Reality Tests

• Post by: admin
• July 13, 2010
• No Comment

Th French magazine “Pour la Science” has just reprinted the 2008 Seed magazine article “The Reality Tests” on our Vienna Leggett inequality experiments.

The original experiment on a violation of the Leggett inequality by Simon Groeblacher and colleagues garnered a lot of attention. My modest contribution was to perform more conclusive measurements for an inequality with less assumptions.

The actual implications of these experiments are a little blown out of proportion by the Seed magazine article. They have however sparked a lot of additional interest in research of the foundations of quantum mechanics beyond Bell inequalities. Most proficient have been the folks in Switzerland and Singapore, who picked up on Simon’s paper with amazing speed and then almost beat us to the second experiment, which we ended up publishing back-to-back. It didn’t take them long to then work out an improved version of Leggett’s inequality which they published in Nature Physics. Lead author was Cyril Branciard, who is now a colleague of mine in Brisbane and has helped Pour la Science translate the Seed magazine article into French. Thus closes the circle.