- Tuesday, April 5, 2022
- 3:30 PM–4:30 PM
- SB 110
Senior Physics major, Lauren Henderson, will be the featured speaker for the April 6 Physics & Astronomy Seminar.
Join us in the Student Room (SB 157) for refreshments at 3:30 and in SB 110 immediately following for the lecture. Lauren's presentation is entitled: "Bell's Inequality: Entanglement, Nonlocality, and the Strangeness of Quantum Mechanics."
Have you ever wondered what quantum mechanics really means? It turns out that many physicists are wondering that too. There still isn’t a consensus about how to interpret many of the equations of quantum mechanics. In the 20th century, physicists developed theories to try to avoid some of the weirdness of quantum mechanics, which they called “local hidden variable theories.” For a while, many scientists thought that it would be impossible to test these different interpretations of quantum mechanics experimentally. But in 1964, a physicist named John Bell derived a relatively simple mathematical expression, “Bell’s inequality,” that shows how local hidden variable theories make different predictions than quantum mechanics. Since then, experimentalists have used Bell’s inequality to test local hidden variable theories. In this seminar, we will discuss the development of Bell’s inequality and some of the experimental tests of quantum mechanics. We will conclude by considering the looming question: what do these results even mean?
Location details
Science Building 110
