Well, as long as we are in the quantum realm, the best we can use is a pleasant set of thought experiments. Suppose you suddenly wake up from a deep slumber, not remembering what happened before. In front of you - on a white wooden table - you can see a coin, And a mobile phone with a recorded message on it, you open it and you hear someone telling you that you're in a game, involving another person in an adjacent room.
The form of the game will be as follows: When you hear the sound of the bell, each of you will spin the coin, for a thousand times in a row, and in order to succeed in that game and avoid a bloody fate, the reading of the coins between you must be similar (king, or writing) even once only, the results appear on The nearby screen is on the wall above the window.
quantum eagle
After the message ends, you may be a little optimistic, it seems that you are inside one of the parts of the movie “SAW”, but your game is not as difficult as the parts of the movie, it is natural that some results are similar and others differ in cases of coin rolling, as if you once got a “king.” The other one gets to "write", or you get to "write" and the other gets to "write" like you, so you'll be out of the game by the simple rules of probability theory.
But when the game begins, and after fifty times of rewinding, it happens that the tension begins to seep into your depths, the results of each time differ on the two tables, but the real horror will begin after two hundred laps, as it did not happen - not even once - that the results of your two currencies were similar, what if Was that always happening?
No matter how many times we try or repeat the game, without exception, will the readings be reflected between your two tables?
Here you will think that someone is manipulating you, or perhaps this other player is the designer of the game, or that the screen transmits previously known results.
This is perhaps - in a more complex way, of course - what was in the mind of Mr. Albert Einstein when he formulated the hypothesis of hidden variables in an attempt to explain the phenomenon of quantum entanglement (1), but in the middle of the year 2018, a pioneering quantum experiment was able to reveal an aspect of the behavior of Quantum entangled particles, all it took (2) was 12 teams of physicists, in 10 countries, more than 100,000 players, and about 100 million data units, randomly generated by hand, to be able to prove that Albert Einstein was wrong. !
In an interview with Meydan editor, Morgan Mitchell, professor of quantum optics at the Optical Sciences Institute in Barcelona, Spain, and co-author of the study said: “We have shown that Einstein's view of nature, called Local Realism, includes two criteria: That things have properties, whether you notice them or not, and no effect can travel faster than light, cannot be true, at least one of their former criteria must be false.”
Quantum entanglement
But to understand in a simple way the mechanism of this complex experiment, and how it proved that Albert Einstein’s view of the world is wrong, let’s start by identifying one of the basic properties of subatomic particles, which is the spin (3) (Spin), the rotation of the particles is similar to the Earth’s rotation around itself, not the matter specifically as well;
But it is the closest example we know, with an important difference, which is that the Earth rotates because it was forced to rotate at the beginning of its life, while the rotation of subatomic particles is a specific intrinsic property of it, which does not rotate;
Because someone made her spin;
But it's always going on, it's like your voice or your laughter, it's part of your makeup as a human being, and so for particles, each particle has a specific spin pattern that never changes.
Quantum entanglement refers to the existence of a kind of connection between quantitatively entangled particles that when we read the rotation of particle “A” at a certain moment, when reading the rotation of particle “B” that is entangled with it quantitatively at the same moment it will be opposite, no matter how much we repeat the experiment, and in any way, and on Any quantum sample, was a molecule, atom, or a superconducting chip, and this happens at any distance between particles, even if we decide to place each particle of them in one side of a galaxy 220,000 light-years wide, or even when we put them on both sides of the universe itself.
This contradicts, of course, one of the foundations of the important theory of relativity, which is that no effect can occur faster than the speed of light. Complete because the effect of its attraction to us will not disappear suddenly, but rather at the speed of light at a maximum, so this particle that reads an opposite rotation with its companion at the other end of the galaxy breaks that rule, in a way.
Therefore, Albert imagined that the matter of quantum entanglement should contain what he called hidden variables (4), i.e. a set of conditions that control these observations and make the results appear as such. , two children who are not yet ten, have claimed that they can communicate with each other telepathically, in order to prove their claim wrong we will ask each of them to enter a different toy store from the other, at the same moment, and buy a “car” game, provided that they go out From the two toy stores, every time we replay the experience, a car is a different color from each other, either red or green.
hidden fingers
At that point, the two children may go out, each time, with cars of the opposite color, but you will ask yourself: What if both Abdel-Rahman and Rahaf had agreed before the experiment?
What if they wrote a long list, and hid it in their pockets, for the situations that each of them would choose, so Rahaf chooses a red car the first time for the experiment, a green car for the second and third, and a red car for the fourth, and so on, while Abd al-Rahman knows that he will do the opposite, and so it continues Experiment any number of times, this list they wrote and each put a copy of it in their pocket, are the "hidden variables" that Einstein meant.
