Vlatko Vedral, The Oxford Physicist Who Put a Number on Entanglement

Vlatko Vedral is Professor of Quantum Information Science at the University of Oxford, a Serbian-born physicist who has spent three decades asking what entanglement is and what it can do. Entanglement is the link that lets two particles share one quantum state. As a PhD student in London he helped find a way to put a number on it, and that idea made his name. His curiosity has since carried him from magnets and heat to birds, bacteria and a tardigrade. With his colleague Chiara Marletto he proposed a tabletop test of whether gravity itself is quantum, which may be the biggest open question in physics. He is also a warm and witty explainer. He has written seven books, three of them for general readers, and he writes a lively Substack. Vlatko Vedral was born and grew up in Serbia, and the Observer described him in 2010 as originally from Belgrade. His grandfather taught him chess when he was four, and Vedral jokes that his game has hardly improved in all the decades since, so he is happy to call himself a weak player. The teacher who shaped him most taught mathematical logic at his high school. The pupils called…