Editor's Note: I wanted to take the time to explain the awesomely HUGE significance of this experiment a bit deeper as this finally gives us tangible proof of Quantum Entanglement!
Traditionally, Quantum Entanglement involves a pair of initially independent particles and is usually tested through experiments of locality and observation such as double-slits. We've only done these tests on particles that had certain quantum states forced on them both (such as polarity) so as to make them entangled. We would then test how they reacted to one another at a distance. And then by observably recording the reaction of one particle after manipulating the other, we've gotten substantial correlative evidence to support Entanglement.
But what these tests were doing was merely recording the detection or lack of detection of the particles and that's the deepest we've gone as far as actually being able to observe the collapsing wave function itself…until now. There was still so much debate on the validity of these tests due to so many variables, that left so many scientists skeptical and therefore they refused to accept quantum theory unless future experiments could close the loopholes mentioned here.
I wrote an article back in February about what I called “Entangled Triplets“. The article was about how scientists had learned how we could actually have more than two entangled particles at once and also about the amazing way they had created them by splitting ONE photon repeatedly. It kind of opened the door to this latest experiment that has finally proven Entanglement as far as how we create entangled particles now (from one single particle, rather than forcing quantum states onto two separate particles).
Scientists were finally able to prove Entanglement because we now have the technology to do so (homodyne measurements and quantum tomography) to measure the actual non-local wave function collapse (simply put: opposite action) of a single particle (split into two quasi-particles) and reconstruct the origin quantum state (which IS the wave function). Long story short, they set each quasi-particle to have a quantum state of (0). They then forced a quantum state onto one of the quasi-particles (let's stick with polarity, for example, and say they made it positive…another example could be spin or momentum).
With quantum tomography they read the state of the first particle and sent the reading to the other particle telling it to recreate the same quantum state. However, instead of becoming positive, it became negative in polarity, thus proving Entanglement (because it recreated the quantum OPPOSITE state – which they measured using the homodyne measurements). They actually did this with various quantum states and repeated the test over and over and got the same result/reaction.
This is also important because it violated Einstein's steering inequality and proved quantum “steering” is possible. Which simply put means once we first set entangled particles to (0) and then set the quantum state of only one of them, we now have physical, verified proof of how the second one will react, just by knowing the state of the first. We could conclude this through correlative conclusions provided by previous Entanglement experiments, we just didn't have THIS kind of proof to finally put any and all doubts to rest. Awesome! 🙂 – Tamara Rant
By Arjun Walia | Collective Evolution
The Director of Griffith University’s Center for Quantum Dynamics, Professor Howard Wiseman
“Space is just the construct that gives the illusion that there are separate objects” – Dr. Quantum (see video below)
There is a phenomenon so strange, so fascinating, and so counter to what we believe to be the known scientific laws of the universe, that Albert Einstein himself could not wrap his head around it. It’s called “quantum entanglement,” though Einstein referred to it as “spooky action at a distance.”
An experiment devised by the Griffith University’s Center for Quantum Dynamics and led by Professor Howard Wiseman confirmed what Einstein did not believe to be real: the non-local collapse of a particle’s wave function. The findings were recently published in the journal Nature Communications (1)(2)
Wisemen stated that:
“This phenomenon is the strongest yet proof of the entanglement of a single particle, an unusual form of quantum entanglement that is being increasingly explored for quantum communication and computation.” (1)
They did this by splitting a single photon between two laboratories, and testing whether measurement of it in one laboratory would actually cause a change in the local quantum state in the other laboratory. In doing so, researchers were able to verify the entanglement of the split single photon.
Wisemen went on to state that:
“Einstein’s view was that the detection of the particle only ever at one point could be much better explained by the hypothesis that the particle is only ever at one point, without invoking the instantaneous collapse of the wave function to nothing at all other points. However, rather than simply detecting the presence or absence of the particle, we used homodyne measurements enabling one party to make different measurements and the other, using quantum tomography, to test the effect of those choices.” (1)
Here is a great illustration from Dr. Quantum, as seen in the film “What The Bleep: Down The Rabbit Hole.”
So what is going on here? Either information is traveling faster than the speed of light, or, the vast distance we perceive between the objects really doesn’t exist at all! Either possibility is mind altering.
Read the rest of the article at Collective Evolution…
