I just saw a comment that linked to an article explaining how Nobel prize winners recently discovered the universe is not locally real. My brain isn’t functioning properly today, so can someone please help me understand what this means?
In: 2860
Local means cause and effect apply. For A to affect B, a signal has to have time to travel from A to B.
Real means things like particles have set properties. A particle has spin up or down.
When particles are entangled, they if one is measured with spin up, the other must be measured with spin down, for example.
So you might say when we perform an experiment where we entangle two particles and then separate them, one has U and one and D assigned at the moment of entanglement. This makes sense to us. This would be local realism.
This prize was won for determining that the particles don’t have U and D assigned. It had been done before, but the recent experiment rules out all remaining loopholes.
The particle exist in a “superposition “, and both particles assume a value when ONE is measured. There is no time for the communication to occur to somehow signal that one of the particles has been measured, so the other should assume to correct value. So in other words, local realism does not apply. (Note that locality still applies, just not realism).
It is absolutely AMAZING that we can know this. Look up YT videos on Bells Inequality for some relatively easy to understand videos on how we know particles don’t have values before we measure them.
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