First image of particle entanglement | Hacker News Reader

First image of particle entanglement

bbc.com

27 pointsjermaustin117 comments

For people with more questions: https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-just-unveiled-the-fi...

> This particular photo shows entanglement between two photons - two particles of light. They're interacting and for a brief moment sharing physical states.

Here’s the research paper: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/7/eaaw2563.full

That's much more informative, I'd almost say it should be the link instead.

Strange way of throwing Einstein's name into the title for linkbaiting sake. It's not his particle entanglement but John Bell's if anyone's, calling it "spooky" is Einstein's contribution, at least in the context of the article.

I had the BBC as a reference on journalism, but from a quick glance over the headlines at least its website looks like it's lost some decency in that respect.

Einstein described quantum mechanics as "spooky" because of the instantaneousness of the apparent remote interaction between two entangled particles.

The interaction also seemed incompatible with elements of his special theory of relativity.

Scientist Sir John Bell __later__ formalised the concept ...

Ok, we've deeinsteined the title above.

One more Hapax legomenon just landed on this planet

(For those unmotivated to Google: it is a word which only occurs once in a context, book ... or the whole world)

So what exactly is this a picture of? Two entangled photons? I don't have the background for the full maths involved here, but there's not enough in that article to tell me why it's exciting ...

From what I understand it’s a lot of entangled photons showing the behavior that was forced onto their entangled counterparts.

In short: - Create beam of entangled photons - Split off half of them - Pass one half through liquid crystal making them behave funny - Photograph the ones that where not passed through crystal and, lo and behold, observe the funny behavior

> It occurs no matter how great the distance between the particles is.

Well then set up two particles on opposite sides of the planet and send communications via this entanglement at the speed of.. light?

And yes, I have near zero knowledge of particle physics!

Basically, what skybrian has, in a rather short way, said. As far as I have been able to find out over the years, quantum entanglement "does" operate at speeds greatly exceeding that of the speed of light, but, because of the weird properties of quantum mechanics, no "operation" that could ever be used to transfer data between two sets of particles is possible.

So while they "are" entangled, they are apparently not entangled enough in a stable way such that a change to atom A would be picked up as a new change to atom B (thus, having successfully transferred some sort of information), because the quantum state breaks down somehow.

The mathematics of entanglement doesn't allow it to be used for communication.

What specifically prevents entanglement for being used in communication?

Einstein described quantum mechanics as "spooky" because of the __instantaneousness__ of the apparent remote interaction...

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here, or snarky ones. That only makes this place worse. Instead, if you know more, please share some of what you know so we can all learn something. You're broadcasting to thousands of people when you post a comment like that, so your audience transcends the user you're replying to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

A depressing lack of details in the article.

The paper is discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20428250.

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