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Quantum Theory Experiment Said to Prove "Spooky" Interactions (economist.com)
universe520 writes: Albert Einstein was troubled by how two particles can communicate with each other even if they are on opposite sides of the galaxy. Today researchers in the Netherlands have closed the final two loopholes in how quantum entanglement works. The Times reports: "The new experiment, conducted by a group led by Ronald Hanson, a physicist at the Dutch university’s Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, and joined by scientists from Spain and England, is the strongest evidence yet to support the most fundamental claims of the theory of quantum mechanics about the existence of an odd world formed by a fabric of subatomic particles, where matter does not take form until it is observed and time runs backward as well as forward."
Spooky action at a distance is only spooky if one assumes distance is real and not an emergent property of a projected/holographic universe. In the same way in a computer simulation/game the distance between objects in no way represents the "distance" between them in the computers memory, perhaps our universe works at a similar level of abstraction.
This is not a chicken/egg problem. This is now a known scientific fact. The Beginning of the universe, according to this information, must have had an observer.
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I thought all this means is that you can entangle two particles when they are close. Basically this means all you know is one is + and one is -. Then if you separate them and measure one you know what the other one is. That doesn't seem so spooky.
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Don't we have an intractable Chicken-and-Egg problem here?
The difficulty in understanding is mostly in how the experiment is described. This is the latest in a series of increasingly technical experiments exploring pretty odd corner cases in quantum theory. They're important because they close the last loopholes, the last excuses that anyone who really understands the field had in believing in any sort of classical underlying reality.
There's no time travel here. There's no FTL communication here. Either of those would actually invalidate the experiment. The point of this all is: you simply can't explain these results classically. And that's nothing new - there's a long list of such results.
Here's any easier experiment to understand. Take 2 polarized filters, and measure the amount of light that gets through as a function of the angle between them. With a classical model of polarization, you'd expect it to fall directly with the angle, but instead it falls of as cos^2 of the angle. Most of these Bell Inequality experiments are very similar in principle, they just use 2 entangled photons or electrons instead of one beam of light passing through two filters in series.
The part about "hidden variables" vs "spooky action at a distance" is only relevant if you're trying to explain the result classically. If you give up notions of a classical underpinning to physics, if you accept that e.g. the spin polarization of an electron simply isn't about the axis of a spinning ball (a ball with a bar magnet inside), then there's nothing surprising here. Sure, it's weird, but it's weird in the exact same mathematical way as the beam of light passing through 2 polarizing filters.
This all just shows that the idea of an electron or photon as any sort of particle, like a dust mote only smaller, is simply a flawed metaphor that you can't reason from. But since there was no reason to expect them to be that way, it's not even that weird.
(What's really weird, though, is that of you take 2 polarizing filters at right angles, such that no light gets through, then stick a third between them at a 45 degree angle, then it's as bright as one filter alone.)
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