from the I'm-from-the-Government-and-I'm-here-to-disentangle-you dept.
Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have uncovered an entirely new kind of quantum entanglement, a phenomenon that causes particles to become weirdly linked, even across vast cosmic distances, reports a new study. The discovery allowed them to capture an unprecedented glimpse of the bizarre world inside atoms, the tiny building blocks of matter.
[...] The exciting discoveries took place at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a specialized facility at Brookhaven in New York that can accelerate charged atoms, known as ions, to almost light speed. When these ions collide—or even just pass near each other—their interactions expose the inner workings of atoms, which are governed by the trippy laws of quantum mechanics.
All kinds of weird stuff occurs in this tiny realm, but quantum entanglement in particular is so strange that Albert Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance." This phenomenon occurs when particles become intertwined with each other, causing their properties (such as spin or momentum) to sync up, even if they are billions of light years apart. Quantum entanglement has been demonstrated countless times in laboratories, but the entangled particles have always belonged to the same group and possessed the same charge, such as photons, which have no charge, or electrons, which are negatively charged.
Now, for the first time ever, scientists at Brookhaven have captured interference patterns that are created by the entanglement of two particles with different charges, a breakthrough that has opened up a completely new window into the mysterious innards of atoms that make up visible matter in the universe, according to a study published on Wednesday in Science Advances.
[...] Scientists have imaged atomic nuclei at lower energies before, but attempts to probe these structures at high energies has always produced a puzzling result. Nuclei in these experiments look way bigger than they should, according to models, an outcome that has puzzled scientists for decades.
Now, the STAR collaboration has now solved this mystery by pinpointing a blurring effect that is linked to the photons in the experiment. Essentially, past studies captured one-dimensional glimpses of nuclei that did not account for important patterns in photons, such as their polarization direction. The new study included this polarization information, allowing Brandenburg and his colleagues to probe the nuclei from two angles, parallel and perpendicular to the photon's motion, producing a two-dimensional view that matches theoretical predictions.
What's more, the team is even able to make out the rough positions of key particles in the nucleus, such as protons and neutrons, as well as the distribution of gluons. It also offers a new way to unravel persistent mysteries about the behavior of atoms at high energies.
[...] "By looking at different nuclei and by looking at this process at higher precision, we can start to learn more and more details," Brandenburg concluded. "What we did here is a proof of concept, but there's a lot more opportunity."
Journal Reference:
STAR Collaboration, JTomography of ultrarelativistic nuclei with polarized photon-gluon collisions [open], Sci Adv., 2023. (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abq3903)
(Score: 3, Funny) by MIRV888 on Monday January 09, @09:46PM
Bring on the worm holes...
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09, @10:33PM (11 children)
"causing their properties (such as spin or momentum) to sync up, even if they are billions of light years apart"
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Tuesday January 10, @12:06AM (10 children)
They used Dark Matter to check that this is happening: they put the Dark Matter on the back of a unicorn and the unicorn saw it happening at both places! Magic!
Yeah... our physics if f*cked.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10, @12:39AM (8 children)
We are communicating using these devices that owe their functionality to that very f*cked quantum mechanics physics you mention, which was also the focus of the last physics Nobel given out.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Gaaark on Tuesday January 10, @01:06AM (7 children)
We're communicating because "particles become intertwined with each other, causing their properties (such as spin or momentum) to sync up, even if they are billions of light years apart. "?
Citation needed.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10, @03:52PM
I guess the point I was trying to say was that you can't pick and choose which parts of quantum you like or don't like. "Spooky action at a distance" IS quantum and has been experimentally verified over a number of decades, at least to the level that they felt comfortable enough to award a Nobel for. If you want to stand on the "billions of light years apart" and say we haven't verified entanglement over those distances to prove you win the point, then I will concede to your pedantry, but if you are arguing against entanglement in general, then you can choose to die on that hill (but the bodies amongst which you'd lay would have some notable names mixed in).
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday January 10, @04:35PM (5 children)
Citation needed
Er, huh? What? TFA IS is the citation, which likely (I haven't read it) has its own citations.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Tuesday January 10, @07:00PM (4 children)
Sorry: just because someone mentions unicorns and magic doesn't make it real.
There IS something wrong with our physics and there IS something wrong with people pushing incorrect physics because they're not thinking outside the box that supports them financially.
We NEED to get thinking outside that box.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday January 11, @05:57PM (3 children)
You seem to misunderstand how science works. Here's a real life example. I took care of databases and spreadsheets for sociologists, psychologists, and statisticians. One fellow held masters degrees in the first two, and a doctorate in statistics.
This was a long time ago, when the US still had welfare. We worked for Illinois, and were trying to find ways to get people off of welfare and into jobs. Their theories led to a program called "Project Chance". They were sure it would work. I knew it wouldn't, because my favorite bar is in the ghetto and a lot of really poor people drank their welfare checks there. GHW Bush was President and there was a bad recession that had lasted since Nixon and there was simply no work. I knew what the poor thought of it before they sent out the surveys. The poor called it "Project NO Chance" or "Project Fat Chance".
