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We need a down to earth real guide on quantum, because many are convinced that superposition and entanglement are somehow communication and/or trust mechanisms.
by devwastaken 5y ago
We need a down to earth real guide on quantum, because many are convinced that superposition and entanglement are somehow communication and/or trust mechanisms. In reality entanglement simply means that one particle spins the opposite of another particle it's entangled with. They could already have been this way from entanglement, but we don't know it's actual state until observation (with scientific instruments small enough to read the spin of a particle, not eyes).
I'm probably completely wrong too.
- drdeca 5y agoNo, entanglement does not just mean “it is in one of these two states but we haven’t measured which”. Entanglement is what you get when you have a state in the tensor product of two systems which is not a tensor product of a single state from each system, but is instead a linear combination of such products. There are, in fact, experiments that can be (and have been) done which distinguish between “these two particles are entangled” and “we don’t know which of two combinations of states these two particles are in”. However, if you only have one particle of the entangled pair, and don’t have any other way of getting information from the other particle, you can’t distinguish it from just, a probability mixture of (superpositions of) states of the one particle. I say “(superpositions of) states of the one particle” to emphasize that the states don’t have to be in one of the standard basis states with a nice name like “up” or “down”, (though you could use a different basis in which it is a basis state).