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
Nobody has talked about how particles become entangled, which is important for understanding why they behave as they do. The key is conservation.
Particles have certain potential properties. The properties of a particle can affect those same qualities of any other particle it may interact with. These properties have relationships with one another that must be conserved throughout the interaction.
So, because the two particles interacted in the past, their future property states must always be equivalent for any observer in order for the laws of conservation to be maintained.
It is a counter-intuitive idea because, with the inclusion of quantum uncertainty, we appear to be able to *change* the action of one particle by changing how we observe its
entangled partner. In reality these states are set by that initial interaction, not our observation.
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