Wed Nov 4 · 4pm
Physics Colloquium: David Kaiser — Scenes from the Quantum Century
David Kaiser, MIT physicist and historian of science, describes how a group of 1970s California physicists steeped in the counterculture wrestled with quantum entanglement and John Bell’s inequality, the story of his book How the Hippies Saved Physics. He then traces how that history spurred new experimental tests of Bell’s inequality, including his group’s “Cosmic Bell” experiments, which used light from distant quasars to close a subtle loophole.