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Quantum Entanglement of Macroscopic Diamonds
New submitter ananyo writes "A pair of diamond crystals has been linked by quantum entanglement — one of the first times that objects visible to the naked eye have been placed in a connected quantum state. 'This means that a vibration in the crystals could not be meaningfully assigned to one or other of them: both crystals were simultaneously vibrating and not vibrating (abstract). Quantum entanglement — interdependence of quantum states between particles not in physical contact — has been well established between quantum particles such as atoms at ultra-cold temperatures. But like most quantum effects, it doesn't tend to survive either at room temperature or in objects large enough to see with the naked eye.'"
As near as I can understand this they're entangled so that vibrations in one are indistinguishable from vibrations in another, they both do the same thing at the same time (or near it at least)... doesn't this imply the ability to entangle two whatevers and transit information via entanglement induced vibrations?
No, they are in opposite states. If you measure one of them, you'll determine that it is either vibrating or not. If it is vibrating, the other diamond is not, if it's not vibrating, the other diamond is vibrating. Before the measurement, they're entangled, so they are considered to be both vibrating and not vibrating simultaneously.
That said, I don't know much about quantum effects, so I can't read the paper and understand it, but the description in the article made it seem like what's actually happening is just that the experiment is set up such that only one diamond can be vibrating, but you don't know which one it's going to be. So at all times, one of the diamonds is vibrating, the other is not, and you only know which is which when you measure one of them. Which doesn't sound like anything special. It's like me getting two playing cards, an Ace and a King, and putting them in a table face down. Then I ask you, "which one is the card in the left?" and you answer, "it's both a King and Ace. Until I flip it over, and then I can tell you what the other one is." Which is ridiculous, the card is one card specifically, you just don't know which one it is. So I suspect the media writeup screwed up, although it still seems way better than most, since they didn't mention stuff like ftl communications which pops up in almost every entanglement story even though we all know entanglement can't enable ftl communication.