8 Super Simple Ways To Explain Complicated Science
3. Entanglement = Like A Game Show
The Tricky Bit Quantum entanglement is such a bizarre concept, that even Einstein himself had trouble wrapping his head around it, calling it "spooky action at a distance". It is a phenomenon that occurs between a pair of particles that are generated in such a way that their quantum state of each cannot be described independently of one another. For example, if two particles were generated by the decay of a particle with a spin value of zero, then the spin of both particles should combine to be zero also. If one of the particles is measured to have a "spin up" value, then the other must have an equal "spin down" value in order to cancel it out. This means that by measuring just one of the entangled particles, you can collapse the superposition of both and know the properties of its partner without having to measure it. Because this works at every distance, there can be no "information" passed from one particle to another as this would require the information to travel faster than the speed of light and yet, each particle "knows" the measurement that has been performed on the other. The Simpler Way Entanglement is still a hotly debated and actively experimental field, but a super-simplified way of thinking about it is to think of a game show. In this game show, there are two doors, one with a car behind it and one with a goat behind it. You have to pick one to open and you win whatever is behind it (presumably you're hoping for the goat, because goats are rad). Before selecting one, the two doors are basically equally goat and car as far as you're concerned. You choose door number #1 and, success, it's the goat! Not only do you now know that door#1 has a goat behind it, but you also know that door #2 has a car behind it without having to open it. Door #1 didn't tell door #2 what to do, but by observing it, you were able to collapse the wavefunction of its properties from 50:50 goat/car to 100% goat, and thus also collapsing it for door #2.
