Instructor

Background materials

As mentioned in the video, there is an abundance of videos apparently following my lessons. The recent Nobel Prize for Clauser, Aspect, and Zeilinger has turned that into a regular flood. Somewhat surprisingly, even explanations from professionals who know the science well, often follow the lessons "for simplicity". Indeed many audiences prefer a spooky talk over one that requires them to follow several steps of an abstract argument.

Apart from the Nature Video production, I recommend a perfectly confusing piece by Dr. Krister Shalm, who actually brings in a magician to build the classical correlation. If you want to understand the magic trick, ask yourself whether they are really shuffling the decks. This video also contains an especially embarrassing scene of literal Einstein bashing. Anton Zeilinger, one of the greats in our field, is also a wonderful public speaker, but regularly fails the newspaper test. With him, the special feature of quantum correlations is that the results are only fixed at the moment of measurement. This is true, but you are asked to just believe that, whereas it would be a consequence of a fuller explanation.

The video mentions Deepak Chopra in the Quantum Healing business. His hilarious explanation of the word quantum in his bestselling book title "quantum healing" is found here (for the core explanation jump to 9:30-13:35). Other books of this genre invoke the quantum only to justify the business model of remote healing, by which the healer can conveniently stay at home and offers his spooky assistance for real dollars.

A critical view of all the Einstein bashing is also given by Sabine Hossenfelder (But Sabine: Did you really have to triple your German accent when reading his quotes? I know his accent was really thick. But isn't that just a bit besides the point?)

At the end, I promise pointers to videos making a serious attempt at explanation. Of course, I have made many attempts at intelligible explanations over the years, and so have many of my colleagues. Actually, in an ongoing project on this platform, some of us will present their versions. That may be repetitive, but "the best explanation" for one viewer might not be best for another. So we offer several approaches to the core argument, in different styles and coming from different directions.

For earlier attempts available on youtube, you might want to try:

• David Mermin, the author of a famous article "Is the moon there when nobody looks?" can be seen given the 2008 Oppenheimer lecture.
• There is a carefully built version on the channel 3Blue1Brown.
• As to explaining the Nobel Prize, this video from Qiskit (IBM) stays at a refreshingly low nonsense level.