Rahaf and Abdel-Rahman are entangled quantum particles. Einstein assumes that these particles have something like a list of all possible states, but John Stewart Bell (5), an American physicist, in the sixties of the last century, had noticed because the idea of a list that It contains those hidden variables that are not possible, to understand that let's change the rules of the game for the two children.
It is the same experience, but with two stores that not only offer cars, but offer cars, planes, or ships randomly, meaning that each of Abdel Rahman and Rahaf will enter his toy store and order a game, so the seller enters a closed and dark room to catch the first game he meets, and exits With her, here she tells Abdul Rahman and Rahaf about the rules of the new game, where each of them must come up with a toy of a different color than the other, except in one case, which is when the seller presents each of them with the same game, here they must choose the same color.
At that point, the problem begins. Abdel Rahman and Rahaf can write a previous list specifying the color of the game each time, but what about the similarities of the game?
In a random sample, this will happen only one third of the time, and in two thirds of them, Abd al-Rahman and Rahaf can be right through the list method. Therefore, in the case of telepathy, Abd al-Rahman and Rahaf must succeed in coming up with a game that agrees with the rule more than 66% of the times. We repeat the experiment, now let's stop a little and talk about particles.
How do we get a random pattern?
The two children are quantum particles, and the color of the toy is the spin of each particle, and the type of toy is the way or direction in which we measure this rotation, and regardless of the mechanism of measurement or the meaning of measuring the spin of a particle, Bell has developed what we call “theorem (Bell's theorem), or proof, says that we can design a set of experiments, during which researchers - like shopkeepers - randomly choose between measurement directions, to make sure of the rightness or wrongness of Einstein's idea, only if the measurements exceed a certain limit. It can be said that: inevitably There is communication between particles without hidden variables.
Our two children's intellectual game is very similar to Bell's theorem.
With a lot of complexity and hundreds of pages written in harsh mathematics incantations of course, and over the years following the theorem, beginning6 with the Friedman and Clauser experiment in 1972, the hidden variables hypothesis was tested, and each time the results confirmed that there are no hidden variables, the two particles could not previously agree on Something, because forecast results exceed two-thirds each time.
But the problem that emerged, during all of that, was always related to that "randomness" required to conduct experiments, the Bell test requires a completely random measurement, and this is difficult to implement, because many hidden factors can affect the choice of researchers, and even when they are Generating random data in computers The matter is not as random as you imagine, this leaves a hole in the pipeline of Bell's tests called the "freedom-of-choice loophole", meaning that there is a possibility for a hidden variable to affect the settings used in the experiments.
If the measurements were not entirely random, which we are sure of, the Bell tests could not be conclusively definitive.
We must therefore include in Bell's experiment, in a way, an affirmation that the owners of the two toy stores did not previously agree with the two children, and thus the two children deceive us and come up with toys of different colors except in the case of the similarity of the toy, and the solution was in the new experiment, which is called the Greater Bell Test (7) (The Big Bell Test), here there will not only be one shop owner who will enter to choose the game at random, but 100,000 people, "We believe that humans have free will and are not affected by entangled particles," Mitchell says in his interview with the editor of "Meidan", continuing "And that's why experimenting with humans can completely close that loophole."
The idea is simple, and John Bell himself referred to it when he said (8) that human free will can create the best forms of randomness, but at the time when Bell made that suggestion, the use of humans was impractical, we need to repeat the experiment a huge number of times, Currently in the era of communication, researchers have been able to integrate more than 100,000 people into an Internet game that rewards them more whenever their pressures are unexpected, in several stages, with an interesting graphic interface, and the game also allows you to share your efforts in supporting science on the means of communication to attract many of the players.
Bill game in which more than 100 thousand people participated
The game only allows a choice of two: (zero) or (one), during 12 consecutive hours, on November 30, 2016, players joined the game, and produced about 100 million units of data, saying (zero) or (one), directed That data was immediately sent to 12 specialized laboratories on five continents, in each of which the researchers conducted experiments by choosing measurements according to the instructions of random players.
Here the results of the experiment came to confirm that, with this degree of pure randomness based on human freedom of choice, and with this huge amount of it, the cases of quantum entanglement showed a clear relationship in a way that refutes Albert Einstein’s expectations of the existence of hidden variables, thus enabling the researchers of the study, which was published 9) In the journal Nature in the middle of last year, from closing that loophole through which hidden variables can enter, to prove that quantum mechanics is undoubtedly stranger than we could ever imagine.
