Quantum experiment verifies Einstein's 'spooky action at a distance'

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Article Link | Phys.org Website

 

An experiment devised in Griffith University's Centre for Quantum Dynamics has for the first time demonstrated Albert Einstein's original conception of "spooky action at a distance" using a single particle.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Communications, CQD Director Professor Howard Wiseman and his experimental collaborators at the University of Tokyo report their use of homodyne measurements to show what Einstein did not believe to be real, namely the non-local collapse of a particle's wave function.

According to quantum mechanics, a single particle can be described by a wave function that spreads over arbitrarily large distances, but is never detected in two or more places.

This phenomenon is explained in quantum theory by what Einstein disparaged in 1927 as "spooky action at a distance", or the instantaneous non-local collapse of the wave function to wherever the particle is detected.

Almost 90 years later, by splitting a single photon between two laboratories, scientists have used homodyne detectors

[DocM]

Spooky Action confirmed for the umpteenth time. Quantum mechanics isn't just weird, it's weird than we can conceive.

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I don't get anything written in the article, but it sounds cool.

[benplace]

I am still not sold on entanglement.  I believe two particles can be entangled but not communicate instantly over any distance. They are simply opposites of each other.  If you put a pair of gloves, a right and left each into a separate box, no matter how far you spread the boxes apart when you open them you have a right in one box and a left in the other.   Until someone can control the particles and show that changing one changes the other in real time, I simply don't think it is really what's happening.

[Unobscured Vision]

Yeah, Doc. This is the 5th or 6th time I can recall that experiments were performed confirming that it was real. Or unreal. Or real. Or unreal.

 

(Remember, we have to quantify it and then unquantify it at the same time, otherwise it isn't valid.)

 

It's maddening, isn't it. It's like that South Park episode, with that agnostic Foster Family who was deliberately sketchy because they couldn't be sure and didn't want to offend something that could or could not be there.

 

@benplace: They've observed what happens to the local and non-local space near the particle. It's scientific certainty, and something they've been able to duplicate many, many times over. That's why they know.