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Einstein's 'Spooky Action' Has Been Demonstrated On a Massive Scale For the First Time (sciencealert.com)
schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: For the first time, scientists have managed to show quantum entanglement -- which Einstein famously described as "spooky action at a distance" -- happening between macroscopic objects, a major step forward in our understanding of quantum physics. Quantum entanglement links particles in a way that they instantly affect each other, even over vast distances. On the surface, this powerful bond defies classical physics and, generally, our understanding of reality, which is why Einstein found it so spooky. But the phenomenon has since become a cornerstone of modern technology. Still, up until now quantum entanglement has only been demonstrated to work at the smallest of scales, in systems based on light and atoms, for example. Any attempt to increase the sizes has caused problems with stability, with the slightest of environmental disturbances breaking the connection. But new research changes all of this, by demonstrating that this "spooky action" can indeed be a reality between massive objects. We're not talking massive in the black hole sense but in the macroscopic sense -- two 15-micrometer-wide vibrating drum heads. And the next step will be to test whether those vibrations are being teleported between the two objects. The research has been published in the journal Nature.
Entanglement is a cornerstone of modern technology? Say what?
Massive is relative.
15 micrometer is only 0.015 mm. Massive would be 1,500 meters.
0.015 mm is massive compared to 10^-10 m.
Context matters.
Hey, maybe we're on the verge of (re?)discovering magic is real and something we can harness!
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
>which is why Einstein found it so spooky
Which is why you have no clue what Einstein was talking about. He wasn't spooked you knucklehead, he was mocking it as magic.
Did I miss a bunch of modern technology development?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
>"In quantum teleportation, properties of physical bodies can be transmitted across arbitrary distances using the channel of 'spooky action at a distance'," says one of the team, Caspar Ockeloen-Korppi from Aalto University in Finland.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of entanglement. It is not a mechanism for teleportation, it is a dual destination verification mechanism (ie. one must be opposite the other if they maintain entanglement). You cannot set the value at one end and have it appear on the other.
Spooky!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I so wanted to make a "spooky action at a distance" dick joke, but they said "massive scale". :-(
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Two separated items simultaneously communicating/sharing state information/controlling each other? I thought light speed was the fastest the simulation could update. The Simulators get a new algorithm or swap out some chips or get a faster HD or something? Or no?
For those of us who don't know enough to really understand it, we can think of it like a cat.
You pull the cat's tail on one end, the cat meows on the other end. Quantum entanglement is exactly like that. Except there is no cat.
(The above is an old description of radio, often attributed to Einstein. Doesn't sound like Einstein's sense of humor, though.)
How close are we to a mathematical model for this spooky action at a distance?
Spooky action at a distance boils down to a simple thing really. Take a coin and slice it in half so that heads is on one piece and tails is on the other and don't look at it. Now put one piece in an envelope and send it to person A. Put the second piece in a second envelope and send it to the second person B. Now when person A opens the envelope and reads the value, They will also know the value that was sent to A. The information was encoded in the envelope before it left so it is not a mystery how they both get the values.
The second to last sentence was supposed to read...
Now when person A opens the envelope and reads the value, They will also know the value that was sent to B (B not A).
I find the summary in great need of clarification. Let me attempt to clarify it in the hope that will be useful to other readers.
First, the linked article links to a much better summary written by one of the team members, Matt Woolley. I recommend you read it instead:
https://theconversation.com/ex...
Second, the summary conflates *mass* with *distance*. The experimenters claim to have entangled remarkably massive objects (compared to the mass of atoms, for example). But the summary says 'any attempt to increase the sizes has caused problems with stability' and that, taken literally, is not true. For example, here's an experiment from 1998 in which entanglement was maintained over a distance of kilometers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Finally, the summary claims 'a major step forward in our understanding of quantum physics' but I doubt that. It sounds to me like a major accomplishment but one that *confirms* our previous understanding of quantum physics in more massive systems.
It's not quite the same as the cold fusion. With cold fusion there wasn't any cold fusion and some combination of noise and bad experimental setup made it look like there was. With entanglement, the entanglement part is not actually science. There isn't any way to disprove that measuring one particle affects the other particle. Science requires that a hypothesis be falsifiable.
What you're talking about are hidden variables, and Einstein considered them as a way to explain away the spookiness. The problem is, people like John Bell came up with pretty ingenious ways of testing whether hidden variables are really responsible for the spookiness, and, in short, they aren't*. Veritassium actually has a pretty good explanation of why hidden variables don't work.
*Okay, local hidden variables (like those in your example) are ruled out. It is possible that hidden variables, that stretch across the whole of the universe, could still be in play.
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
I always thought quantum computing was mainly based on quantum entanglement. So is that wrong or is quantum computing simply a pie in the sky project topped with a lot of BS?
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
How is 15 micrometers a "massive scale"?
If I recall, John Bell was not a fan of the Copenhagen interpretation, was very interested in De Broglie-Bohm pilot-wave interpretation (using non-local hidden variables), and his theorem was built as a test of local-hidden variable theories - which have been ruled out by his theorem.
And quantum properties are always discreet state-changes, like flipping bits. There is no entanglement property that extends beyond a single degree of freedom; i.e. one single dimension. I've always thought that an interesting observation.
This again. There's no need to get all Paranormal Activity on poor Einstein; the term he used was 'spukhafte Fernwirkung', which is not 'spooky action at a distance', it's much better translated as 'ghostly action at a distance'.
I think this is incorrect and EPR does allow instantaneous (i.e. FTL) communications except that the entangled particles have to travel first and this is bound by the speed of light. So EPR seems to use bandwidth in the past. However, there are some conflicts with other theories so science came up with the "no-communication theorem" to fix the breakage as far as I understand it.
And in that context "massive" probably just means "has mass", i.e. inertia is of central importance.
