Supervisor: Jan Arlt

In the post-war period, physicists paid little attention to fundamental interpretations of quantum mechanics – despite objections raised earlier by Albert Einstein and others regarding entangled states, locality and hidden variables. Even John Bell’s seminal 1964 paper formalising the dispute, raised no eyebrows until it caught the attention of the informal discussion group Fundamental Fysiks Group. Its members were keen to discuss the scientific implications of non-locality and even possible connections to parapsychology, mind reading and psychokinesis! One member of the group, John Clauser, decided to test Bell’s Theorem experimentally and recently received the Nobel Prize for his work. Some of the esoteric speculations have since become mainstream physics. Today entangled states breaching Bell’s Inequality are the motor of quantum computers and cryptography.