Newton Medal winner (2008): Anton Zeilinger - Part 1

For some reason I was always curious about things. Like when I was a little boy I liked to take apart things. I was usually not able to put them back together again but I took them apart. For example, like the legs and the arms off the dolls of my sister - that, she certainly didn’t like. So I just wanted to know how this mechanism works.

00:50 - So when I went to school I was lucky to have an excellent teacher in physics. He was able to present in an interesting way. And certainly the most interesting situation was when he started to talk about the theory of relativity of Albert Einstein. he gave us the feeling that we understand what’s going on, which I now know is not true. But it was excting and important for us, and provided a big motivation. We learnt basically, that you can find out. And you can find out if you want. And that is a very important message. My father was a scientist. He was a chemist. So he was a professor himself.

01:59 - So I must have got it both through the genes and also through the environment. Simply sometimes I visited him in the lab, I didn’t understand what was going on, but just the atmosphere was important for me. He worked on what we called today on microbiology and genetics. So it was the questions how bacteria multiply and how they modify. And their life-cycles. Inititaly related to the And their life-cycles.

Inititaly related to the 02:34 - dairy industry - how to make milk and cheese - this was the starting point for him But it went much deeper than that. I never considered a career along that path - I don’t know why. you meet in physics that interested me. Chemistry maybe. Some point I thought briefly that I would study medicine to become a scientist there. But I quickly found out that the fundamental questions are more interesting for me personally. I have three children who are grown up. One is an artist, the other one studied law and the third one is interested in urban planning. Very different from science. If they would have been interested then I would have provided some encouragement. But the first decision has to come from the young person themselves. We should not push young people in the direction where they don’t want to go on their own already.

03:59 - If I would give one piece of advice for young people, it would be if you find something interesting Go for it. It doesn’t matter what it is. If you really find it interesting you will make your way, and if it happens to be science, I can guarantee that you will lead a very interesting life. I love to sail. This is a very interesting activity because it kind of keeps you busy all the time. It is one of the few situations where I don’t think about physics because you’re so busy doing other things. I love sailing and I like music. I like jazz. I don’t like modern jazz so much. I like more classical versions of jazz. I play the cello. I also started to play some bass. But that is now 20 years ago. I should pick it up again, I know. And I will! in terms of brain activity.

That if you listen to music, if you are fully immersed 05:24 - in music then many parts of your brain are active. And it seems to be the case when you are creative - as a scientist or an artist - it doesn’t seem to matter. It is very interesting actually. There’s a lot of parallel between art and science. where you don’t exactly know which way to go. You have to have a hunch, you have to have a feeling. And really interesting new steps, are steps where your feeling is important.

06:06 - Find something out as the first one or the first group. In physics we work in groups and this discussion all the time - how we can improve things, how can we find out and so on… that is the really interesting thing. It’s never about making money. It’s never about making a big career. It’s just curiosity. Well I became interested in quantum physics at the end of my university education. When it is a very mathematical and very abstract body of knowledge. I was fascinated by the mathematical and very abstract body of knowledge.

07:08 - I was fascinated by the mathematical beauty. If you really see how beautiful some of the mathematics is, it is mind- boggling. It is impressive. what does it mean for our understanding of the world - they were not answered, they were open. I got excited about that. I wanted to find out. It’s fascinating. and it was invented to explain the behaviour of atoms and small particles and so on. are in a very fundamental way different from what we see in every-day life.

08:11 - Things like what you observe depends on whether you look at it or not - the observer is very important. It’s what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”. at some other location far away. One of the big points, is that we can now do experiments in a way the creators of quantum physics would not even dream of. So we can see all these phenomena in very detailed experiments. We can ask new questions about what is reality, things like that. And we can also and so on. So we have learned a lot in doing these things. are not answered yet. Things like “What is really real?” .