Entanglement is no new kid on the block but it hasn't said much yet, other than through Einstein. LiveScience gives the run-down behind the spooky image here.
The trouble with this phenomenon is that it doesn't have a relationship with time. Entanglement is an instantaneous, simultaneous response to stimuli shared between two particles (or two bodies of material, for it's being shown to occur in larger things than first thought) irrespective of distance. And that causes a few headaches with the equations.
The trouble with this phenomenon is that it doesn't have a relationship with time. Entanglement is an instantaneous, simultaneous response to stimuli shared between two particles (or two bodies of material, for it's being shown to occur in larger things than first thought) irrespective of distance. And that causes a few headaches with the equations.
Last month the first-ever photograph of an entangled photon pair was promoted as a herald to new types of technology. You can read the review from Science Alert behind the picture of said pair.
The big question is, how does anything get entangled in the first place? Is there a definitive point at which things are entangled, or is it a case, being devoid of any conditional time measurement, that entanglement occurs in advance of its physical evidence? Are these photons (and all other entangled things) destined to be cleaved together and subsequently find each other so paired? Could entanglement, per se, be a real-life physics love story? This is not such a stupid question. For people get entangled just as particles do. Love can lead us a merry dance for a lifetime, and when it does, there's nothing you can do about it.
The big question is, how does anything get entangled in the first place? Is there a definitive point at which things are entangled, or is it a case, being devoid of any conditional time measurement, that entanglement occurs in advance of its physical evidence? Are these photons (and all other entangled things) destined to be cleaved together and subsequently find each other so paired? Could entanglement, per se, be a real-life physics love story? This is not such a stupid question. For people get entangled just as particles do. Love can lead us a merry dance for a lifetime, and when it does, there's nothing you can do about it.
When you've experienced entanglement.... you know when you've been Tangled. A study on the effects of consciousness applied to entanglement is previewed behind this beautiful image of tangled balance. On the understanding that the phenomenon is not confined to subatomics, but applies on the grander scale of Everything, the job at hand would seem to be to get the symmetry of our entanglements right, which is a bit of a tough call when you consider the flotsam our minds have to deal with in everyday living. Photons might not have much to think about in the course of their lives, but they live beyond time, without considering matters of constraint, and they continually give themselves up and pull themselves back to freedom in their eternal dance with electrons. Is that so very different from the relationships we have with those people to whom we would consider ourselves most entangled? Probably not. The matter of life after matter is another topic for hot debate, but photons can speak for themselves.
Personally I don't see the Entanglement conundrum going underground any time soon. In fact we could be right on the cusp of New Physics, a revolutionary era mooted by the latest generation of scientific thinkers who are quietly considering the implications of oscillation as we speak. While academics seek holy grails among darknesses in the universal soup, entanglement could come to mean more than the sum of spacetime. It could mean the beginning of the end for the Standard Model. About time too.
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