9 Things To Say About Quantum Physics That Will Make You Sound Clever At Parties
1. "Actually, I Think Einstein Was Wrong"
Sounding Smart 101 teaches us that, in order to sound clever, you need to make someone else sound stupid. If the person you're disagreeing with is Einstein then you must be literally the smartest person in the universe, right?
The thing is, Einstein had a massive problem with the idea of entanglement, because according to His Royal Clever Clogs and his famous Theory of General Relativity, nothing in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light, not even information. So he would rather scathingly refer to it as "spooky action at a distance".
The instantaneous transferral of information between two entangled particles breaks this universal law and caused Einstein to get his knickers in a right old knot.
Niels Bohr was the go-to entanglement guy back in Einstein's day and the pair spent years arguing this point back and forth. Bohr was the ringleader of the school of quantum physics theory known as the Copenhagen Interpretation which, generally speaking, held most of the more batsh*t crazy theories on quantum mechanics.
Einstein, as one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, couldn't dispute the existence of entanglement, but that didn't stop him coming up with his own theory about why it occurs.
Einstein's theory of entanglement was that the fate of the two particles is already predetermined. Simply put, this means that the particles aren't telling each other what to do, so much as they already know what to do before they split up.
Unfortunately for Einstein, scientists have now managed to prove that Bohr's theory of entanglement is actually happening. By splitting a single photon between two detectors in two different laboratories, they discovered that the measurements that they chose to take in Lab A affected the properties of the photon in Lab B, and they can actually observe the collapse of the wave function that Bohr predicted.
Sorry Einstein, but you'll have to sit this one out, the grown ups are talking...