The 2022 Physics Nobel Prize is misunderstood even by the Nobel prize committee itself. What the work of John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger has shown, building on John Bell’s ideas, isn’t that quantum mechanics cannot be replaced by a deterministic, hidden variables theory. What it has shown is that quantum mechanics, as well as all of physics, is non-local. “Spooky action at a distance”, what Einstein had found disturbing about quantum mechanics, is real and emerging technologies depend on it, argues Tim Maudlin.

The presentation of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics to John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger is a bittersweet moment for those of us who work in the foundations of physics. It is mostly bittersweet because John Bell, whose brilliant theoretical work provided in impetus and basis for the experimental work done by the laureates, did not live long enough to receive this same recognition for his achievement.