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There might be no getting around what Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." With an experiment described [February 7th] in Physical Review Letters — a feat that involved harnessing starlight to control measurements of particles shot between buildings in Vienna — some of the world's leading cosmologists and quantum physicists are closing the door on an intriguing alternative to "quantum entanglement."
[...] In the first of a planned series of "cosmic Bell test" experiments, the team sent pairs of photons from the roof of [Anton] Zeilinger's lab in Vienna through the open windows of two other buildings and into optical modulators, tallying coincident detections as usual. But this time, they attempted to lower the chance that the modulator settings might somehow become correlated with the states of the photons in the moments before each measurement. They pointed a telescope out of each window, trained each telescope on a bright and conveniently located (but otherwise random) star, and, before each measurement, used the color of an incoming photon from each star to set the angle of the associated modulator. The colors of these photons were decided hundreds of years ago, when they left their stars, increasing the chance that they (and therefore the measurement settings) were independent of the states of the photons being measured.
And yet, the scientists found that the measurement outcomes still violated Bell's upper limit, boosting their confidence that the polarized photons in the experiment exhibit spooky action at a distance after all.
Source: https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170207-bell-test-quantum-loophole/
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Aiwendil on Tuesday February 14 2017, @01:47PM
The more articles I read about it the more certain I become I have no clue how it works
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 14 2017, @03:21PM
Isn't the idea that "how it works" is "how well the math predicts experiments"?
I've come to appreciate that intuition is something which is overrated; there is no extra "meaning" or "interpretation" behind the mathematics, other than whether or not it accurately predicts an outcome or describes an observation in the universe.; the universe itself is the manifestation of understanding it.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday February 14 2017, @11:58PM
More precisely, you have no clue on how to reconcile those things with your macroscopic experience of a world modeled as a mechanical item.
The problem I have is, why cannot spooky action at a distance occur? because our models say so? then the models are wrong if it does. Because our intuition says so? ditto.
The same reason is there for spooky action at a distance, or time travel, or faster than light travel, or energy from nothing, if any of this really occurs. The reason is the same you have to give when asking the ultimate reason of any phenomenon: "because it is so". If you want a meta-reason, then look at god, or at your personal atheist model, but as far as the domain where you can legitimately ask "why", that is the answer.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Wednesday February 15 2017, @10:50AM
No meed to reconsile it with my macroscopic model (my models for nuclear physic and the electro-magnetical feel natural enough), nor my classical model. (Heck - my entire model of math is almost completly abstract)
My problem with quantum is that I simply have no idea where to start (and stuff like non-linear time, virtual particles and such actually makes sense to me - and my mental model has speed of light as a variable (unless in vacuum and away from gravity)).
And I am uninterested in "why" but are very interested in "how" (and are comfortable with building a new mental midel for it) - but in order to understand "how" I need a starting point (for examaple: with gravity I've never asked why stuff falls to the ground, but I am curious about how momentum is imparted at distance).