Word: clauser
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Dyson believes that the baidarka will have a robust future, influencing the shape of modern sport kayaks. Physicist Francis Clauser designed a forked-bow craft for a syndicate in the 1986-87 America's Cup race. Dyson still speaks of the genius of the Aleut kayak builders with reverence: "Modern science has recognized all the elements that went into the baidarka, but nobody put them together to achieve a synthesis the way the Aleuts...
...photon puzzle was nothing more than a matter of speculation until 1964, when an Irish theoretical physicist named John Stewart Bell restated the problem as a simple mathematical proposition. A young physicist named John Clauser came upon Bell's theorem and realized that it opened the door to testing the two-photon problem in an experiment. Like Einstein, Clauser was bothered by the seemingly absurd implications of quantum mechanics. Says Clauser, now a research physicist at the University of California, Berkeley: "I had an opportunity to devise a test and see whether nature would choose quantum mechanics or reality...
...Clauser's work pointed out once again that the rules of quantum mechanics do not mesh well with the laws of Newton and Einstein. But most physicists do not see the apparent disparity to be a major practical problem. Classical laws work perfectly well in explaining phenomena in the visible world -- the motion of a planet or the trajectory of a curveball -- and quantum theory does just as well when restricted to describing subatomic events like the flight of an electron...
...small band of physicists, including Clauser and Stapp, are disturbed by their profession's priorities, believing that the anomalies of quantum theory deserve much more investigation. Instead of chasing ever smaller particles with ever larger accelerators, some of these critics assert, physics should be moving in the opposite direction. Specifically, science needs to find out whether the elusiveness of the quantum world applies to objects larger than subatomic particles...
...worries about the relevance of quantum mechanics to the momentum of a charging elephant. But there are events on the border between the visible and the invisible in which quantum effects could conceivably come into play. Possible examples: biochemical reactions and the firing of neurons in the brain. Stapp, Clauser and others believe that a better understanding of how quantum theory applies to atoms and molecules might help in everything from artificial-intelligence research to building improved gyroscopes. For now, though, this boundary area is a theoretical no-man's-land. Certainly physicists are a lot further from understanding...