The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It (2024)

FAQs

How did they prove that the universe is not locally real? ›

Under quantum mechanics, nature is not locally real: particles may lack properties such as spin up or spin down prior to measurement, and they seem to talk to one another no matter the distance. (Because the outcomes of measurements are random, these correlations cannot be used for faster-than-light communication.)

The scientists' findings show that the universe cannot be locally real, as particles lack definite spin-up or spin-down properties (quantum state) prior to their observation or measurement. Therefore, the simple act of observing a particle changes its state, contradicting the rules of local realism.

The 2011 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded today to Saul Perlmutter at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Brian Schmidt at the Australian National Lab and Adam Reiss at Johns Hopkins University for their discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.

The 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three physicists who have made pioneering contributions to astrophysics.

The Big Bang Theory suggests that about 13.8 billion years ago, the entire universe began from a dense, extremely hot single spot according to the Center for Astrophysics. This spot is known as the “singularity,” and it marks the beginning of what we now know as space, time, and matter.

The Big Bang theory is universally accepted by those who do research on the development of the universe, galaxies, and stars as the cause of the origin of the universe. The Big Bang theory says that the universe has developed by expanding from a hot dense state with everything exploding away from everything else.

It wasn't the 'Prize' itself that 'proved' that the universe is not local. The Prize was awarded to the Experimentalists that provided the empirical evidence supporting the theoretical work of John Stewart Bell (Bell's inequality theorem).

Predictions of quantum mechanics have been verified experimentally to an extremely high degree of accuracy.

The award is shared by Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger, all of whom showed a mastery of entanglement—a quantum relationship between two particles that can exist over long distances.

But with advances in technology and the development of new techniques we now know the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years, with an uncertainty of only 200 million years. How did this come to be?

Who is the only person to win the Nobel Prize for Physics? ›

The first prize in physics was awarded in 1901 to Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, of Germany, who received 150,782 SEK. John Bardeen is the only laureate to win the prize twice—in 1956 and 1972.

LONDON — Nobel prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed the existence of the so-called "God particle" that helped explain how matter formed after the Big Bang, has died at age 94, the University of Edinburgh said Tuesday.

Albert Einstein, winner of the 1921 Nobel prize in physics.

Two Nobel Prize laureates declined the prize

Jean-Paul Sartre, awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, declined the prize because he had consistently declined all official honours. Le Duc Tho, awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

William Lawrence Bragg

In 1915, aged 25, he was the youngest ever winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics – jointly with his father, William Henry Bragg, then professor at Leeds. Educated in Adelaide and Cambridge, Bragg served in World War I.

We can observe directly about the solar system and the galaxy that the objects do not revolve around the earth. This has been observed for thousands of years in the retrograde motion of Mars, which appears to mysteriously turn around and go backwards for a while at certain points in its orbit.

Nonlocality describes the apparent ability of objects to instantaneously know about each other's state, even when separated by large distances (potentially even billions of light years), almost as if the universe at large instantaneously arranges its particles in anticipation of future events.

When the seventeenth-century Italian scientist Galileo Galilei built his telescope, he observed that the planet Venus showed phases, and deduced that it orbited the Sun. He also found four moons orbiting the planet Jupiter, conclusively disproving the idea that everything in the universe revolved around Earth.

An illuminating philosophical discussion of issues surrounding entanglement, like realism, locality, causality, relativity, etc., in various interpretations of quantum mechanics is Timpson and Brown's Entanglement and Relativity. Entanglement does not refute the principle of locality.