) work tends to get recognized a lot faster. For recent examples see LIGO, blue LEDs, graphene, all awarded within a decade.
Wu's results were SO strong and outstanding that THEORISTS won a year later. So the committee obviously trusted Wu's results enough.