They Probed Quantum Entanglement While Everyone Shrugged?

They Probed Quantum Entanglement While Everyone Shrugged

The experiments that Bell had in mind were clever, and they also seemed feasible. No need to build a huge particle accelerator or launch a massive new satellite. And yet years went by before other physicists even cited Bell’s article, let alone rolled up their sleeves to give it a go.

One of the first to reach out to Bell was a young John Clauser. Clauser had stumbled upon Bell’s article while browsing journals in the library as a graduate student. Excited by what he read, he rushed to his Ph.D. supervisor to suggest they conduct the type of experiment that Bell had proposed. To Clauser’s frustration, his advisor responded with (no doubt well-intentioned) advice: Stick with more mainstream topics for the dissertation, don’t chase such “philosophical” topics as entanglement.

At first Aspect’s beautiful experiment, like Clauser’s a decade earlier, was met with a collective shrug. For the next several years he focused on other areas of physics, frustrated by many colleagues’ indifference to topics like entanglement.

Zeilinger, too, pressed on even when many colleagues considered entanglement to be a sideshow. In fact, for decades he worked tirelessly to shore up Bell tests, conducting several trailblazing experiments to address various “loopholes”—far-fetched but still logically consistent scenarios by which an Einstein-like scenario might account for all of those correlated measurements on pairs of particles.

There seems to be a great resistance to examining anomalies, even when they are not related to Psi? We are still told humans are machines in a machine-like universe, even though currently the best science suggests the exact opposite seems to be true in a materialist/naturalist reading - an indeterministic "cosmic ocean" that somehow managed to produce not only life but also poetry, mathematics, philosophy, art...