What is quantum entanglement?

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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

16 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Imagine you have 2 cards, an Ace and a King, you shuffle them and shove each inside an envelope so you don’t know which envelope contains which card. Then you give your husband one Envelope and you keep the other.

The two envelopes are now quantum entangled, the card inside is neither the Ace nor the King, but rather a superposition of the two. If you open the envelope and see that the card you have is an Ace, you will now that your husband must have a King, no matter how close or far away you are.

This same procedure can be done for quantum system, creating 2 particles where knowing a property of one, forces you to know a property of another. The usual case is Spin, you can create a pair of particles in which one has a spin of 1/2 and the other of -1/2. You won’t knoe which is which umtil you measure it. But if you measure only one, you instantly know the spin of the other no matter how far in the universe they are.

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