In Anton Zeilinger’s dream world, superfast quantum computers will process data using single atoms instead of silicon chips. Such devices will have fantastic powers, including the ability to transpose matter into packets of information and teleport it through space. But to Zeilinger, even that dream is not exotic enough. When science is truly new, he says, the technology that results from it “cannot be imagined” in advance.
He speaks from experience: The Austrian physicist has spent his career on the outer boundaries of understanding, studying some of the greatest mysteries of quantum physics. While classic Newtonian physics does a fine job of describing the world we see around us, it breaks down utterly when confronted with the unpredictable behavior of the quantum world, the realm of atoms and quarks. Quantum physics addresses that breakdown, but it also leads to ideas so bizarre that Albert Einstein said they had to be in error. He particularly objected to “entanglement” —the notion that twin particles could become intertwined across space and time—and predicted it would never be proved.
Yet Zeilinger is doing just that through an elaborate series of experiments, each one cleverer than the last. In his hands, entanglement is not just a scientific oddity but an essential tool. Using photons, the basic unit of light, he demonstrated that multiple particles could be entangled, a key step toward practical quantum computers. He also was the first to accomplish teleportation (pdf), in which the characteristics of one particle are transferred to another, a breakthrough that could lead to the creation of unbreakable codes. A professor of physics at the University of Vienna and scientific director of the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Zeilinger was awarded the first Newton Medal, given by the British Institute of Physics, and the 2010 Wolf Prize in Physics. DISCOVER senior editor Eric Powell caught up with him during a visit to New York City.
How did you come to view the world in such an unusual way? I grew up after World War II in Austria, so we were very poor. We lived in the Soviet zone, which meant housing was scarce. We were put up on the third floor of a castle in a small village. It had these huge rooms, and I liked to look out the window. So my parents got these bars on the window, and they tied me to them with a harness. I would sit there, hanging out of the window for hours just watching and observing cows and people below. The villagers still talk about the strange child hanging from the castle window watching everything.
So you were intensely curious from an early age? Oh, I used to take apart everything I could. Like my sister’s dolls. I took the arms and the legs off because I wanted to know how they worked, and I never put things back together, which was not always appreciated, as you can imagine. And later in school I had a very good physics and mathematics teacher. He was able to teach us the basic ideas of relativity theory, such that we believed we understood it, which I now know is not true. Then I learned about quantum mechanics on my own at university, from books, and I was immediately struck by its mathematical beauty.
