Quantum Entanglement

Gradually, over several years now, I have become as interested as a non-mathematician, non-scientist can become interested in quantum physics.

That interest started when I read for the first time The God Problem.

I have read it a couple or three times since that first reading, and with each reading I become more interested in things like quantum entanglement.

That interest unfortunately is hindered by the fact that I don't know math, so I can't look at a whiteboard full of line after line of symbols and draw any conclusions.

But at the ape-brain level I can grasp some of the entry level concepts and their deep and important implications.

Recently I found a Nova episode titled Einstein's Quantum Riddle.

I have watched it several times because I couldn't get all of it in one viewing.

And between viewings I forget a lot of what I got.

I came away from the last viewing with a question: "Which particles can be entangled?"

I asked that because the Nova episode was using photons as the example of entangled particles and I assumed that other particles could be entangled, and I wondered what they were and if all known particles could be entangled.

(I actually wondered why Nova was using photons at all, because, as I understand it, photons are particles of light, light also being a wave; and, I am unsure of what a wave really is - I think it is something like a vibration, maybe, and that it waves/vibrates through something, some of the somethings in the case of light being beyond my current level of physics comprehension, and that if that is anywhere near an accurate description of light, and if one accepts the apparently accepted fact that light is the only wave that is also a particle, or has particles, or oscillates between being a wave and being a particle, that raises the question: is light like, but totally different from an atom, atoms having particles and all?  But I couldn't figure out how to pose that question to Bing. Because my version of Bing doesn't have any AI assistance such a kludge of a question would probably not produce rational results anyway; maybe when I get that version of Bing with AI, I can just refer it to this blog post and maybe Sidney, Bing's sidekick will get back to me with an answer - or ask me to run off to the Bahamas with it, if one believes the New York Times.)

I'm going to copy/paste a few things I found being said as a result of that Bing search: "which particles can be entangled?"

It turns out that not understanding or being able to speak math is the least of my problems.

It turns out I can't even do English.

Here are a few of the answers.

"Entanglement is nothing more than a state of correlation between two or more quantum objects. They need not even be the same object. Alan Steinhardt has already given the example of the electrons in an atom, or a molecule for that matter. Those electrons are arranged as Pauli spin pairs, which must be naturally correlated and therefore entangled. I will give another rather mundane example. Consider an atom that emits a photon. We don't know what direction the photon took. However, if we measure the photon we would know not only the direction of the photon, but also that of the atomic recoil. You see, a photon has momentum and the conservation of momentum means the atom will recoil. Therefore the momenta of the photon and atom are entangled."

"The excitement regarding entanglement has more to do with controlling and manipulating entanglement as a quantum resource. These requirements are far more stringent and call for special entanglement resources, or more specifically quantum resources that can be deterministically entangled. The gates in a quantum computer generate and manipulate entanglement. That's because entanglement is shared information between multiple quantum parties, and computing is all about information processing."

"Entanglement features largely in the theory of decoherence. With every interaction, a quantum system becomes increasingly entangled with it's environment. We quickly lose track of this increasing complexity and disregard the information. It is this information loss that introduces decoherence and wavefunction collapse, simply because a system becomes too entangled to comprehend."

Those are from Mark John Fernee from the University of Queensland.

I'm going to stop there.

I think I have lost any illusion that I could acquire a cocktail party level facility with quantum physics.

I'm going to confine my cocktail talk on the subject, should such an occasion ever present itself with a confident "Niels Bohr was absolutely correct!!"