Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality

by Anil Ananthaswamy

Some young minds—à la Heisenberg when he was twenty-four—might cut through this clutter. There’s insight in a comment that Anton Zeilinger made to Fuchs, after Fuchs had given a talk on QBism that wasn’t terribly well received in Fuchs’s own estimation. Fuchs thought that the veteran Alain Aspect, who was in the audience, had written him off “as a nutcase.” Even Mermin, a well-wisher, walked up to Fuchs and said, “We need to talk. That was the worst talk you’ve ever given.” Zeilinger said, “Great talk!” to which Mermin responded, “No, it wasn’t!” Fuchs recalled (in his writings) that Zeilinger looked past Mermin and addressed him directly: “You know what I would do when I was young, being dismissed by the old professors on the front rows of the seminar? I would not look to them as I spoke, but rather to the back rows where the young students were sitting. They were the ones ready to hear something new.”