IT IS one of those delicious ironies of history that Albert Einstein received the , the theory of gravity for which he is now justly most famed, but largely for his contribution to a theory that he spent much of his later career trying to disown.
Perhaps that’s only right. After all, quantum theory notoriously allows things to be in two states at once, and divides minds as well as it – potentially – divides worlds.
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At the time of Einstein’s award a century ago (in another irony, delayed for a year as the Nobel committee were initially unsure whether the contributions of any of that year’s nominees truly merited the honour), quantum mechanics wasn’t yet even a fleshed-out mathematical theory. Its greatest assaults on our ideas of how reality should work – Erwin Schrödinger’s dead-and-alive cats, the “spooky action at a distance” of quantum entanglement – were yet to come.
Entanglement was another of Einstein’s contributions, which, as we set out in our special feature on the frontiers of quantum theory , he introduced in 1935 very much in the spirit of pointing out the theory’s supposed deficiencies. Today, we can say that entanglement is very much a thing, the basis of technologies such as quantum computers – although the questions of when and for what quantum computers will be of practical use remain themselves hanging in an appropriate state of fuzziness.
“A century on from Einstein’s Nobel prize, quantum theory’s mysteries remain a gift”
Einstein’s prize heralded the beginning of the golden era of quantum theory’s development. It’s hard to overstate just what a seismic shift that has brought about, not only in our conceptions of how reality works, but of our role in it. Because it works on scales we cannot directly see, it raises still seemingly insoluble questions about how much we think we observe is actually there, or whether it merely seems to be there because of the way we, as large lumps of classical reality, interact with it.
A century on, quantum theory’s mysteries are a gift that is still giving – a true frontier of knowledge always worthy of exploration and celebration.