Aug 27 2020 38 mins 170
A grasshopper lands at a random location on a patch of lawn and then jumps a fixed distance in a random direction. What shape of lawn has the highest probability of retaining the grasshopper after its jump? In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast, we talk to a quartet of physicists and mathematicians who have made a remarkable connection between this “grasshopper problem” and Bell’s theorem of quantum physics. We also chat about an international programme for mentoring medical physicists and the recent €150 million upgrade to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. This weeks guests are quantum grasshopper experts Olga Goulko, Adrian Kent, Dmitry Chistikov and Mike Paterson.
