Time for mysterious photons to get the prize

In December 2016, the world's first quantum communication satellite, Chinese QUESS, sent a quantum signal down to earth. It consisted of two twin photons, ie light particles, which were directed in each direction. One went to a measuring station in Delingha on the Tibetan high plateau and the other to Lijiang which is 120 km south of China.

When they arrived at their respective measuring stations, a so-called Bell test was done. The researchers wanted to find out if the twin photons were quantum mechanically intertwined. It is a long word for a mysterious trait that manifests itself in the small quantum world.

Photo pairs transmitted from the same light source are in immediate contact with each other. It is as if they are each other's mirror images. If one starts spinning to the left, the other spins immediately to the right, and that without communicating with each other.

But how can that be possible? Albert Einstein did not believe that quantum mechanical entanglement could exist and called it ghost-spacing effect. More and more experiments are now showing that nature really behaves so strange.

The Chinese Bell test proved that the twin photons captured by the measurement stations on Earth were also interconnected. The distance between them is 120 miles and it beat the old Bell test record which was 14 miles.

This is physics that does not seem to take into account neither time nor space, but which can nevertheless be practically feasible within a few years, for example within extremely secure quantum encryption.

Three people are favored for their pioneer experiments that prove quantum mechanical interlacing. It is the American John Clauser, the Frenchman Alain Aspect and the Austrian Anton Zeilinger.

But if the award-winners would really take up the challenge in the Nobel will that the prize should go to sciences working for the benefit of mankind, the prize should not go to the mysterious quantum world but to research on the world in which we are clearly living and facing a threatening climate crisis.

In 1967, Syukuro Manabe (Japan) and Richard Wetherald (USA) published a scientific climate article that is considered by many to be the most influential ever. Manabe and Wetherald designed the first modern climate model to help analyze and predict climate development. This is vital research.