Quantum entanglement occurs when two or more particles interact in a way that causes their fates to become linked: It becomes impossible to consider (or mathematically describe) each particle’s condition independently of the others’. Collectively they constitute a single quantum state.
Top Making a measurement on one entangled particle affects the properties of the other instantaneously. (Image by Patrick L. Barry)
Two entangled particles often must have opposite values for a property — for example, if one is spinning in “up” direction, the other must be spinning in the “down” direction. Suppose you measure one of the entangled particles and, by doing so, you nudge it “up.” This causes the entangled partner to spin “down.” Making the measurement “here” affected the other particle “over there” instantaneously, even if the other particle was a million miles away.
While physicists and philosophers grapple with the implications for the nature of causation and the structure of the Universe, some physicists are busy putting entanglement to work in applications such as “teleporting” atoms and producing uncrackable encryption.
Quantum entanglement does some mind-bending things. In this laser experiment entangled photons are teleported from one place to another.
(“Spooky Atomic Clocks,” science.nasa.gov, January 23, 2004)
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In April 2011, physicists at the University of Geneva in Switzerland devised a new kind of quantum experiment using humans as detectors. In December 2011, researchers from the University of Oxford, the National Research Council of Canada and the National University of Singapore (NUS) reported that entanglement could be achieved in macroscopic objects at room temperature. They achieved entanglement for diamonds at room temperature.
Studies by Mohan Sarovar, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, and Gregory Scholes, a chemist at the University of Toronto, marked the first evidence of biological organisms that exploit strange quantum behaviors.
It is now assumed that quantum entanglement occurs spontaneously in the Sun’s interior and stellar coronae. Stellar representations of a quantum state demonstrate that in the celestial sphere condensed matter may exist in an entangled pure state, represented as stereographic coordinates.
In the early stages of our solar system’s creation, fragments of matter were violently hurled apart, but remained in entanglement. Some clusters of ejected stellar mass eventually merged into planets and their moons. But numerous particles continued in entanglement because they shared identical stereographic superposition. Since this connection took place in the initial stages, entangled matter is more likely to be found in the interior or close to the core of a planet.
Suppose we could detect a heap of condensed matter (or protostellar mass) on Earth in quantum entanglement with protostellar mass that long ago coalesced on Mars. What if we placed the heap of matter in a sandbox? Hypothetically, any change we made to the contents of our sandbox would instantly be reflected in the stereographic Martian pile.
If we pushed a diamond in the sandbox with our hand, an identical diamond on Mars should also move. (But because our hand itself is not in entanglement, it may not be visible in the Martian picture. If we could use fine particles from our sandbox to paint our hand, perhaps a human outline would be visible in the Martian picture.)
A jump room (larger than a sandbox) is said to be a teleportation device that resembles a subterranean elevator. A jump room is a wormhole that can facilitate interplanetary teleportation by gaining access to behaviors of quantum entanglement with other planets such as Mars. It is alleged that the US government has enforced a 30-year cover-up of jump room technology.