Entanglement
From Telkoth.net
At first I hated quantum entanglement, but then I had a notion...
Contents |
[edit] What is Quantum Entanglement
In a word, "stupid", but that's a personal opinion >_> Allow me to explain a little better:
When a particle and anti-particle pair are created - something that happens on a regular basis all over the universe - besides one being matter and the other being anti-matter, there are some other... qualities they "agree on". One of these qualities is "spin" (which has nothing to do with spinning motion, it's just the name for the property that physicists decided on, for whatever reason); specifically, there are two kinds of spin, "spin up" and "spin down", and whichever one of the two particles has, the other has the opposite, so you could have a particle with spin up and an anti-particle with spin down, or a particle with spin down and an anti-particle with spin up.
But here's where it gets weird: apparently - and this makes zero sense to me - neither particle has "decided" on its spin until that information is needed; until it collides with some other particle; until it is "observed". So you've got a particle and an anti-particle, and they MUST have opposite spin types, but they don't know what those types are yet... and they go and go, zipping across the universe, possibly light years away from each other, when suddenly - BAM! - one of them hits something, and goes "oh, er, hello. and by the way, I'm spin up," and at that exact instant its anti-particle knows that it must be spin down. Because they're opposite. They have to be.
This is troubling, of course, because this information is conveyed instantly, through no apparent means, and by "instantly" we mean "instantly" for real: faster than the speed of light. Two particles; opposite sides of the universe; one is forced to "decide" on a spin, and the other settles into the opposite instantly.
How can that information be conveyed so quickly? Physicists would like to know that very same thing.
And even though it doesn't make sense, it's been tested and proven: we've created particles, and probed them each, one at a time, over such a distance that light could not have got from one to the other in the meanwhile, then brought the results together, looked at them, and lo and behold: one decided spin down and the other was spin up.
Now, a question in my mind has always been: "what?!!?" and "wouldn't it make more sense to do away with all this 'it doesn't know yet' nonsense, and admit that the particles were created with their individual properties from the outset." That would make a lot more sense to me, but I don't know quantum mechanics much except to know that quantum mechanics doesn't make a lot of sense.
(This also bothered Einstein apparently, which makes me feel a little vindicated, but he wasn't right about everything, either, so...)
[edit] PsyPets
PsyPets is an on-line browser-based game I run, and you might wonder why it's related at all to this, and I will tell you:
In PsyPets (and, really, other games as well) players can acquire items that are essentially boxes or treasure chests with goodies inside. The player has no way of knowing what goodies are inside until they open the chest to find out, at which point the goodies spill out, and the box item is destroyed.
Now: the reason the players aren't allowed to know what's inside the box before opening is because, in fact, the game doesn't actually know the contents of one of these boxes until a player opens it. Players get these box, and know that any number of things might pop out, and might even imagine to themselves that the box already contains those things (that would make sense, right? boxes work like that in real life), but in fact the game has not decided on the contents until the box is opened. Really, in a sense, it doesn't contain anything. It's just a box that knows how to make stuff.
And this starts to sound very similar to aspects of quantum mechanics; to particles that don't know their properties until they interacts with something else.
Why the game does it this way is to conserve disk space - why store the contents of the box if they don't matter; there's no need to reveal the contents until that information is needed - but surely the universe isn't trying to conserve disk space... right? :P
[edit] We're In a Computer Simulation?!
This is something I've thought about a lot, quite independent of quantum mechanics, and it goes like this:
If you believe that we, as humans, will ever be able to simulate a universe - we might do it for research, business, or even fun - then you cannot deny the possibility that someone else already has done so, and we're inside it. In fact, it begins to seem likely... after all, if we can simulate a universe, we can simulate two, or three, or ten, or a hundred. Right there, for our one universe, you have more than one. Then suppose that those universes evolve life which in turn create their own simulated universes. The number of simulated universes very quickly exceeds the number of real universes. Consequentially, the probability that we're in a simulated universe is far greater than the probability that we're in a real one.
But that all hinges on "is it possible to simulate a universe as rich and detailed as our own." One of the biggest problems with simulating a universe is the space needed. There are a lot of particles in our universe, each with many properties. Even if you could somehow make one particle in our universe store one particle worth of data for the simulated universe, the simulated universe would have to necessarily be smaller than our own, and it seems unlikely that we'll turn the entire universe into a computer (at least any time soon). Of course, data compression can help a lot - think zipping up a text file to be much smaller than it started, without losing any information - but now I'm starting to realize something else that could help tremendously, and something that explains quantum entanglement beautifully: you don't have to store the information of a particle until that particle's information is needed! (And if you're a programmer, each particle can have a pointer/reference which points to its anti-particle.)
So maybe, for the same reason PsyPets doesn't know what's inside a box until you need it, the universe doesn't know the spin of an electron until that's needed: to conserve space.
[edit] Conclusion
I'm alright with quantum entanglement now :P
