LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

right leg at precisely that moment, even though he is 4000 miles away, sipping a latte at Starbucks.4 Albert Einstein refused to accept non-locality, referring to it disparagingly as ‘spukhafte Fernwirkungen’ or ‘spooky action at a distance’. This type of instantaneous connection would require information travelling faster than the speed of light, he argued through a famous thought experiment, which would violate his own special relativity theory.5 Since the formulation of Einstein’s theory, the speed of light (299,792,458 metres per second) has been used as the absolute limiting factor on how quickly one thing can affect something else. Things are not supposed to be able to affect other things faster than the time it would take the first thing to travel to the second thing at the speed of light.

Nevertheless, modern physicists, such as Alain Aspect and his colleagues in Paris, have demonstrated decisively that the speed of light is not an absolute outer boundary in the subatomic world. Aspect’s experiment, which concerned two photons fired off from a single atom, showed that the measurement of one photon instantaneously affected the position of the second photon6 so that it has the same or opposite spin or position (as IBM physicist Charles H. Bennett once put it, ‘opposite luck’).7 The two photons continued to talk to each other and whatever happened to one was identical to, or the very opposite of, what happened to the other. Today, even the most conservative physicists accept non-locality as a strange feature of subatomic reality.8

Most quantum experiments incorporate some test of Bell’s Inequality. This famous experiment in quantum physics was carried out by John Bell, an Irish physicist who developed a practical means to test how quantum particles really behaved.9 This simple test required that you get two quantum particles that had once been in contact, separate them and then take measurements of the two. It is analogous to a couple named Daphne and Ted who have once been together but are now separated. Daphne can choose one of two possible directions to go in and so can Ted. According to our commonsense view of reality, Daphne’s choice should be utterly independent of Ted’s.

      When Bell carried out his experiment, the expectation was that one of the measurements would be larger than the other – a demonstration of ‘inequality’. However, a comparison of the measurements showed that both were the same and so his inequality was ‘violated’. Some invisible wire appeared to be connecting these quantum particles across space, to make them follow each other. Ever since, physicists have understood that when a violation of Bell’s Inequality occurs, it means that two things are entangled.

      Bell’s Inequality has enormous implications for our understanding of the universe. By accepting non-locality as a natural facet of nature we are acknowledging that two of the bedrocks on which our world view rests are wrong: that influence only occurs over time and distance, and that particles like Daphne and Ted, and indeed the things that are made up of particles, only exist independently of each other.

      Although modern physicists now accept non-locality as a given feature of the quantum world, they console themselves by maintaining that this strange, counter-intuitive property of the subatomic universe does not apply to anything bigger than a photon or electron. Once things got to the level of atoms and molecules, which in the world of physics is considered ‘macroscopic’, or large, the universe started behaving itself again, according to predictable, measurable, Newtonian laws.

      With one tiny thumbnail’s worth of crystal, Rosenbaum and his graduate student demolished that delineation. They had demonstrated that big things like atoms were non-locally connected, even in matter so large you could hold it in your hand. Never before had quantum non-locality been demonstrated on such a scale. Although the specimen had been only a tiny chip of salt, to the subatomic particle, it was a palatial country mansion, housing a billion billion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 10¹⁸) atoms. Rosenbaum, ordinarily loathe to speculate about what he could not yet explain, realized that they had uncovered something extraordinary about the nature of the universe. And I realized they had discovered a mechanism for intention: they had demonstrated that atoms, the essential constituents of matter, could be affected by non-local influence. Large things like crystals were not playing by the grand rules of the game, but by the anarchic rules of the quantum world, maintaining invisible connections without obvious cause.

In 2002, after Sai wrote up their findings, Rosenbaum polished up the wording and sent off their paper to Nature, a journal notorious for conservatism and exacting peer review. After four months of responding to the suggestions of reviewers, Ghosh finally got her paper published in the world’s premier scientific journal, a laudatory feat for a 26-year-old graduate student.10

One of the reviewers, Vlatko Vedral, noted the experiment with a mix of interest and frustration.11 A Yugoslav who had studied at Imperial College, London, during his country’s civil war and subsequent collapse, Vedral had distinguished himself in his adopted country and been chosen to head up quantum information science at the University of Leeds. Vedral, who was tall and leonine, was part of a small group in Vienna working on frontier quantum physics, including entanglement.

Vedral first theoretically predicted the effect that Ghosh and Rosenbaum eventually found three years later. He had submitted the paper to Nature in 2001, but the journal, which preferred experiment to theory, had rejected it. Eventually, Vedral managed to publish his paper in Physical Review Letters, the premier physics journal.12 After Nature decided to publish Ghosh’s study, its editors threw him a conciliatory bone. They allowed him to be a reviewer on the paper, and then offered him a place in the same issue to write an opinion piece on the findings.

In the article, Vedral allowed himself some speculation. Quantum physics is accepted as the most accurate means of describing how atoms combine to form molecules, he wrote, and since molecular relationship is the basis of all chemistry, and chemistry is the basis of biology, the magic of entanglement could well be the key to life itself.13

      Vedral and a number of others in his circle did not believe that this effect was unique to holmium. The central problem in uncovering entanglement is the primitive state of our technology; isolating and observing this effect is only possible at the moment by slowing atoms down so much in such cold conditions that they are hardly moving. Nevertheless, a number of physicists had observed entanglement in matter at 200 K, or –73°C – a temperature that can be found on Earth in some of its very coldest places.

Other researchers have proved mathematically that everywhere, even inside of our own bodies, atoms and molecules are engaged in an instantaneous and ceaseless passing back and forth of information. Thomas Durt of Vrije University in Brussels demonstrated through elegant mathematical formulations that almost all quantum interactions produce entanglement, no matter what the internal or surrounding conditions. Even photons, the tiniest particles of light emanating from stars, are entangled with every atom they meet on their way to earth.14 Entanglement at normal temperatures appears to be a natural condition of the universe, even in our bodies. Every interaction between every electron inside of us creates entanglement. According to Benni Reznik, a theoretical physicist at Tel Aviv University in Israel, even the empty space around us is heaving with entangled particles.15

      The English mathematician Paul Dirac, an architect of quantum field theory, first postulated that there is no such thing as nothingness, or empty space. Even if you tipped all matter and energy out of the universe and examined all the ‘empty’

Скачать книгу