‘Happy to be alive in time!’: Clauser on Nobel prize win

STORY: "I was very happy. This has been---this is all for work that I did 50, more than 50 years ago. I'm happy to still be alive in time," Clauser, 79, told Reuters in an interview at his home in Walnut Creek, California.

The scientists all conducted experiments into quantum entanglement, where two particles are linked regardless of the space between them, a field that unsettled Albert Einstein himself, who once referred to it in a letter as "spooky action at a distance."

Clauser said he had witnessed his initial work snowball into much larger experiments. China's Micius satellite, part of a quantum physics research project, was constructed in part on his findings, he said.

Quantum physics is the study of matter and energy at a subatomic level involving the smallest building blocks of nature. The laureates explored in groundbreaking experiments how two or more photons, or particles of light, that are "entangled" because they come from the same laser beam, interact even when they are separated far apart from each other.