Avshalom Elitzur
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Avshalom Cyrus Elitzur (Hebrew אבשלום כורש אליצור; born 30 May 1957, Iran) is an Israeli physicist and philosopher. He was a senior lecturer at the Unit for Interdisciplinary Studies, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel. He is noted for the Elitzur-Vaidman bomb-testing problem in quantum mechanics, which was widely publicised by Roger Penrose in his book Shadows of the Mind.
Elitzur received no formal university training before obtaining his PhD. His parents emigrated from Iran to Israel in 1959 when he was two years old, and settled in Rehovot. He left school at the age of sixteen and began working as a laboratory technician at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot.
In 1987 he published his book: Into the Holy of Holies: Psychoanalytic Insights into the Bible and Judaism. During that same year he was invited to present an unpublished manuscript on quantum mechanics at an international conference in Temple University in Philadelphia. Consequently he was later invited by Yakir Aharonov of Tel Aviv University, the doyen of physicists in Israel, to write a doctoral thesis on the subject.
