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2021 Events

John Bell Day Lecture 2021 | 4th Nov | 1.30pm

The Chief Executives’ Club at Queen’s and Royal Irish Academy were delighted to welcome Italian physicist, Professor Angelo Bassi, University of Trieste to deliver a keynote address at the Annual John Bell Day Lecture - 'Spooky Action at a Distance'.

Date(s)
November 4, 2021
Location
Online
Time
13:30 - 14:45

Telepathy would be a powerful way to communicate among people, but it is not allowed by the laws of Physics. The transfer of information requires always some time; this was particularly true in the past, when messages and letters took months to reach people on the other side of the world via a ship. It is true also today in our fully interconnected world, where information travels at the speed of light, which is very large but finite. The underlying physical principle is called locality: changes, forces, information… anything cannot jump instantly from a place to another, rather it must propagate through space at a finite speed, limited by the speed of light. We will present why Quantum Mechanics challenges this principle, and how J.S. Bell contributed to uncovering one of the most fundamental problems in the foundations of quantum theory.

Department
Audience
All
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