Alain Aspect

Alain Aspect (born June 15, 1947) is a French physicist who performed the crucial "Bell test experiments" that showed that Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen's "spooky action at a distance", did in fact appear to be realised when two particles were separated by an arbitrarily large distance. A correlation between their wave functions remained, as they were once part of the same wave-function that was not disturbed before one of the child particles was measured.

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• Certainly we do not need quantum mechanics for macroscopic objects, which are well described by classical physics – this is the reason why quantum mechanics seems so foreign to our everyday existence.
  • in the introduction of John Stewart Bell's Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press. 2004. p. xxix. ISBN 0521523389. 

• La principale difficulté pour vulgariser la physique quantique, c'est qu'on ne sait pas très bien comment en fabriquer des images dans notre monde. C'est en ce sens qu'elle est vraiment contre-intuitive.
  • The main difficulty in popularizing quantum physics is that we do not really know how to make images of it in our world. In this sense it is really counterintuitive.
  • Interview on the occasion of the CNRS Gold Medal Award Ceremony in December 2005.