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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 14 2017, @04:43PM
They are getting Rube Goldbergier to test quantum theories.
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Tuesday February 14 2017, @07:02PM
Yeah, these setups are pretty crazy. A lot of that is because the QM debate is still full of arguments like, "you can't prove that the two particles didn't talk to one another in the time between measurements!"
In this case I think it's justified; it's just an upgrade on their random number generator. Given that the previous state-of-the-art Bell test used clips from movies and TV shows [wikipedia.org] as the RNG source this is a big step up.
PS - whichever whippersnapper thought that "Saved by the Bell" was worthy of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Dr. Who and Monty Python in the annals of Science history for being used as an RNG for an epic experiment needs to GET OFF MY LAWN. Seriously, they'll let anyone's toddler off the street get a PHD in Quantum Physics these days, I'm telling you!
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Tuesday February 14 2017, @10:04PM
Hey, they wanted to show violations of the Bell inequality.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.