kristalris Posted May 6, 2014 Posted May 6, 2014 http://www.nature.com/news/cosmic-light-could-close-quantum-weirdness-loophole-1.14771 "Do you ever feel like the Universe is plotting against you? Strange as it may sound, physicists are planning to test whether a cosmic conspiracy could lie behind one of the weirdest phenomena in quantum physics, in which particles appear to influence each other, no matter how far they are separated. The experiment, proposed in a paper due to be published in Physical Review Letters1, would use light from distant quasars to verify that this 'entanglement' is real. The test could also help cosmologists to distinguish between rival models of the early Universe."
swansont Posted May 6, 2014 Posted May 6, 2014 It's sad that Nature would publish such a crappy description of entanglement on its blog. In particular: in which particles appear to influence each other, no matter how far they are separated. Not influence. The particle states are maximally correlated. when one of the states is measured the properties of its twin are immediately affected. No. When one is measured the other is immediately known. "Affected" implies that the state has somehow changed, but the state was unknown prior to the measurement. What they're doing is trying to close a loophole in EPR experiments dealing with hidden variables, which almost nobody thinks exist and have been ruled out under many conditions in experiments. The opening paragraph makes it sound like hidden variables is the expected result, when the opposite is true.
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