This year's Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded a few days ago to three scientists (Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger) for their work on "quantum entanglement"—what Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance"—whereby measurement of the state of one particle can instantaneously change the measured state of another particle, even if they are separated by light-years.
At my 50th (gulp!) college reunion this year, I went to a lecture, one of the many organized by the reunion staff for interested alumni, by Prof. Stephen Girvin, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Yale. The subject was quantum computing, something I had been trying, with absolutely no success, to understand for a couple of years.
The lecture was outstanding; though I would hardly say that I came away understanding exactly how quantum computers work, I did get at least get a glimpse of the underlying principles, which was considerably more than I had had before.
