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from the not-actual-physicists,-just-theoretical-ones? dept.
Supercomputers help link quantum entanglement to cold coffee:
Theoretical physicists from Trinity College Dublin have found a deep link between one of the most striking features of quantum mechanics -- quantum entanglement -- and thermalisation, which is the process in which something comes into thermal equilibrium with its surroundings.
Their results are published today [Friday 31st January 2020] in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters.
We are all familiar with thermalisation -- just think how your coffee reaches room temperature over time. Quantum entanglement on the other hand is a different story.
Yet work performed by Marlon Brenes, PhD Candidate, and Professor John Goold from Trinity, in collaboration with Silvia Pappalardi and Professor Alessandro Silva at SISSA in Italy, shows how the two are inextricably linked.
Explaining the importance of the discovery, Professor Goold, leader of Trinity's QuSys group, explains:
"Quantum entanglement is a counterintuitive feature of quantum mechanics, which allows particles that have interacted with each other at some point in time to become correlated in a way which is not possible classically. Measurements on one particle affect the outcomes of measurements of the other -- even if they are light years apart. Einstein called this effect 'spooky action at a distance'."
"It turns out that entanglement is not just spooky but actually ubiquitous and in fact what is even more amazing is that we live in an age where technology is starting to exploit this feature to perform feats which were thought to be impossible just a number of years go. These quantum technologies are being developed rapidly in the private sector with companies such as Google and IBM leading the race."
But what has all this got to do with cold coffee?
Journal Reference:
Marlon Brenes, Silvia Pappalardi, John Goold, Alessandro Silva Multipartite Entanglement Structure in the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis, Physical Review Letters (DOI: doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.040605)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Thursday February 06 2020, @12:22PM (2 children)
Any interpretation is BS.
Interpretation is trying to model phenomenons according to our macroscopic experience, which is the one that shapes our mental models and logic.
Problem being, logic derives from modelling, not the other way round. In other words, nature does not care about our interpretation. It feels weird that something pops up from the void? so what? but more importantly, WHY? what is the difference between an universe where entangled photons do exist and other theoretical ones where they don't?
Scientists are still reasoning like clock repairmen, in an impersonal mechanical and deterministic universe, instead of reasoning like a sysadmin logged into a port left open, that might lead to bare metal, a VM, a honeypot. You can model what you found however you like, but from the inside the ultimate nature of what you are into is undiscoverable. I mean, it is discoverable but it is not provable that the discovery is the definitive one. No matter how useful are the models. In this case previous models for heat distribution were probably very accurate. But now they are proven as mere shortcuts for a more complicated model. This is what science has always been about, until petty atheist scientophiles took over.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 06 2020, @05:04PM
This is standard trite about quantum mechanics, aka nobody can understand it stop trying feeble human mind. The problem with that is that the Hamiltonian is built up completely from classical notions (electrostatics, inverse square laws, etc.). At the last step everything is turned into an operator instead of a physical quantity and voila! We call it mysterious quantum mechanics that nobody's feeble human mind understands.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 06 2020, @09:07PM
--Niels Bohr