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Comment by lucozade | Hacker News Reader

With quantum entanglement, what happens to one particle prior to measurement affects the other even if the effect occurred after they were parted. That's where it gets really spooky.

To belabour the colours and boxes analogy:

We have 2 balls, if one is orange the other is always purple and vice versa.

Now these balls have an extra property. If you shake them vigorously they may or may not change colour randomly.

So, we put them in boxes without looking and take them far away from each other. Now, some time after they are far apart and before you look in the box, you shake one of the boxes. You then look.

In QM, if the ball you observe is orange(purple) then you know the other is purple(orange). But the other ball can't have known ahead of time that a) you were going to shake your one and b) that it changed colour (or didn't). That's why it's spooky.

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What is the equivalent to "shaking" in QM? I'm trying to figure out why it matters whether you shake the box or not (i.e. could the shaking simply not have an effect if you're not looking?)

The shaking represents any sort of action that doesn't perform a measurement. It was the first thing I thought of that could affect the ball without opening the box.

It could be that the shaking didn't have an effect. But equally, it could have had an effect. The spooky bit is that the other ball 'knows' whether it did or not in a non-local way.

But isn't it possible that performing "shaking" might not affect any "ball" when it's "inside of a box"?

Sounds like they never were two separate entities to begin with or never parted location. Which is spooky too, in a different way.

Too build on this thought - is it possible that these quantum properties aren't affected by locality? Which is obviously true given the explanation above... I guess I'm asking if there are other intuitions that can be made if locality is explicitly considered unrelated.

When I first started to be interested in this area, it occurred to me that it might be something like a 'stretchy' spacetime i.e. the particles are actually locally connected but appear unconnected if you use a static spacetime as a reference as we tend to. I guess something analogous to the idea that someone moving close to c experiences time different from someone in a slow moving reference frame.

Unfortunately, I have neither the experience nor ability to progress that thought much further so, if someone wants to go off and get a Nobel from it, feel free...

>>Sounds like they never were two separate entities to begin with or never parted location. Which is spooky too, in a different way.

Sounds interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that these two particles are really just a single particle in a different dimension that we don't know it exists yet.

Experimentally, when they entangle photons, they just pick two random photons.

If two random photons used in an experiment weren't ever really separate entities to being with, even before the experiment ever started, then one should probably conclude that /all/ photons are not really separate entities.

Otherwise, every quantum experiment we've ever done has just /happened/ to pick two photons that were actually one entity, unlike most other photons.

> Sounds like they never were two separate entities to begin with

“Separate entities” may just be an artifact of intelligences trying to divide sense data about the universe into chunks they are capable of processing.

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