Back

Building physical intuition through conscientious experiments, starting with Bell’s Inequality

Local realism is the worldview in which physical properties of objects exist independently of measurement and where physical influences cannot travel faster than the speed of light—aligned with common human intuition.

Thursday 13.11.2025 01:11 pm

Bell’s theorem states that this worldview is incompatible with the predictions of quantum mechanics, as is expressed in Bell’s inequalities. Many experiments have convincingly supported the quantum predictions, yet, every experiment requires assumptions that provide loopholes for a local realist explanation. This motivated a 2015 Bell test, carried out in the sub-basement of the Vienna Hofburg, that closed the most significant of these loopholes simultaneously. In this talk, I will review the motivation and some details of this experiment, giving way to a discussion about how intuition is built in the physical sciences, with a context colored by both quantum foundational experiments and my current work at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.

Information

 

Speaker:  Marissa Giustina

Time:  13:30