I still don't get what the basis is for carrying out entanglement, even if we observe its existence. What is actually connecting the 2 disparate qubits/particles that is the mechanism for communication between the 2? Rather than merely settling for "spook action at a distance", there has got to be some conjecture/speculation on an underlying mechanism, even if we lack the means to measure/verify it at the moment. I would just feel more secure if we could use more rational descriptors than "spooky". It just sounds very mentally lazy, and even patronizing, like when mom told you to make sure to come home before dark, or the "boogeyman" would get you.
I too am not a physicist, but still enjoy reading about topics like this. I want to make a comment however, by way of analogy, on the nature of Heisenberg Uncertainty and DeBroglie Wavelength.
When I was in highschool, our biology teacher asked us to look throgh a microscope at a drop of water under a slide. In the view I could see a fuzzy/blurry-looking speck of dust, which was apparently jiggling. The teacher explained that the jiggling of the speck was due to it being battered by water molecules in a phenomenon known as "Brownian Motion".
I've never heard Heisenberg Uncertainty or DeBroglie Wavelength described in that manner before, but I want to ask if these phenomena could likewise be considered a form of Brownian Motion. Ie. the intrinsic DeBroglie wavelength of a small particle could be due to it being buffeted by some minute forces occurring in the space surrounding it (aka. the Quantum Vacuum), and likewise the associated Heisenberg uncertainty would be the fuzziness/blurriness from that jiggling.
In school, I never understood why an electron's orbital was called a probability cloud, because it was just so counterintuitive. But if you use that jiggling analogy, one could visualize a tetherball attached to a post, where the ball is the electron, the post is the nucleus, and the tether is the charge attraction between them. Once again, the buffeting from the surrounding Quantum Vacuum would cause the tetherball to bop around under the constraints of the tether. If you used time-lapse photography, that tetherball might show up as a Probability Cloud, rather than in a single position.
I think good science should always strive to make the explanations as intuitive as possible, rather than hiding behind cryptic phrases such as "spooky action" and "counter-intuitive quantum behavior". When science can't explain things intuitively, then in my opinion science is failing to do its job, and more efforts need to be made to come up with better analogies. Good analogies make the difference between enlightenment and ignorance.
LIGO and other gravity detectors have been known about for quite some time. There's no news here.
What might be even newer is the idea of using atom matter waves for ultra-precise detection of the same phenomena.
This is where the Bose-Einstein condensates and similar things come in.
Please read this article, published in Physical Review, which is quite arguably a mainstream physics journal:
http://focus.aps.org/story/v16/st14
They are pointing out discoveries of flaws in the previous understanding of the Quantum model. The discovered behavior was not predicted by Quantum theory. So it's possible there are subtleties in Quantum physics that we have not yet accounted for.
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I still don't get what the basis is for carrying out entanglement, even if we observe its existence. What is actually connecting the 2 disparate qubits/particles that is the mechanism for communication between the 2? Rather than merely settling for "spook action at a distance", there has got to be some conjecture/speculation on an underlying mechanism, even if we lack the means to measure/verify it at the moment. I would just feel more secure if we could use more rational descriptors than "spooky". It just sounds very mentally lazy, and even patronizing, like when mom told you to make sure to come home before dark, or the "boogeyman" would get you.
I too am not a physicist, but still enjoy reading about topics like this. I want to make a comment however, by way of analogy, on the nature of Heisenberg Uncertainty and DeBroglie Wavelength.
When I was in highschool, our biology teacher asked us to look throgh a microscope at a drop of water under a slide. In the view I could see a fuzzy/blurry-looking speck of dust, which was apparently jiggling. The teacher explained that the jiggling of the speck was due to it being battered by water molecules in a phenomenon known as "Brownian Motion".
I've never heard Heisenberg Uncertainty or DeBroglie Wavelength described in that manner before, but I want to ask if these phenomena could likewise be considered a form of Brownian Motion.
Ie. the intrinsic DeBroglie wavelength of a small particle could be due to it being buffeted by some minute forces occurring in the space surrounding it (aka. the Quantum Vacuum), and likewise the associated Heisenberg uncertainty would be the fuzziness/blurriness from that jiggling.
In school, I never understood why an electron's orbital was called a probability cloud, because it was just so counterintuitive. But if you use that jiggling analogy, one could visualize a tetherball attached to a post, where the ball is the electron, the post is the nucleus, and the tether is the charge attraction between them. Once again, the buffeting from the surrounding Quantum Vacuum would cause the tetherball to bop around under the constraints of the tether. If you used time-lapse photography, that tetherball might show up as a Probability Cloud, rather than in a single position.
I think good science should always strive to make the explanations as intuitive as possible, rather than hiding behind cryptic phrases such as "spooky action" and "counter-intuitive quantum behavior". When science can't explain things intuitively, then in my opinion science is failing to do its job, and more efforts need to be made to come up with better analogies. Good analogies make the difference between enlightenment and ignorance.
Comments, anyone?
LIGO and other gravity detectors have been known about for quite some time. There's no news here. What might be even newer is the idea of using atom matter waves for ultra-precise detection of the same phenomena. This is where the Bose-Einstein condensates and similar things come in.
Please read this article, published in Physical Review, which is quite arguably a mainstream physics journal: http://focus.aps.org/story/v16/st14 They are pointing out discoveries of flaws in the previous understanding of the Quantum model. The discovered behavior was not predicted by Quantum theory. So it's possible there are subtleties in Quantum physics that we have not yet accounted for.
I'd read that spray-on plastic solar cells will bring down costs despite their lower efficiency, but how do you wire them up?