Interview with the 2022 Nobel Prize laureate in physics Anton Zeilinger on 6 December 2022 during the Nobel Week in Stockholm, Sweden.

Where does your passion for science come from?

Anton Zeilinger: My passion for science goes back very, very far. Even as a child, I wanted to know how things work, and I was also curious what happens. We lived in the countryside in a small castle, it was not private, it was after war, so the castle was free to be used. My father was working there, and I’m told that I was sitting up there on the second floor of the castle and watching out all the time, as a child, three, four or five years old. The people in the village thought that I’m kind of crazy, which maybe I am, you never know. This is how it started, and as I said, I was interested in how things work. I was usually not interested in putting them together. Many physicists try to put things together. As soon as you know how it works, why should you put it back together again? You know it already, right? It seems to be curiosity, and it seems to be curiosity for everything.

Was there a single defining moment when you decided to pursue science?

Anton Zeilinger: I don’t think that there was a single moment which made me this decide to go for science. There were various inputs, like my father had given me a microscope when I was 14 years old, and I played with the microscope. I had a fantastic teacher in physics, in gymnasium, as we call it, high school, and at the time when the others in my class, the other boys, were talking about girls and all this, I had a friend and we were talking for hours about cosmology and about the big bang and this and that. This was curiosity.

Was there a particular person who influenced you?

Anton Zeilinger: My teacher in physics and mathematics, he was clearly excited about what he was telling us. That’s the most important ingredient in my eyes for a good teacher. He or she can make mistakes, and it doesn’t matter as long as the person is excited and you see that the whole soul is behind it. That’s enough. That’s it.

To be excited, you cannot fake. Young students, they know immediately what goes on in a teacher. They know it right away after 10 minutes. Let me make one point, another feature of a teacher is that the teacher has to take you as a person seriously. I had a teacher in another field who was very cynical and made jokes about us, but the fact that he made jokes meant that he took you seriously. That was a good teacher too. It is not fashionable today to say something like that, but you felt accepted and the teacher took you so serious that he even tried to make fun about you. At least that’s the way I saw it. The worst are teachers who don’t care. That happens unfortunately sometimes.

How do you cope with failure?

Anton Zeilinger: There was only one big failure. There was one experiment, about 2000, where we tried to do something which was too ambitious at that time. We spent a lot of money and the results we got were so complicated that we didn’t understand it, so we gave up. This was the only really big failure in my academic life, having been too ambitious in terms of … and with my students. But otherwise, you meet challenges. There are things which you did not expect, new problems, and you don’t know how to solve it right away. But this can all be attacked by essentially stamina. Keep going what you want to do, and most important, in my field, in experiments, talk with your students, your postdocs all the time. Discuss, and certainly somebody has an idea, and off we go.

What was it like when you first started pursuing science?

Anton Zeilinger: I was very lucky, which I found out later, for having been educated in Vienna. Because in Vienna, you still had or still have a spirit of openness to very fundamental questions. The idea that something has to be useful is secondary in Viennese culture, and that was extremely useful for me, as I discovered when I came to the US. The second point is that I had my PhD thesis supervisor was doing experiments on the foundations, fundamental experiments which were unique at that time, there were maybe two or three others in the world, I didn’t realise how unique this was. I was lucky to work on that thing. It’s an intellectual environment, which is extremely important.

How is science today different from when you first started? How can it be improved?

Anton Zeilinger: Not that common, and it gets worse. Now we have a development that when you want to get money, you have to say what it can be used for. 30 years ago, when journalists asked me what can this be used for, I said, I can probably tell you this is not good for anything. We just do it out of curiosity. It is very important that you have the possibility to do something out of curiosity. In today’s funding schemes, you’re always asked, what is it good for? You’re also asked, what methods will you use to do this? In the beginning, I had no idea how to realise the things I wanted to do. This came slowly, it took years. What to me is my most important experiment is entanglement of more than two particles. We had the idea in the late 1980s, and the realisation was in the late 1990s. My appeal is really that funding agencies, universities, and so on, should be much more open to really curiosity driven research with no application in mind. I will fight for that as long as I’m alive. Not for me, but for the young people. The young people need to be encouraged to do this kind of thing.

What attitude do you need to be a successful scientist?

Anton Zeilinger: This attitude is playfulness, personally, and that also means that like myself, I never worried about my career. I never thought about what will I do? Where will I get a job? This was just not a theme. I worked on this kind of thing because I was curious and I enjoyed it, and the rest came. I think today there’s too much worry about what will happen and so on. I tell young people, if you find something where you are curious about where you are excited about, do it. Don’t listen to what your supervisor tells you, what other people tell you. Because if you are excited about it, you will always be better than the others who are not excited about it.

How do you like to spend your free time?

Anton Zeilinger: In my free time, I like to sail. I have a boat on the lake in Austria, and I love to just be on the boat. This is an old wooden boat, just to be on the boat and fix this or that. That’s already relaxing. Sailing, you stand the top. I also like to sail in the Mediterranean with the crew and so on. I think I know why sailing is so important for me. This is because when you are sailing, the complete mind is focused on just what happens on the boat and on the wind and on the waves and all this. There’s no possibility for your mind to go off and think about the usual daily problems or even the questions, what do you have to solve in science and so on. It takes your complete person, and that I think is a kind of recovery to get strengths and so on.

The second thing I like to do is to collect old maps and they collect old views, and with the maps, it’s a focus on political change, like a map of the Soviet Union is very interesting to look at today. A map of the British Empire is very interesting to look at. Even way back 100-200 years ago, the maps of Europe, like how big Sweden once was, for example. All these things are very instructive. It tells you in the end how unimportant some questions are. The name of my boat is 42, because this is taken from The Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy. There was the question about life, the universe and everything, and the supercomputer produced the answer, which was 42. And my boat is the answer.

What was it like talking physics with the Dalai Lama?

Anton Zeilinger: I visited Dalai Lama twice, for a week in his residence in Northern India, and he went to my lab in Austria, and looked at the lab. He has a scientific mind, very clear scientific mind, and he asked the right questions. We talked about, on the one side, the basic statements of quantum physics, and on the other hand, he told us some of their philosophical findings. Not meditation and so on, but some of their philosophical findings, which are quite interesting. It was a very interesting discussion, it’s not written up yet, but at some day it has to be written up, what came out of it. What that actually tells me is there maybe are interesting parallels between Eastern philosophy and what we are doing, but I say maybe because some of these explanations are wisdom in hindsight. I told them, there were some leading Buddhist teachers and philosophers there also, and I told them when it is said that quantum mechanics has realised this or that, then I believe that under one challenge. Tell me one thing which we have not discovered yet, and I go to the lab and check it. This has not happened.

What about the future of quantum mechanics excites you?

Anton Zeilinger: The most important question is why quantum mechanics. Quantum physics is probably the most beautiful mathematical theory humanity ever invented, and it’s also the best proven. It’s incredible how precise the predictions are realised. But as John Clauser said in an interview recently, he doesn’t know what goes on, why do we have this? This is in my eyes one of the most important questions, and I think it has to do with what is the role of information versus reality, and there is something where we can make a breakthrough, I think, and I hope this will happen. I have some ideas about that, and I want to spend the rest of my life working on these questions.

Watch the interview

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