Awarded by the Swedish Committee for his work on quantum entanglement, the physicist retains the RAM of each stage of his career, between volubility, pedagogy and modesty.
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It is promised, the physicist Alain aspect will postpone his famous mustache for the ceremony of the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, on December 10, as he said during the program “Daily” on TMC, October 5 . The attribute which has singled him up since his youth has indeed gave way to a graying beard for a few weeks.
For the rest, at 75, he does not change. Southwest accent, sparkling eye when he explains with many gestures the behavior of his favorite objects, photons, grains of light … and an incredible memory of the smallest details of the experiences that made him famous and earned him the reward This year alongside the American John Clauser and the Austrian Anton Zeilinger. All three, at different times – 1970s, 1980s and 2000 – decided an almost philosophical debate on the interpretation of quantum mechanics, which heated the most brilliant spirits, including Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, for fifty years.
Quantum mechanics, developed in the interwar period to explain the behavior of electrons, atoms or photons (in short of everything around us!), Is it intrinsically bizarre or “normal”, seeming strange Only because his description is incomplete, as if something magician remained to be discovered?
“No one believed”
“The beast resists! It’s strange but it’s like that”, slice Alain aspect, fifteenth French Nobel in physics, in his office of the Institute of Optics (in Palaiseau, in Essonne), To the shelves crumbling under the theses of his masters, colleagues or students. The “beast” is quantum mechanics, which he observed an astonishing property, which gives reason to Bohr against Einstein. If you make, with a little subtlety, two photons per pair and you distance them from each other, their properties will remain linked, even at great distance. Touching one will instantly modify the other with a 100 %safe result. It is quantum entanglement.
“When we have attacked this question, in the Lab No one believed in it and some laughed,” recalls Philippe Grangier, in thesis in 1981 with Alain Aspect, during the first experiences at the Institute of ‘Optics of Paris-Saclay University.
To fight against adversity, Alain aspect has deployed several of his qualities. Resourceful, he invents his own components, which did not exist anywhere else, as a source of photons much better than that of the pioneer John Clauser. He has electronic equipment leaned by a laboratory of the CEA neighboring the Institute of Optics, his “house”, which he constantly thanks for his support.
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