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posted by janrinok on Tuesday February 14 2017, @12:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the for-big-values-of-weird dept.

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/


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 15 2017, @10:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 15 2017, @10:10AM (#467313)

    A car with engine type C can go up to 50 mph. A car with engine type Q can go up to 70 mph. Possibly there could be cars that go to 100 mph, but we don't know an engine that does this.

    We observed a car going faster than 50mph, but not faster than 70 mph. That is strong evidence that this car is not using engine C. It is consistent with the car using engine Q. I'd say that is a very strong experiment.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 15 2017, @12:48PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 15 2017, @12:48PM (#467356)

    There is a bait and switch in this reasoning. Strong evidence against engine C does not correspond to strong evidence for engine Q, in this case it is weak evidence for engine Q. Also, engine C was already ruled out long ago for other reasons, so is just a strawman.

    These experiments do not severely test QM, so shouldn't have much effect on our belief in that idea. Thats all. There have to be better ways of studying this quantum entanglement phenomenon.