My part was to make a FoxPro database and enter the 30,000+ surveys that were returned, and make up codes for open ended statements. Few surveys get as many results as we did with that, an unheard of 30%. Poor people feared the government they were dependent on and turned in the surveys, and I think a very large number of them just wanted to vent, and I couldn't blame them.
The results and the surveys were buried deep in the bowels of a file cabinet and probably never saw the light of day again, but that's what science is for, learning what simply isn't known. Subatomic physics is possibly that hardest of sciences. The theories are far from "unicorns". They theorize the possible cause of what they see in the collider traces, then test the theory.
You also can't trust someone with a BA in communication or journalism to explain, or even understand, particle physics. They are the ones introducing unicorns and rainbows. An example is the "God Particle" that was later named the Higgs bosun after the scientist who confirmed it. It got the "God particle" name when a journalist asked the researcher what they called the particle they were searching for. The scientist replied "We just call it 'that God damned particle'." The newspaper, not wanting to print the vulgarity, edited it to "God particle".
Only fools make fun of what they don't understand.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday January 12, @04:23AM (2 children)
What I'm trying to say is that some of our physics is based on "Einstein got it 100% correct the VERY FIRST TIME OUT", and if there are problems with his theories it's because of something we don't understand and so instead of following the scientific theory, lets just make up Dark Matter, because it's the only way we can save General Relativity AND our jobs!
A lot of our physics is upheld by people whose very careers and financial stability depend on "Einstein got it 100% correct the VERY FIRST TIME OUT" and if anything else is suggested they shout it down as being nonsense.
A lot of our physics is not understood well at all, STILL:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/new-physics-muon-1.5978372 [www.cbc.ca]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity [wikipedia.org]
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/do-we-need-to-rewrite-general-relativity/ [pbs.org]
I just hate it when suppositions are made fact. We need to rethink what we 'know', not keep supporting nonsense.
I'd rather be a fool questioning things than a fool who stands on a world supported by turtles all the way down ("The world is flat", "Copernicus is wrong", "Dark Matter exists", etc etc etc etc)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday January 12, @08:23PM (1 child)
"Einstein got it 100% correct the VERY FIRST TIME OUT"
I've not once heard of any scientist making any statement that remotely resembles that, so as wikipedia says, "citation needed".
and if there are problems with his theories it's because of something we don't understand and so instead of following the scientific theory, lets just make up Dark Matter,
"Dark matter" is just a label to point out that we don't know what it is that makes our measurements wrong.
A lot of our physics is upheld by people whose very careers and financial stability depend on "Einstein got it 100% correct the VERY FIRST TIME OUT"
Name him and quote him and cite your source. Are there dishonest scientists? Obviously, they're human beings. A given percentage of any collection of humans will be dishonest, incompetent, or both. But not the majority. Like, "Nixon and Trump were crooks, all presidents must be crooks, even Eisenhower and Lincoln".
A lot of our physics is not understood well at all
You don't need to study what you know well. You don't seem to understand the very purpose of science, let alone how it works. Science exists to explain how the universe works, and to test those explanations. And again, scientists generally don't write science articles in magazines, they write articles for scientific journals. Newspaper goofs with BAs in journalism can't even halfway understand an article in a real scientific journal written by a PhD that he tries futility to explain what he doesn't understand to the even more clueless. When is the last time you saw any math in a magazine article? You can't have science without math.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday January 12, @09:35PM
This is why Dark Matter exists: instead of saying "Hey, maybe Einstein got something wrong", they said, "Einstein is right, so there must be matter there we cannot find" and gave it a bunch of made up properties and called it Dark Matter!
The DM theory predicts nothing: in order to solve the DM equation for each and every galaxy out there, they have to plug in a matter amount and then add or remove matter from it in order to keep it from flying apart... in other words, there is NO DM equation, just haphazardly plugging in mass numbers until it works: not very scientific.
A REAL theory predicts things through equations: DM theory is just a kludge... like unicorns.
EXACTLY!
The scientific method!
But Dark Matter has nothing to do with the scientific method: it was 'made up' JUST in order to save GR.
They need to stop 'saving' GR and start coming up with alternatives, because Einstein is not entirely correct.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday January 10, @09:06PM
Brexit unicorn? Were there Sunlit Uplands too?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Funny) by hopp on Tuesday January 10, @05:39AM
Fuzzing reality.
(Score: 4, Informative) by mcgrew on Tuesday January 10, @04:38PM (2 children)
Ignore the anti-science clowns above who either make fun of or disbelieve anything that's over their heads. I found it fascinating, a thank you to submitter and staff! This is what I come to S/N for.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Tuesday January 10, @07:01PM
Not anti-sience: just pro REAL science, following the scientific theory... if it's me, you're talking about. ;)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Tuesday January 17, @01:37PM
'causing their properties (such as spin or momentum) to sync up, even if they are billions of light years apart.'
Sorry the joke upset you, but the first thing I thought of with synced up particles billions of light years apart was a worm hole.