Let's go to Siberia
With closing this gap in Bell’s experiments, quantum mechanics brings us closer to two possibilities imposed by the Copenhagen interpretation of the nature of the universe, Mitchell says during his dialogue with the editor of “Medan”: “Either we intervene to influence the reality of the universe and change it every time we look at it, or there is a relationship - no Its nature can still be imagined - between quantum entangled particles, or perhaps both”, which means that we undoubtedly need new physics that describe the behavior of this universe at its minute levels, but to understand the secret of our falling into those possibilities that Mitchell presents, let us give a simple example.
We only have (10) oranges and apples in the room, everyone knows that, and while you're busy talking to a friend of yours who shares the experience, someone puts the apple in your bag and the orange in his bag, then you'll travel to Siberia, and he'll travel to South Africa, when you arrive it will open Your bag and you see the apple, here you will immediately know that your friend's bag contains the orange, not because you caused it, but because there is a "hidden information" that says that all we have is an apple and an orange only, this is how Einstein conceived the problem of quantum entanglement.
That's because if these two fruits were entangled in a quantum world, your closed bag would not only carry one of them, but all possible possibilities together, an apple and an orange at the same time, to understand the idea let's consider the famous Schrödinger thought experiment, we will put a cat in a closed box with a small amount Of a radioactive substance, for example, 50% of an atom is likely to decay within a specified period, if that atom decays, it will cause the work of the Geiger counter that measures radiation, here the counter will let go of the hammer and fall on the poison bottle, it spreads in the place and the cat dies.
Now you and I stand in front of that box before we open it to ask: Is the cat alive or dead?
At this point the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics intervenes to answer with: "Both states are both alive and dead";
Because this atom has a probability wave that describes it in all cases;
That is, as decomposing and non-decomposing at the same time, but when we open the box, we will not find any surprises, the cat is either alive or dead, this is what happened when we try to enter a measurement or observation process in the quantum world, because the particle loses its quantum state, a situation that exists all cases In it together, for a subjective situation, one specific case.
(To understand why this happens, consider the double slit experiment (11) in a previous report.)
Between realism and quantum oddity
When you open your bag and see the apple, this means that you intervened to affect the quantum state in the bag and it changed to a normal state, but it also means that you may have affected the quantum state in the other bag, which indicates that you have an effect on a particle thousands away from you kilometers, and instantaneously, which contradicts what Einstein called local realism (12).
What Einstein was wrong about was not his opinion that quantum mechanics was right or not. In fact, what he was wrong about was the idea that quantum theory and local realism can be combined in one crucible.
The experience in Einstein’s world is very similar to observing a distant galaxy through our telescopes, these telescopes cannot affect the galaxy you are observing, but in the quantum world the experience is like tasting a piece of cake, when you are observing you interact with the experience, it can be understood with a thought experiment Others, we will imagine that you are an anthropologist from a prestigious university, who would like to travel to the Ancheri region in the Bolivian rainforest to live with the Chimani, a group of 16,000 people who live in scattered villages, your goal in this trip is to study them.
When we ask: Do you really get an accurate result from your studies?
The answer will be: "Not exactly", because your goal will be to study their pure lifestyle, while they are no longer pure with your presence, they are affected by your clothes, your shoes, the music you hear, your cameras and your staff, and everything else you brought in to study them, so your monitoring process affects In fact, this is - to a large degree of simplification - what we encounter in the quantum case.
In fact, local realism is entirely different from the quantum viewpoint. “In local realism, everything that can be measured has value, it happens whether we measure it or not,” Mitchell puts it while talking to the Meydan editor, who adds that “ In local realism, too, no effect can occur faster than the speed of light.” This contradicts the quantum world view, where the measurement itself is responsible for some of the properties we observe.
But what Einstein was wrong about was not his opinion that quantum mechanics is right or not. In fact, we do not know whether quantum mechanics is right or wrong. What Albert Einstein did wrong is the perception that quantum theory can be combined with local realism in one crucible, But the results of the larger Bell experiment, and its predecessors, tend towards asserting that the quantum world cannot be explained in the language of classical physics. (13) John Stuart Bell says: “For me, the real problem with quantum theory is the apparent contradiction between its strict equations and the theory of relativity, perhaps A true synthesis of the two theories requires not just technical developments, but a radical renovation of concepts."
In the last sentence of John Bell we can understand very well the main problem that quantum theory poses to physics, and science as a whole.
Let's imagine the position of scientists at the moment when quantum mechanics appeared and began to gain wide degrees of confidence, it seems frustrating, everything that physicists built before it is subjected to a violent shake, notions of simply "local realism" turn into a state of confusion, but what is happening here reminds us of an important and final question : What science?
If it is an effort by human society to understand nature, we must respect the way that nature expresses itself as it wants, not as we want it to. This means that when surprises arise, we are on the right path. Richard Feynman once said: “The contradiction arises from the contradiction between reality And your perception of what that reality should be.