Clarifications on the Chien-Shiung Wu feature

Kam, Zhang, and Feng reply: With respect to Robert Cahn’s comments , we agree that John Bell and Stuart Freedman should be acknowledged, just as Chien-Shiung Wu should be, for their contributions to the body of work that eventually earned Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger a Nobel Prize. We wanted to draw attention to Wu and Irving Shaknov being the first to conclusively verify photon entanglement. Considering that Wu and Shaknov’s experiment was done only about 15 years after Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen first brought the concept of quantum entanglement to light in what’s known as the EPR paper, our personal perspective is that it was worthy of a Nobel Prize.

With respect to Stephen Durbin’s comments , we agree that the experimental efforts made by Ernst Bleuler and Helmut Bradt should not be dismissed. John Wheeler made no mention of “entanglement” in his paper, and neither did Wu and Shaknov in their letter. When the latter published their results in 1950, the word was not yet a common scientific term. To perform an experiment like that 75 years ago required Wu to be well ahead of her time. We think that she had the concept of entanglement in her mind.