I read this the other day in a Wired (Elsa says I don’t need to ever say what I read it in as it would always be Wired) and it is still blowing my mind… I think if I’d read this back in high school and wasn’t such a slacker I might have actually steered myself in this direction of quantum physics… now I will just observe from afar and let my mind continue to be blown by it:
“How do entangled particles communicate?
One of the zanier notions in the plenty zany world of quantum mechanics is that a pair of subatomic particles can sometimes become “entangled.†This means the fate of one instantly affects the other, no matter how far apart they are. It’s such a bizarre phenomenon that Einstein dissed the idea in the 1930s as “spooky action at a distance,†saying it showed that the developing model of the atomic world needed rethinking.But it turns out that the universe is spooky after all. In 1997, scientists separated a pair of entangled photons by shooting them through fiber-optic cables to two villages 6 miles apart. Tipping one into a particular quantum state forced the other into the opposite state less than five-trillionths of a second later, or nearly 7 million times faster than light could travel between the two. Of course, according to relativity, nothing travels faster than the speed of light – not even information between particles.
Even the best theories to explain how entanglement gets around this problem seem preposterous. One, for example, speculates that signals are shot back through time. Ultimately, the answer is bound to be unnerving: According to a famous doctrine called Bell’s Inequality, for entanglement to square with relativity, either we have no free will or reality is an illusion. Some choice.”
– Lucas Graves, New York City-based writer
