 In everyday life, when I look out the window and I see a tree, then everyone would agree that the tree is there, whether I look at it or not. It has some property which makes it look green, again, whether I look or not and so on. With quantum particles, there are situations where the assumption is wrong that the property I see of the particle existed before I looked at it. That is wrong and that's quite exciting. So the state of the system, the state of affairs, so what is real depends on whether I look and the way I look. Now this is not just a philosophical question, we can see this in experiments and that is the interesting progress over the last 30, 40 years. Well, the world is certainly not deterministic, the world is certainly wide open, the world is more a world of potentialities of what might happen and what could happen. In Austria, we have a tradition which is somewhat philosophical. It goes back to a famous philosopher, physicist Ernst Mach and another famous physicist who was very interested in philosophy, Ludwig Boltzmann, so there was always this connection to fundamental questions. There was this famous philosophical activity, the Vienna Circle, which had the idea to put philosophy on very strong foundations. I should explain in which way we do quote-unquote philosophy with our experiments and that is that people have made very precise predictions what should happen, what kind of results you should see if certain philosophical assumptions about the world are true. And then you go and check whether the experiment really confirms these predictions or not. And if it does not, which happens in a couple of cases, then you know that some of the basic assumptions must be wrong. And that means that people have to sit down again and think, okay, how could we modify the assumptions? How could we learn something new that way? So I'm saying this because what we do is very precise, it's predicted certain numbers and we check them and we see in the experiment is it true or is it not true. So it is not a kind of a free wandering of the mind, it's not speculation in a sense, but very focused. And that actually is what's interesting, that you can answer as my friend Abhashimoni, a professor of both physics and philosophy in Boston in the United States, once said that you can answer philosophical questions in the laboratory by doing an experiment. Well, we now know with relatively high confidence, not completely, but high confidence that it's the idea of reality which is at stake because there have been different experiments looking at this kind of thing. So this is really a significant progress and different models of reality have been tested in different experiments and they all failed to support realistic pictures of the world. So this to me is conceptually the most important progress. There's also another progress which was a big surprise for me in my life and that is that the things which we and others are doing in the foundations of quantum mechanics suddenly become important for possible applications. When you asked me 20 years ago what this is good for, what I'm doing, no, I simply said this is not good for anything, no application which has to do it because curiosity is part of being human. It's like listening to music is part of being human or looking up at the stars and wondering what's going on up there, it's part of being human. But since about 10 years or a little more than 10 years, maybe 15 years, people started to develop new ideas on information processing like quantum computers or transmission of information like encrypting secret messages and so on which in my eyes have a fair chance to completely change our information technology. This is very interesting, it happened many times in physics that the most profound changes in technology came from fundamental investigations. While one of the applications is quantum cryptography, when you do a payment for example on the internet using a credit card, the information is always encrypted such that no unauthorized person can read it. But there's always an uncertainty to it, whether this is really true. Quantum mechanics provides a way where you know by the laws of quantum physics itself that the message is encrypted in a way that no unauthorized person can read it. So that's quite interesting, quite important. Another application is the quantum computer. It's a computer which does not work on bits like any existing computer but on what's called Q-bits or quantum bits. And these quantum bits, they are not just zero and one but they can be what we call superposition of zero and one. They can be in a sense be both at the same time. And that means that the quantum computer can process much more information than a classical computer. So these are two examples, teleportation is another one where you transfer the quantum state that is information from one place to another one in a way where this information is not traveling from A to B. It kind of disappears here, it's reconstituted over there which might be important for future quantum computers to talk to each other. So these are some of the ideas people are working on and this is a huge field now. Many, many people all over the world active in what's called now quantum information science. Nobody has an idea of when this will happen but there is an interesting hint and that hint comes from information technology itself. It's called Moore's Law, Gordon Moore, he was the founder of the Intel Corporation, the company which makes these computer chips. He found out that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years or every one and a half year. That means that the individual elements on a chip like individual even wires and transistors or whatever you name it get smaller and smaller. And if you look how this law develops then you can estimate that in about maybe 20 years or so we are at a situation where one bit of information is carried by one atom or one electron in short one particle only and then we are in the quantum regime. So the industry is going that way even if they don't want to acknowledge it at present but it will happen. The most interesting challenge or one of the most interesting challenges is to extend the validity of quantum phenomena to larger and larger objects. Maybe even someday to living systems and to basically show and learn and see that quantum phenomena are not restricted to the very small and maybe in the future they might even have some implication in our daily life, who knows.