Professor Miles Padgett FRS, is a Royal Society Research Professor and also holds the Kelvin Chair of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He leads an optics research team covering a wide spectrum from blue-sky research to applied commercial development, funded by a combination of government, charity and industry.

His research team, covers all things optical from the basic ways in which light behaves as it pushes and twists the world around us, to the application of new optical techniques in imaging and sensing systems. They are currently using the classical and quantum properties of light to explore: the laws of quantum physics in accelerating frames, microscopes that see through noise, shaped light that overcomes diffraction-limited resolution, endoscopes the width of a human hair and new ways of imaging in 3D.

Does God Play Dice ?

Quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories every proposed, making highly accurate predictions both in fundamental science and in the underpinning of many of today’s technologies and consumer electronics such as the satellite navigation on your phone or in your car. In the 1980s Alain Aspect (an honorary graduate of Glasgow) completed a number of groundbreaking experiments measuring the polarisation of photons, showing that their orientation is only decided at the moment of measurement by an observer. Furthermore, the measurement of either photon instantaneously gives knowledge of the state of the other. This is called quantum entanglement or as Albert Einstein famously called the phenomenon “spooky action at a distance.”