This book excerpt traces the history of quantum information theory and the colorful and famous physicists who tried to figure out "spooky actions at a distance"
?| January 30, 2012?|
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Editor's Note: Reprinted from How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival by David Kaiser. Copyright (c) 2011 by David Kaiser. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
[from Chapter 2, pp. 25-38:]
The iconoclastic Irish physicist John S. Bell had long nursed a private disquietude with quantum mechanics. His physics teachers?first at Queen's University in his native Belfast during the late 1940s, and later at Birmingham University, where he pursued doctoral work in the mid-1950s?had shunned matters of interpretation. The "ask no questions" attitude frustrated Bell, who remained unconvinced that Niels Bohr had really vanquished the last of Einstein's critiques long ago and that there was nothing left to worry about. At one point in his undergraduate studies, his red shock of hair blazing, he even engaged in a shouting match with a beleaguered professor, calling him "dishonest" for trying to paper over genuine mysteries in the foundations, such as how to interpret the uncertainty principle. Certainly, Bell would grant, quantum mechanics worked impeccably "for all practical purposes," a phrase he found himself using so often that he coined the acronym, "FAPP." But wasn't there more to physics than FAPP? At the end of the day, after all the wavefunctions had been calculated and probabilities plotted, shouldn't quantum mechanics have something coherent to say about nature?
In the years following his impetuous shouting matches, Bell tried to keep these doubts to himself. At the tender age of twenty-one he realized that if he continued to indulge these philosophical speculations, they might well scuttle his physics career before it could even begin. He dove into mainstream topics, working on nuclear and particle physics at Harwell, Britain's civilian atomic energy research center. Still, his mind continued to wander. He wondered whether there were some way to push beyond the probabilities offered by quantum theory, to account for motion in the atomic realm more like the way Newton's physics treated the motion of everyday objects. In Newton's physics, the behavior of an apple or a planet was completely determined by its initial state?variables like position (where it was) and momentum (where it was going)?and the forces acting upon it; no probabilities in sight. Bell wondered whether there might exist some set of variables that could be added to the quantum-mechanical description to make it more like Newton's system, even if some of those new variables remained hidden from view in any given experiment. Bell avidly read a popular account of quantum theory by one of its chief architects, Max Born's Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance (1949), in which he learned that some of Born's contemporaries had likewise tried to invent such "hidden variables" schemes back in the late 1920s. But Bell also read in Born's book that another great of the interwar generation, the Hungarian mathematician and physicist John von Neumann, had published a proof as early as 1932 demonstrating that hidden variables could not be made compatible with quantum mechanics. Bell, who could not read German, did not dig up von Neumann's recondite proof. The say-so of a leader (and soon-to-be Nobel laureate) like Born seemed like reason enough to drop the idea.
Imagine Bell's surprise, therefore, when a year or two later he read a pair of articles in the Physical Review by the American physicist David Bohm. Bohm had submitted the papers from his teaching post at Princeton University in July 1951; by the time they appeared in print six months later, he had landed in S?o Paolo, Brazil, following his hounding by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Bohm had been a graduate student under J. Robert Oppenheimer at Berkeley in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Along with several like-minded friends, he had participated in free-wheeling discussion groups about politics, worldly affairs, and local issues like whether workers at the university's laboratory should be unionized. He even joined the local branch of the Communist Party out of curiosity, but he found the discussions so boring and ineffectual that he quit a short time later. Such discussions might have seemed innocuous during ordinary times, but investigators from the Military Intelligence Division thought otherwise once the United States entered World War II, and Bohm and his discussion buddies started working on the earliest phases of the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb. Military intelligence officers kept the discussion groups under top-secret surveillance, and in the investigators' eyes the line between curious discussion group and Communist cell tended to blur. When later called to testify before HUAC, Bohm pleaded the Fifth Amendment rather than name names. Over the physics department's objections, Princeton's administration let his tenure-track contract lapse rather than reappoint him. At the center of a whirling media spectacle, Bohm found all other domestic options closed off. Reluctantly, he decamped for Brazil.
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Public release date: 30-Jan-2012
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