Nobel In Physics: Your Tax Dollars At Work

In this combination of photos, American physicist David Wineland (left) speaks at a news conference in Boulder, Colo., and French physicist Serge Haroche speaks to the media in Paris after they were named winners of the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics.

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AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: And I'm Robert Siegel.

In the foothills of the Colorado Rockies, the U.S. Commerce Department runs a lab. Scientists there are searching for evermore precise methods of measuring things. And while that sounds very practical, the lab is actually at the cutting edge of the mind-bending science of quantum physics. Several Nobel physics laureates work there. And today, one more scientist from the lab learned that he will share in a Nobel.

NPR's Richard Harris tells us more.

RICHARD HARRIS, BYLINE: When David Wineland started working in his laboratory, which is now the National Institute for Standards and Technology in Boulder Colorado, he was trying to build a better atomic clock. These days, the best clocks aren't made from gears and pendulums, they're made from atoms which vibrate with great regularity. So, Wineland got down into the weeds of quantum mechanics, which is what governs the behavior of atoms.

Chris Monroe was working in his lab at the time.

CHRIS MONROE: Turns out that we were trying to make certain quantum states of these atoms that would make for better clocks, and this new field sort of fell into our laps.

HARRIS: That field is something that didn't even have a name at the time, but has since been dubbed quantum computing. The idea is still quite speculative, but the hope is you can make amazingly powerful computers by tapping into the spooky quantum mechanical nature of atoms. The basic idea is these atoms can be in many different states at the same time, so you can manipulate that in some mind-boggling ways.

MONROE: We are starting to put together 10 to 20 atoms; sounds pretty small, 20 atoms. But with 20 atoms, we can store a million numbers at the same time, and there are some interesting things you can do with that, that are very hard to do otherwise.

HARRIS: Like breaking the toughest codes. It's an idea that's still likely decades away. But it has inspired a generation of scientists, like Monroe, who now has his own lab at the University of Maryland.

MONROE: In the '90s there was one group in the world that could do this, and that was our group, Dave Wineland's group in Boulder. And now there are, depending on how you count, probably about 30 other groups in the last 10 years that have started.

DAVE WINELAND: I can't take credit for all that.

(LAUGHTER)

HARRIS: That's David Wineland himself, living up to his reputation for being humble and eager to share the credit. He says one reason he succeeded is his boss and his boss' boss, simply let him follow his nose, without worrying too much about where it was all leading.

WINELAND: We've been encouraged to kind of think out of the box, so to speak, and develop some of these new, basic ideas.

SIEGEL: Sure enough, that led to new, improved atomic clocks. But it also pushed him toward the world of quantum computing. There was no light bulb, no aha moment, Wineland says.

WINELAND: You know, we push this as hard as we can on one idea. And usually it leads to some other avenue that we'll develop into. But I think, in certainly in my case, it's been a slow, gradual procession.

HARRIS: Wineland will share the prize with his friend and friendly competitor, Serge Haroche, who is at the College de France in Paris. Haroche also delves into the weird world of quantum physics. He's figured out how to trap particles of light, photons, and measure them without destroying them.

PER DELSING: This is actually very hard to do.

HARRIS: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences asked physicist Per Delsing to explain this, during the Nobel Prize announcement this morning.

DELSING: For instance, when I look at the people in this room right now, the photons that reaches my eyes are absorbed by my eyes, and therefore destroyed.

HARRIS: Nobel laureate Haroche devised a way to study those light particles by trapping them between two mirrors and without destroying them. And this work is related to what's happening in Colorado because these light particles, like atoms, live in a realm that defies our intuition.

MONROE: A single atom can be in two places at the same time. And so, this in a nutshell is what's weird about quantum mechanics.

HARRIS: Monroe says probing this netherworld is about as basic as it gets when you think about basic science. But he says it also happens to be leading somewhere practical. And yes, it's your tax dollars at work.

Richard Harris, NPR News.

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