Physicists John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger have won the 2022 Nobel Prize for "experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science." What this means is that their work built on a 1964 paper by Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell, who was himself building on the work of Albert Einstein, who had previously noted that particles tend to do some "spooky" things whenever they're being observed. I'm not a quantum physicist and literally only knew about Bell's Theorem because of the comic book Morning Glories, but I think Scientific American explains it here:
One of the more unsettling discoveries in the past half century is that the universe is not locally real. "Real," meaning that objects have definite properties independent of observation—an apple can be red even when no one is looking; "local" means objects can only be influenced by their surroundings, and that any influence cannot travel faster than light. Investigations at the frontiers of quantum physics have found that these things cannot both be true. Instead, the evidence shows objects are not influenced solely by their surroundings and they may also lack definite properties prior to measurement.
This short comic also offers a pretty clear explanation. Minute Physics, too. Suffice to say, reality is weirder than you think.
The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It [Daniel Garisto / Scientific American.
Explorers of Quantum Entanglement Win 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics [Lee Billings / Scientific American]
