My husband is watching YouTube and there’s a man discussing quantum entanglement.
His description: There are two particles. They can be either green or red, but they are both colors until they’re measured. Once you measure one, though, it automatically determines that the other is the same. No matter how many times you measured, or how far you separated the particles, the two would always be the same color.
Why does one being one color guarantee that the other one would be? How do they “know” to always be that color? And what sort of implication does that have for science/real world, other than being really cool?
In: Physics
It’s basically a phenomenon where two particles are “entangled” with each other, meaning they have the same state, always. This is not only a cool phenomenon but an incredibly useful one if it could be harnessed.
The most obvious use case would be faster than light communication. Electromagnetic radiation travels at the speed of light so any long distance communication is subject to some delay. But if we were able to intentionally entangle particles and control their state, we could create faster than light communication. If one state, for example green, corresponds to 0, and red corresponds to 1, we could make entangled computers which communicate instantaneously with each other. For example spacecraft on Mars have a significant signal delay of about 15 minutes one way on average. But with two such entangled terminals you could enable instant communication, without violating any laws of physics. So rovers could be controlled in real time, which would make rover missions much more versatile and cheaper. If crews were sent to Mars, or anywhere else in space, they’d have instantaneous communication with Earth. Hell even if we sent spacecraft to another solar system, we’d still be able to have real time communication.
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