Apparently the slashdot submitter misinterpreted "massive" to implicate scale as in "really heavy".
Of course 10^12 Atoms is quite a step up from single atoms or simple molecules.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Actually, not quite. For the analogy to work, each half of the coin is equally heads and tails until the measurement. Only the entanglement itself (i.e. that one is opposite the other) was encoded in the envelope to begin with.
We might need another analogy. Consider Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as entangled particles guaranteed to hold opposite views on any given topic. With Hillary in New York and Donald in Los Angeles, ask Donald a question about one of the few things he has no opinion on. Until you ask, nobody (including Donald and Hillary) can know what his answer will be. But as soon as you ask and he answers, we Know what Hillary thinks about the subject as well.
Now, at this point, Donald and Hillary have taken Stands on the issue. Before the question was asked, each of them equally supported and opposed the issue. Once the question was asked, one fully supported and the other fully opposed the issue. If you then manage to convince Donald to change his mind, your efforts destroy the entanglement, so it will not change Hillary's opinion.
Quantum teleportation requires a "classical" channel.
This is also described in the WP-Article. I wonder if you really need to transfer 2 classical bits per qubit though.
There are some quantum computer simulators out there with which one can "simulate" quantum teleportation.
E.g. http://algassert.com/quirk has a ready teleportation example under "Menu" with which one can play around.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
The physicists chose to describe their system in a convenient coordinate system, and usually work with very simple systems as well, e.g. those that have only two states like qubits.
Sure one could work with more complex systems, atoms with higher spins or systems of multiple particles, but that would just make everything more complicated, when there's still much to learn from simple systems.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Yes Occam's razor is often misunderstood and misused. It's only an (on the surface) obvious rule that one should check the easy explanations first.
Many people that should know better take it as meaning one of the easy explanations _is_ the answer instead of one of the easy explanations being very likely to be right. That can introduce biases in the process.
Some time ago I read a possible explanation for the entanglement that makes sense even though it leaves physicists ripping out their hair... That perhaps two entangled particles are, somehow, actually the same particle existing in two places at the same time.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
two 15-micrometer-wide vibrating drum heads
Do they have any 15-micrometer-wide cowbells to go with those drums? They need more cowbell! Einstein was a huge fan of BOC.
This actually sounds like the one-electron theory, which postulated that positrons are just electrons traveling backwards in time, allowing for the possibility of just one "electron" in the universe (any electron you observe is just the universal electron at a particular time instance, and the same would apply to observed positrons). Entangled electrons or positrons, then, would literally just be the same actual particle (or rather, field fluctuation). The problem with this particular theory is that, if true, one would expect to see the same amount of positrons as electrons, which just doesn't seem to be the case. I would expect that there's probably a similar issue with the general idea of any entangled particles being the same particle.
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
I've always believed this. For every guy that gets laid a LOT, there is a guy who never does because of a variation of the First Law of Thermodynamics. Building upon this theory, there may very well be quantum entanglement when it comes to sex. For example, some guy manages to c*ckblock another guy without even being in the room.
Despite all assertions to the contrary, information has been teleported. The information is: "Your wavefunction is now collapsed." This information travels faster than light, and is received by the entangled atom. The question is: can we tell it happened? This is the same as asking: Can we detect when a particle's wavefunction collapses? Under some circumstances, we can, because the superposed states interfere with each other. See, e.g., single-photon, two-slit experiment. I can never get an intelligent response to this seemingly obvious point.
With entanglement, the entanglement part is not actually science. There isn't any way to disprove that measuring one particle affects the other particle.
Do you even science, bro? I don't think you even know what entanglement is. Entanglement is a part of standard quantum mechanics. It doesn't say that measuring one particle affects the other particle.
Until you ask, nobody (including Donald and Hillary) can know what his answer will be. But as soon as you ask and he answers, we Know what Hillary thinks about the subject as well.
Very good! Now add to this that to actually see the effect, somebody must ask Hillary the same question. They will have opposite opinions even if asked simultaneously while far apart. But then nobody can tell if it was you who started the effect by asking Donald and thereby made Hillary have the opposite opinion of Donald, or if it was the other person who asked Hillary who made Donald have the opposite opinion of Hillary.
The mystery is how Donald and Hillary seem to have a faster-than-light coordination channel. It looks as if they had agreed before how to answer, but the Bell tests show that the statistics of their answers do not fit a theory of previous agreement. However, in any case there is no faster-than-light communication between you and the other person who asks Hillary. You both get to know how Donald and Hillary respond, but none of you get to know anything that the other of you wanted to transmit through the questions. You don't get to know if the other person asked first. You need to meet before to coordinate your questions, or you can ask random questions and meet afterward and compare questions and answers. You will find that IF you happened to ask identical or similar question, then the answers were in fact opposite.
There is no substitute for common sense. Especially, no body of rules will do.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.016...
Organization? You must be joking..
Quantum entanglement is science. It's statistically falsifiable. Do the same experiment a bunch of times and keep track of the results.
For example, send two entangled particles out, and do the exact same measurement on both of them, and you get opposite results. There's no way to set that up normally. If you have two electrons, one measured with spin up and one measured with spin down, that are not entangled, measuring them for left-right spin will mean they're the same half the time and opposite half the time. If you measure one up-down and the other in an axis 45 degrees off, you'll get a certain number of same and a certain number of different matches, and this turns out to be very enlightening.
You're not going to prove anything with one entangled particle pair. You need lots of them.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Yup. A scientist can come up with a momentous result that's not what the scientist expected or wanted.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I was pulling for Pocahontas
Ever heard of Plato ... Socrates ...
...
If gravity was incoherent magnetism couldn't you cancel it out with a Faraday cage?
Or maybe you were being intentionally facetious