Great for John Clauser. We grad students from that time at Columbia all remember how his interest in testing quantum mechanics entanglement was strongly discouraged by faculty.
— Emanuel Derman (@EmanuelDerman) October 4, 2022
This was when “shut up and calculate” was still the dominant paradigm, and when physicists (as they still mostly do today) tried to pretend that the universe is 100% deterministic. Most still profess determinism, but they know they are lying I think — but just don’t care. They wish the universe were a completely predictable machine. But Bohmian “hidden variable” determinism appears not to be true and that makes many people wildly angry.
In fact, I’ve seen several articles after this Nobel Prize win still asserting that the Bohmian determinism-preserving interpretation of QM could still (somehow) be true even though Clauser et al.’s experiments showed that the Bell’s inequalities were unequivocally violated in this universe (the only one we appear to have access to).
Thus went locality and determinism. Many physicists still hate this today, though it’s true. Here’s a good fairly-technical history and summary of the work that won the Nobel Prize.
The best one-sentence summary of what this means was by John Conway who said, “To be more precise, what we shall show is that the particles’ response to a certain type of experiment is not determined by the entire previous history of that part of the universe accessible to them.”
As I said before, thus went locality and determinism. So when someone tells you that this universe is fully deterministic, you can now cite the Nobel Prize-winning physicists who showed it absolutely is not.