Demonstrating the direct observation of individual quantum particles without destroying them.
Serge Haroche of France and American David Wineland, both 68, found ways to manipulate the very smallest particles of matter and light to observe strange behavior that previously could only be imagined in equations and thought experiments.
Wineland is a dedicated experimentalist, not bothered by the bizarre philosophical implications of quantum mechanics, such as the notion that reality does not exist until an observer measures it. “You can find debate on this, but I’m not sure we’re so special in the universe” as to have the power to bring reality into being, he told Reuters.
Solving the Schrodinger’s Cat paradox would be exciting news for quantum physicists. The Nobel Prize winners may have figured out two different ways to determine whether the cat is alive or dead at any point in time without having to open up the box and check.
One camp claims that a deeper level of reality lies hidden beneath all the quantum weirdness. Once the so-called hidden variables controlling reality are exposed, they say, the strangeness of superposition will evaporate.
Another camp claims that superposition shows us that potential realities matter just as much as the single, fully manifested one we experience. But what collapses the potential electrons in their two locations into the one electron we actually see? According to this interpretation, it is the very act of looking; the measurement process collapses an ethereal world of potentials into the one real world we experience.
And a third major camp argues that particles can be two places at once only because the universe itself splits into parallel realities at the moment of measurement, one universe for each particle location — and thus an infinite number of ever splitting parallel versions of the universe (and us) are all evolving alongside one another.
At the same time new and even more exciting possibilities opened up as scientists began thinking of quantum physics in terms of information, rather than just matter. And so the field of quantum information theory was born.
Demonstrating the direct observation of individual quantum systems without destroying them.
Measuring and Manipulating Individual Quantum Systems.