Alain Aspect, Nobel laureate in physics: Einstein was so smart that he would have had to recognize quantum entanglement'

"Alain Aspect, 78, learned the real quantum physics in Cameroon. Not at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, but during his civil service in Africa, reading a book by Claude Cohen-Tannoudji while teaching physics. That work which revolutionized the teaching of quantum physics, he explains changed his life. Decades later, Aspect experimentally demonstrated something that most physicists considered science fiction: quantum entanglement, the phenomenon Albert Einstein called spooky action and that few believed in."

"It is so counterintuitive that even today it is hard to grasp: two particles are connected in a way that classical physics cannot explain, and what happens to one instantaneously affects the other, even when they are separated by miles. Aspect's experiments in 1982 settled a half-century-long debate between two of the most important physicists in history, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, and opened the door to the second quantum revolution computers, cryptography, and technologies that today generate billions of dollars."

Alain Aspect learned foundational quantum physics while teaching in Cameroon and studying Claude Cohen-Tannoudji’s work. He later performed 1982 experiments that demonstrated quantum entanglement, a phenomenon Albert Einstein called "spooky action" in which two particles behave as a connected system regardless of distance. Those experiments resolved a long-standing debate between Einstein and Niels Bohr and enabled the development of quantum information technologies such as quantum computing and cryptography. The experiments contributed to the scientific and economic rise of quantum technologies and led to Aspect sharing the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics. Aspect also pursues magic as a hobby and draws analogies between illusion and explanation.

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