A few years went by before a graduate student came knocking on Shimony's door. The student had just completed his qualifying exams and was scouting for a dissertation topic. Together they decided to mount a brand-new experiment to test Bell's theorem. Several months into their preparations, still far from a working experiment, Shimony spied Clauser's abstract in the Bulletin, and reached for the phone. They decided to meet at the upcoming American Physical Society meeting in Washington, D.C., where Clauser was scheduled to talk about his proposed experiment. There they hashed out a plan to join forces. A joint paper, Shimony felt, would no doubt be stronger than either of their separate efforts alone would be—the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts—and, on top of that, "it was the civilized way to handle the priority question." And so began a fruitful collaboration and a set of enduring friendships.
Clauser completed his dissertation not long after their meeting. He had some down time between handing in his thesis and the formal thesis defense, so he went up to Boston to work with Shimony and the (now two) graduate students whom Shimony had corralled onto the project. Together they derived a variation on Bell's theme: a new expression, more amenable to direct comparisons with laboratory data than Bell's had been. (Their equations concerned S, the particular combination of spin measurements examined in the previous chapter.) Even as his research began to hum, Clauser's employment prospects grew dim. He graduated just as the chasm between demand and supply for American physicists opened wide. He further hindered his chances by giving a few job talks on the subject of Bell's theorem. Clauser would later write with great passion that in those years, physicists who showed any interest in the foundations of quantum mechanics labored under a "stigma," as powerful and keenly felt as any wars of religion or McCarthy-like political purges.
Finally Berkeley's Charles Townes offered Clauser a postdoctoral position in astrophysics at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, on the strength of Clauser's dissertation on radio astronomy. Clauser, an avid sailer, planned to sail his boat from New York around the tip of Florida and into Galveston, Texas; then he would load the boat onto a truck and drive it to Los Angeles, before setting sail up the California coast to the San Francisco Bay Area. (A hurricane scuttled his plans; he and his boat got held up in Florida, and he wound up having to drive it clear across the country instead.) All the while, Clauser and Shimony hammered out their first joint article on Bell's theorem: each time Clauser sailed into a port along the East Coast, he would find a telephone and check in with Shimony, who had been working on a draft of their paper. Then Shimony would mail copies of the edited draft to every marina in the next city on Clauser's itinerary, "some of which I picked up," Clauser explained recently, "and some of which are probably still waiting there for all I know." Back and forth their edits flew, and by the time Clauser arrived in Berkeley in early August 1969, they had a draft ready to submit to the journal.
Things were slow at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory compared to the boom years, and budgets had already begun to shrink. Clauser managed to convince his faculty sponsor, Townes, that Bell's theorem might merit serious experimental study. Perhaps Townes, an inventor of the laser, was more receptive to Clauser's pitch than the others because Townes, too, had been told by the heavyweights of his era that his own novel idea flew in the face of quantum mechanics. Townes allowed Clauser to devote half his time to his pet project, not least because, as Clauser made clear, the experiments he envisioned would cost next to nothing. With the green light from Townes, Clauser began to scavenge spare parts from storage closets around the Berkeley lab—"I've gotten pretty good at dumpster diving," as he put it recently—and soon he had duct-taped together a contraption capable of measuring the correlated polarizations of pairs of photons. (Photons, like electrons, can exist in only one of two states; polarization, in this case, functions just like spin as far as Bell-type correlations are concerned.) In 1972, with the help of a graduate student loaned to him at Townes's urging, Clauser published the first experimental results on Bell's theorem. (Fig. 3.1.)
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11 Comments
Add CommentFor anyone who was interested in physics/cosmology in the 60s/70s this book is a fun read that will spark a lot of memories/nostalgia, and add a lot of background information on what was happening behind the headlines.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne reason I did not complete ROTC was because commanding officers told me the prime objective was to stop communism. Not pro or con towards communism, I wondered why the communist party was not allowed an equal voice to the democrats or republicans.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA wonderful and thoroughly enjoyable article--thank you! I totally want to get the book.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGood point. I probably would have dropped out if the war was against the democrats or republicans also.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMaybe it's because they would kill both party's off and rule the roust as King.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou have to step over the rotting corpses of seventy million people in order toget to Communism's justification. There is a reason Communism fell in the late eighties; it outlawed freedom.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNonsense. Communism the ideology had no more to do with those corpses than democracy the ideology was responsible for the deaths in Vietnam (you can look directly to corrupt US leaders for that particular death toll.) Those 70 million corpses were the result of NOT doing communism as the ideology specified, and almost entirely a consequence of being ruled by a series of bloodthirsty, paranoid, power-mad, corrupt dictators -- communist in name only -- who shoveled their caca downhill through a thoroughly corrupt power structure which again, was about as "communist" as you are.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou'll notice communism hasn't produced a mass of corpses in the USA, though there are quite a few communists, and communist-leaning folks around. You might ask yourself why.
