A Nobel prize for quantum dottiness

THE QUANTUM world is full of paradoxes. Is light made up of particles or waves? How can entangled particles seemingly influence each other faster than the speed of light? And if, officially at least, the Nobel committee does not decide on its prizewinners until late morning, why did and , a pair of Swedish newspapers, have their names several hours earlier?The leak of the winners of the 2023 in Chemistry was unprecedented. Some mistakenly thought it to be a hoax. But in the end, the leaks were correct. The prize was awarded to Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov, a trio of scientists who identified, explained and were subsequently able to harness another counterintuitive aspect of the quantum realm: that the properties of a material sometimes depend not on its chemical composition, but on its size.