![]() ![]() "That would still be true if my laboratory was millions of miles across." "I can put my hand in one beam and something happens to the other beam on the other side of the room instantaneously-I see a needle flick," he said. Phillips has seen this "extremely strange thing" first hand in his laboratory, where he has two beams of photons set up. He extended the famous quantum thought experiment of Schroedinger's cat, in which a hypothetical animal locked inside a box with a flask of poison remains simultaneously alive and dead-until the moment the box is opened.įor quantum entanglement, if you have two cats in two boxes, by opening one you would "kill that cat and instantaneously-on the other side of the universe-the other cat has been killed," Phillips said. But if it is up, then its twin is instantly forced down, or vice versa. When you observe the first photon, there are even odds that it will show itself as "either up or down", Phillips said. Einstein's theory of relativity says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.Īnd they are inextricably bound together. If you measure one photon it instantly affects the other-no matter how far you separate them. "They're different colors from the one you started with," Phillips said, "but because they started from one photon, they are entangled". If a photon is put through a "special crystal", it can be split into separate photons, he told AFP. To explain the phenomenon he used the example of a photon-"a single unit of light"-though the theory is believed to hold true for other particles. ![]() Even people with degrees in physics struggle to understand it-and some who do still find parts "hard to swallow," said Chris Phillips, a physicist at Imperial College London. ![]()
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