I'm not saying communism is any great shakes, but it isn't a formula for murder, either. Certainly no more so than democracy or a republic. It's all about responsible, restrained leadership.
Everywhere Communism was attempted in the twentieth century, mass murder ensued. "Doing" communism as specified involves a universal cooperative effort on the part of its adherents. In other words "to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Bourgeoisie, perfectly happy with the status quo wasn't the least bit interested in giving up power or wealth to become "equal" with the working class, and even Marx and Engels new that world wide bloody revolution was necessary to bring about the "workers Utopia". Lenin was a paranoid psychotic, but he was the perfect man to carry out the revolution. Indeed, as evidence for what I say, ask yourself this question:
Where in the history of Communism was there NOT the bloodthirsty Dictator you describe?
Think about that question for a minute; How could it be that every single Communist society in the twentieth Century was a bloody dictatorship? How could it be that there was not one place on earth during the entire century where Communism flourished peacefully and more important, abundantly for all of its citizens?
How else to realize the Socialist dream? How else do you get to full cooperation with this ideology?
The Communist Revolution failed not as a consequence of being ruled by a series of "bloodthirsty, paranoid, power-mad, corrupt dictators"; they were absolutely what the revolution called for in its infancy. The revolution failed precisely because they couldn't kill or imprison apostates fast enough.
Fyngyrz, I'm assuming you are of the impression that if we just tried it one more time, and did it correctly, we'll all be farting bluebirds and singing Kum Bye Ya in no time. Well, we won't.
I agree. I think the problem was that Communism explicitly excluded democracy, and therefore there was never any accountability. Bloodthirsty dictators never had to win an election. Same with incompetent governors, mayors, Party leaders, and garbage collectors. I personally think that the main reason democracy is successful is not that it allow the "best" people to get elected, but that it allows people to "fire" the abusive ones. It permits accountability, or in other words, a negative feedback loop in which an abuse of power results in the removal of power. Communism has a positive feedback loop, in which the worse the abuse of power, the more power the abuser acquires.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you have a tube full of a non-compressible liquid, and you start entering more liquid in the tube in one of its ends, the liquid you entroduce in the origin of the tube will take a measurable time to go from one end of the tube to the other end, but flow transmission, i.e. movement of liquid along the whole tube, would be instantaneous. Does this fact have any connection to "Spooky action at distance" ?. I'm not trying to resuscitate the concept of "ether", naturally. Salut +
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell, when it comes to Hippies they all look alike to me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCERN's neutrinos exceeding the speed of light @ v-c/c=2.48 sec in 453.6 miles is an exact match to Stanford's SLAC E158 weak force asymmetry value showing the cause of 2.48e-5 is not the politics of a "loose fiber optic cable" checked countless times with the same "gain in space" shown by FERMI Lab's neutrinos supporting an observation that goes back to 1947 and is summed up in 2007 by G. Nimtz and A. A. Stahlhofen who believe it occurs outside the bounds of SR [arXiv:0708.0681v1] not aware of the simple explanation I showed E158 data provides with direct proof provided by SLAC's E158 data exposing a gain in time/space in 453.6 miles also @ 2.48e-5 with a .20 harmonic comma as I predicted for the asymmetry in the reverse arrow/phase of time the calculations reveal changing physics. SLAC's data comes from the distance light travels in 1000 years at the speed of light in a ratio to a 1 hour SOL gain making this comparative measurement the most spectacular ever made in physics and does so in regard to the most important observation in the History of Man.
This means E=m+{a}c2 outside the weak force where E=mc2 as that equation does not include the photon's force carrier space the neutrino provides to exit the weak force to create the strong force. This changes physics far more that E=mc2 did due to the infrastructure in place to take advantage of the energy tap {a} provides. It puts us back in sync with Newton's time but armed with E=mc2 corrected as well as Newton's law by adding the second reverse phase held by "imaginary" numbers in physics that never add up correct without {a} added to expose the second "real" reverse phase in time. And One more thing it shows, we live in a world of only 3.6 seconds a year due to time dilation and that's why atoms hang out so long but not their anti-matter reverse phases. This is what happens when you look at the Sun: a thousand years in the inertial frame of the week force is an hour of a day at the speed of light in time equal to distance at the speed of light relative to our body’s inertial frame of reference. Theata 13 shows there 3 points of observation within the weak force as I showed Erin Edwards in demonstrating the chemical source timing relative to a true inertial frame of reference that Mass location in time provides to create it’s placement within the DNA’s Gene Ensemble Instance Location. A new age in physics approaches awaiting your understanding to benefit Mankind.
And they all sound the same.