9 Things To Say About Quantum Physics That Will Make You Sound Clever At Parties
4. "Particles Can Communicate Telepathically"
In a scientific field in which the words "spookiness" and "weirdness" are used as technical terms, you can be sure of some properly odd things going on.
One of the oddest of these is an effect known as "entanglement".
Entanglement, put very simply, is a phenomenon in quantum mechanics that causes a pair of particles to become inextricably, and almost telepathically, linked across any distance.
Say, for example, you have two electrons that were created in the same event, quantum mechanics says that their properties will always have a direct correlation to one another. Not only this, but they will be entangled, meaning that, no matter how far away from each other they are, their properties will remain the same.
If we imagine that these two electrons are actually coins being flipped, in the quantum world the fates of these two coins are linked and so if one comes down with heads, the other will somehow always know to come down on tails, even if they are at different ends of the universe.
Obviously coins don't actually behave like that, but that's because they aren't quantum objects. In real terms, if two electrons were created together with a total spin value known to be zero at a certain axis, when one is measured to have a spin value of 1 in a clockwise direction on that axis, the other will always be measured to have a spin of 1 in a counter-clockwise direction, bringing the total sum of their spin value to 0.
Oh, and this information will be transferred between the two particles instantaneously.
Told you it was weird.