Even as a teenager attending Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, and then hanging around his father’s Johns Hopkins University laboratory after school, John F. Clauser was thinking about inventions and solving problems.

As a high school student, he built the world’s first computer-driven “video games” to win awards at the 1959 and 1960 national high school science fairs, according to his resume.

On Tuesday, Clauser shared the Nobel Prize in physics with two other scientists, Alain Aspect of France and Anton Zeilinger of Austria. All three worked on quantum mechanics and how unseen particles, such as photons, can be linked, or “entangled,” with each other even when they are separated by large distances. The once-doubted phenomenon is now being explored for potential real-world applications, such as encrypting information.

Clauser, who is now based in Walnut Creek, California, has spent only a small portion of his life in Baltimore. But he was already showing signs of brilliance as a student at Poly, which has been the top city school for students interested in science and engineering for decades.

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“We lived in the suburbs, and so I would do homework — I was supposed to be doing homework, but mostly what I would do is just sort of wander around the lab and gawk at all of the nifty laboratory equipment. And I kept thinking, ‘Wow, boy do these guys have fun toys. When I grow up I want to be a scientist so that I can play with neat toys like this,’” Clauser said in an oral history compiled by the American Institute of Physics in 2002.

Born in California, Clauser moved with his family to Baltimore when his father became chairman of the aeronautics department at Johns Hopkins University. Clauser attended Poly between 1956 and 1960 before moving back to California to attend the California Institute of Technology and going on to Columbia University to earn his master’s degree and doctorate.

In the interview for AIP, Clauser said he liked to do science projects in high school. “My dad was absolutely a marvelous teacher, my whole formative years,” he said. “Every time I asked a question, he knew the answer and would answer it in gory detail so that I would understand it.”

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A spokeswoman for the Society for Science said Clauser competed in the International Science and Engineering Fair, which is the largest STEM competition for high school students, in 1959 with a project titled “Electronic Interception Computer” and in 1960 for a project called “Pursuit and Evasion on a Plane.”

Clauser, 79, was awarded his prize for a 1972 experiment, cobbled together with scavenged equipment, that helped settle a famous debate about quantum mechanics between famed physicists Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. Einstein described quantum entanglement as a “spooky action at a distance” that he thought would eventually be disproved.

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“I was betting on Einstein,” Clauser said. “But unfortunately I was wrong and Einstein was wrong and Bohr was right.”

The Nobel committee said Clauser developed quantum theories first put forward in the 1960s into a practical experiment. Aspect was able to close a loophole in those theories, while Zeilinger demonstrated a phenomenon called quantum teleportation that effectively allows information to be transmitted over distances.

The news sent Poly’s principal Jacqueline Williams searching through records for glimpses of Clauser, who was largely unknown at the school until Tuesday when he was catapulted into the ranks of its most famous alumni, alongside writer H.L. Mencken; engineer Willard Hackerman, who founded Whiting-Turner Contracting Company; and Alonzo Decker, who founded Black + Decker.

Williams said she found Clauser’s yearbook. He had been in many clubs, including the Science Fair Club, National Honor Society and radio club.

“This is great news. This says a lot about our students leaving Poly, making a mark on the world,” said Williams, who graduated from Poly in 1981 and has worked as an educator at Poly for 27 years, the last 12 years as principal. She said Clauser is the school’s first Nobel winner.

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Joe Kasper, who spent three years in Poly classes with Clauser, said the Nobel winner was always more interested in science than some of his classmates.

“I would say that he felt like somebody who was more comfortable with science than the rest of us. If you looked at the numbers, he didn’t get the best grades. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t very smart,” Kasper told The Baltimore Banner.

As editor of the school newspaper, Kasper said, he was required to publish the names of the top students. “His name was never in those articles,” Kasper recalled. He said he felt Clauser concentrated on what he loved to do.

He recalled a fascinating experiment that Clauser designed for one of his science fair projects. “He was a very clever person, skilled in the theory of science as well as in the practicality of science. He made something really clever after he understood the science,” Kasper said. But he also described Clauser as “one of those kind of people who got along fine with everyone” when at Poly.

“We had a shiny class,” said Kasper, describing how he was one of five Poly grads who went to MIT while Clauser and another graduate went to Caltech.

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The New Hampshire resident said he hasn’t kept in close touch with his Poly classmates, but that he sent Clauser an email on Tuesday, saying “Bravo.” “He is a fine, fine person,” Kasper said.

In an interview Tuesday with the Associated Press, Clauser said he did not have “the foggiest” idea about “why” quantum entanglement happens — but that the science does show it appears “very real.”

“I’ve been struggling to understand quantum mechanics my whole life,” Clauser told the AP. “And I still don’t understand it.”

Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins, said quantum mechanics is “at the heart of all modern physics.” Quantum mechanics require their own special rules for studying, he said.

“When we measure particles, they appear to have definite positions or velocities, but when we’re not measuring them, they actually have a superposition of many different properties at once,” he said. “‘Entanglement,’ which is at the heart of this year’s Nobel Prize, says that we should not think of individual particles being in their own superpositions, but [of] there being a single superposition for any collection of particles.

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As far as researchers know, Carroll said, quantum mechanics is an important field of study because it is “how reality works at a fundamental level.”

“We are only just now figuring out how to use its special properties for technological applications. Quantum computing is one obvious example, but there is also quantum cryptography, quantum money, and much more,” he said.

Clauser is not the only Nobel laureate with ties to Baltimore. A Johns Hopkins astrophysicist shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 2011 for work on dark energy research. In 2019, researchers at Hopkins were recognized with the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.

Frances H. Arnold, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2018, grew up in Baltimore in the late 1960s and early ’70s. In biographical information submitted to the Nobel Committee, she said she attended Edgewood Elementary School and took classes at a nearby high school. And Douglass C. North, who won the Nobel Prize in economic sciences in 2013, told the committee he spent one day a week in Baltimore working with a colleague in the 1950s.

The prize for medicine or physiology this year was awarded Monday to Svante Pääbo “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.” The prizes will continue to be awarded through Friday, with the next one, in chemistry, announced Wednesday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday. The prizes carry a cash award of nearly $900,000 and will be handed out on Dec. 10.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.

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