We analyze our Universe in a very confident manner, having little concern that reality is full of uncertainties.
Researchers of the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen experimented using a 13 nanometre-thick, millimeters-long silicon nitride membrane (drum) that softly buzzed when photons hit it.
The photons (also known as light particles) are courtesy of a thin fog of a billion cesium atoms swarming inside the confines of the minuscule, cold cell.
Though the drum and the fog of atoms have little in common, they represent an entangled system, and they push the limits of quantum mechanics.
Senior researcher Eugene Polzik said:
“The bigger the objects, the further apart they are, the more disparate they are, the more interesting entanglement becomes from both fundamental and applied perspectives.”
“With the new result, entanglement between very different objects has become possible,” he added.
Entanglement is a concept that feels somewhat mystical than intuitive.
It describes a connection between an object that isn’t dependant on time and space.
Entangled objects have the property that, regardless of how far apart or how many years have passed, a change to a side of an entangled system provokes an immediate adjustment to the rest of it.
Einstein himself often referred to that concept as a “spooky action at a distance,” saying that it had more to do with a lack of knowledge instead of something deeply bizarre.
A century later, quantum physics progressed, but our understanding still leaves a lot of room for spookiness. However, it’s so advanced that it forms the basis of innovation fields like super-strong encryption to new variants of radars.
Quantum Physicist Michal Parniak from the Niels Bohr Institute said:
“Quantum mechanics is like a double-edged sword […] It gives us wonderful new technologies, but also limits precision of measurements which would seem just easy from a classical point of view.”
