Spooky Action

I've written about this before, but recent tests indicate that Einstein might have been wrong about spooky action at a distance, which is known as quantum entanglement.

What exactly is quantum entanglement?

This has to do with the concept of quantum particle physical properties, at least those that are significant to measurement. These are position, momentum, spin and polarization. Now, let's say that you measure the spin of a pair of quantum particles that are entangled. When you measure each of them, they will have the same spin, which could be one or one half. This will be true no matter how far separated they are. The strange thing about this is that this only happens when you measure them. They seem to entangle only when you do that. This is one of the strangest things about quantum particles. They behave strangely when one observes them.

That's why Einstein called this property of quantum particles spooky action at a distance. The question is: how does this happen. Are the particles communicating with one another at much faster than the speed of light, or does the observation actually cause this action?

Trying to answer this question is really difficult, so far. Einstein's thought was that particles were doing this on their own. He called this local realism in which this property of entanglement was intrinsic to the particles and had nothing to do with observation. However, recent experiments might indicate that he was wrong.

The so called Bell tests propose that if you measure two distant particles and that they mirror each other above a threshold this suggests that the particles choose their states at the moment they are measured. The way this experiment was conducted recently was with volunteers in 190 countries playing a game to provide 97,000 bits of data. Twelve teams of scientists in 10 countries used this data to see if entangled particles could transfer all of this random data bits at faster than light. The tests indicated that the particles do communicate at the time of measurement.

However, there are some problems with this test. One is the idea of random data. This has been a problem from the beginning of computers. The concept of random is open to argument. There is no such thing as truly random. It all comes down to the idea that local realism can't be determined using a machine. The question becomes: are we humans truly random in the way we measure things or generate data?

These are questions that are difficult to answer. Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading.