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LHC experiments at CERN observe quantum entanglement at the highest energy yet
- gradientsrneat 2y agoHuh, I was under the impression that particle entanglement was a binary: either it's entangled or it's not. From this article, I have learned that is not the case. Is the degree of entanglement itself a quantum property? Anyways, very cool.
- phyzome 2y ago« test the Standard Model of particle physics in new ways and look for signs of new physics that may lie beyond it » "Surely we're just a teensy bit away from that new physics, and if we can just a little bit more money^Wenergy into the system, we'll find that new physics for sure!"
- metacritic12 2y agoSeriously, this headline is the quantum equivalent of "super expensive catapult observe tallest free fall yet." Or verifying Galileo's free fall experiment with more and more items. It's nice that Newton's laws still hold, but do we really need to test it on the one millionth object?
- dexwiz 2y agoThere are some effects that may show up only at very high energies. A large enough catapult and you would put something into orbit. Wouldn’t that be a novel outcome?
- pohuing 2y agoOr fast enough to break the sound barrier. I'd assume that's a new discovery when catapults were still relevant. Or heating of the projectile from drag...
- andreareina 2y agoHow about a supersonic trebuchet? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gdXOS-B0Bus https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gdXOS-B0Bus
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoYes but clearly you couldn’t achieve that with normal catapult technology. You need some theory to be able to predict what energies are going to be significant.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Valectar 2y agoAt high enough energies the laws of physics are actually different. Two of the four fundamental forces in physics, the electromagnetic force and the weak interaction, are actually a single force which only appears to be two separate forces at "low" energies/temperatures, with low being the pretty much all temperatures in the universe after the Big Bang. It is completely reasonable to test whether phenomenon that hold at low energies still hold at high energies, and that may be the only way you're going to find more fundamental physical laws. Especially when we know quantum theory is incomplete, since it is currently incompatible with general relativity.
- JoshTriplett 2y agoRight now, we have two sets of laws, one at very small scales and one at macro scales. We don't yet have a theory to unify the two. Any and all experiments give data that can help with those and many other questions.
- wasabi991011 2y agoYou're not wrong but on the other hand, if you already have super expensive catapult that's been throwing things at the tallest heights for years, why not publish a short paper analyzing the data to show it matches freefall at those heights?
- jfengel 2y agoThey know that it's a long way and a lot more money. Fundamental physics has a habit of paying off in utterly unexpected ways, but that's not really why we do this. It's pure curiosity. They are grateful that the public seems willing to pay for curiosity. I don't know how long it will last. Though I can say that it's a rounding error in national budgets.
- iamflimflam1 2y agoImagine how much money is spent on defence. And then imagine the tiny proportion that is spend on basic research that might result in offensive or defensive weapons.
- greenavocado 2y agoThe fusion breakthrough in the National Ignition Facility was said to be essentially a program claiming to be for nuclear weapons research but instead they did fundamental research.
- dotnet00 2y agoI think it'd be clearer to say they did fundamental research as part of nuclear weapons research. The goal of the facility is to perform testing that can help to validate the continued functioning and yield of the nuclear weapon stockpile without actually setting off a nuke. Since a hydrogen bomb achieves fusion ignition, being able to perform ignition at the facility is kind of part of the goal.
- AmericanChopper 2y agoPersonally I can’t imagine not understanding that the defence funding is one of the most essential factors in enabling our modern way of life. It’s been so effective at providing the security needed to produce globalisation and highly democratic societies, that a lot of people have forgotten the reason we need it in the first place. Certainly worth the minuscule portion of GDP we allocate to it.
- SiempreViernes 2y agoHey, saying paradise is just around the corner with "just a bit more scale" works wonderfully for OpenAI, and these guys have much more modest claims and asks.
- carstenhag 2y agoThe people at cern are amazing at making you like science & gather money. I was there only for a student trip (non-related studies) and they had many slides about how awesome the international collaboration, science, funding etc is. And of course, they show you the huge site and machines and talk about stuff that you don't understand anything about.
- TaylorAlexander 2y agoI don’t know if that’s what people are saying, tho maybe part of convincing the public to fund such efforts involves strongly suggesting that could be the case. But what else can we do but poke them harder? It’s been working so far.
- tamimio 2y agoI have always wondered if quantum entanglement is the scientific explanation of why when you start thinking of someone (or stop thinking) suddenly they just text you.
- aDyslecticCrow 2y agoIt seems like HN's community very much lacks humour, given the response to your comment.
- smolder 2y agoI won't speak for all of HN but I simply don't like low effort comments. Jokes like this are cheap and exist everywhere online. I come to HN to learn and discuss. I don't down vote an informative post with a joke tacked on, but one like this just lowers the information density and is a time waster.
- jfengel 2y agoNot likely. That's not what entanglement does.
- qwertox 2y agoNobody ever texts me. Maybe you just text too much to realize that its unrelated.
- atoav 2y agoNope. That is coincidence paired with statistical priors. If you have certain relationships to people it is not unlikely that they would think: "I should text" in periods that overlap with you thinking a similar thing.
- ktm5j 2y agoI feel like that's just a combination of coincidence and confirmation bias
- quantadev 2y ago
- cwillu 2y ago“It is a remarkable property of nature that when sufficient energy is crammed into a sufficiently small space, particles that were not previously present can sometimes be created out of that energy. This is, in fact, why we do high-energy particle collisions. The extremely-compressed-energy technique is the only one we know that can allow us to create heavy or exceedingly rare particles that humans have never previously observed. We have no other way to make Higgs particles, for instance.” https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/particle-physics-why-do-it-and-why-do-it-that-way/ https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> when sufficient energy is crammed into a sufficiently small space, particles that were not previously present can sometimes be created out of that energy Huh, could say the same about particle physicists and multibillion-dollar collider proposals. Don't get me wrong. I think we underspend by an order of magnitude on basic research. But the $17bn the Future Circular Collider is proposed to cost [1] (which comes to $30bn if we assume similar overages to the LHC [2]) could be spent better. That's like, six Europa missions [3]? Three James Webb telescopes [4]? Like fifty gravity wave detectors [5]? Thirty years of Moderna's R&D budget [6]? [1] https://home.cern/science/accelerators/future-circular-collider https://home.cern/science/accelerators/future-circular-colli... [2] https://en.as.com/latest_news/how-much-money-did-cerns-large-hadron-collider-cost-to-build-and-who-paid-for-it-n/ https://en.as.com/latest_news/how-much-money-did-cerns-large... [3] https://www.space.com/europa-clipper-mission-explained https://www.space.com/europa-clipper-mission-explained [4] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/james-webb-space-telescope-cost-nasa-billions-pictures-are-rcna38813 https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/james-webb-space-teles... [5] https://www.wired.com/2015/09/long-search-elusive-ripples-spacetime/ https://www.wired.com/2015/09/long-search-elusive-ripples-sp... [6] https://www.biospace.com/business/moderna-slashes-r-d-budget-by-1-1b-eyes-10-approvals-through-2027 https://www.biospace.com/business/moderna-slashes-r-d-budget...
- bastawhiz 2y ago$17bn is 2% of the US government annual defense budget, and that money will build a facility that operates for far longer than a year. It's 0.8% of the cost of the F-35 program (or 3.8% of the program's procurement cost). $17bn is a big number for individuals, but it's a fairly small number for governments. The truth is that there's no shortage of money, there's just a shortage of motivation to put it towards forward-looking endeavors. The idea that there's a fixed-sized pie for science and every project takes away from something else is, frankly, defeatist. As a society we don't value investment in science and medicine like we should, and so lawmakers don't fear that putting too little money towards science will lose them an election.
- guy234 2y agoI am having trouble wrapping my head around the sense in which entanglement is a physical phenomenon as opposed to a semantical byproduct of the bookkeeping involved in modern quantum theory. How can an entangled system be differentiated from a nonentangled system? If the answer is that such an identification is nonfeasible, then in what sense is entanglement an actual physical phenomenon? I was under the impression that a particular entangled system is defined in terms of a particular waveform, which means that the choice of another waveform including, say, an additional particle off to the side, would imply that the entanglement -- which is supposed to be the behaviour being described, not the theory used to describe it -- actually changes. So, substitution of separate waveforms for each component of the entanglement would imply that entanglement is not present. How would this be false in a way different from the inaccuracies present in any other choice of waveform?
- nsxwolf 2y agoI'm still having trouble understanding why it can't be used for faster than light communication even after having it explained to me hundreds of times in the last 30 years.
- jchw 2y agoFrom my admittedly layperson pop-sci level of understanding, that's easier than it seems: there's simply nothing you can do to one part of the entangled pair that will result in observable side-effects to the other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem
- Loughla 2y agoI'm going to level with you. I read the informal overview and only understood about half of it. I still have zero concept of why it's impossible. Help?
- adgjlsfhk1 2y agothe tldr is that the "sender" can't choose what the value of the bits they are sending are.
- cowsaymoo 2y agoThe sophons must be on vacation
- Shadowmist 2y agoGo to the moon for like two seconds and this shit happens.