Alain Aspect on History of quantum mechanics

“The realization of the importance of entanglement and the clarification of the quantum description of single objects have been at the root of a second quantum revolution, and the John Bell was its prophet.”

“The development of quantum mechanics in the beginning of the twentieth century was a unique intellectual adventure, which obliged scientists and philosophers to change radically the concepts they used to describe the world. After these heroic efforts, it became possible to understand the stability of matter, the mechanical and thermal properties of materials, the interaction of radiation and matter, and many other properties of the microscopic world that had been impossible to understand with classical physics. A few decades later, that conceptual revolution enabled a technological revolution, at the root of our information-based society. It is indeed with the quantum mechanical understanding of the structure and properties of matter that physicists and engineers were able to invent and develop the transistor and the laser—two key technologies that permit the high-bandwidth circulation of information, as well as many other scientific and commercial applications.”