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I have always wondered if quantum entanglement is the scientific explanation of why when you start thinking of someone (or stop thinking) suddenly they just tex

I 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 ago
It seems like HN's community very much lacks humour, given the response to your comment.
- smolder 2y ago
  I 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 ago
Not likely. That's not what entanglement does.
qwertox 2y ago
Nobody ever texts me. Maybe you just text too much to realize that its unrelated.
atoav 2y ago
Nope. 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 ago
I feel like that's just a combination of coincidence and confirmation bias
- quantadev 2y ago
  Kind of like how 99.99% of Alien Encounters were not aliens, but .01% were, tho amirite? :)
layer8 2y ago
It’s not.
Yoric 2y ago
Answering in case this is not humor: no, it isn't. From the top of my head, quantum entanglement is something: 1/ that happens at quantum level, so typically with measurable effects on a scale smaller than one atom (way smaller than one neuron); 2/ that requires specific operations on a specific group of particles (the probability that such entangled particles end up in two different brains of related people is infinitesimal); 3/ that requires many measures to confirm – and you can only do so once per group of particles (so it would not be sufficient to have two entangled particles one in each brain, you'd probably need tens of thousands).
dyauspitr 2y ago
No, but it’s the very definition of new age pseudo science work that was all the rage in the 90s.
hansoolo 2y ago
I call it synchronicity
- jgalt212 2y ago
  Best Police album
ivanjermakov 2y ago
Joke aside, seems like a frequency illusion[1] to me. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
Johanx64 2y ago
My idiots understanding of quantum entaglement is that if you take two boxes A and B, and each gets either a plus or a minus stored in them and then those boxes get sent galaxies away from each other, the moment you open either of the boxes and see a plus in it, you know that the other box by necessity has minus in it - even if it's very far apart. This simple observation is something physicists have hard time wrapping their head around for some reason. The reason I suspect being that it clashes with their religious beliefs about free will and whatnot. It's weird.
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  Except that experiments have ruled out hidden variables. (Go read about Bell inequalities.) > something physicists have hard time wrapping their head around for some reason The problem is that it's fundamentally different from anything you can do in classical mechanics. And because of that, attempts to explain it in simple terms with casual language are doomed. And attempts to take shortcuts in reasoning by analogizing it to something from everyday life are doomed.
  - Johanx64 2y ago
    > Except that experiments have ruled out hidden variables. (Go read about Bell inequalities.) Nobel Prize in physics 2022 “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”
- rcxdude 2y ago
  It stops working nicely like that once you go to slightly more complicated than measuring two photons with spin up and spin down. Then you find correlations that make no sense at all if you assume that each photon has a definite state before you measure them (for example, it's as if some events have negative probabilities).
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  To some extent, that is in fact how entanglement works. In fact, if you perform a Bell-style experiment exactly like this (with the two measurements in the two galaxies along the same axis), you'll get this same un-interesting result. The problem is that it works like more than this too. Say you have two billiard balls on a very very large table with almost no friction. One ball is stationery, the other is moving towards it and spinning along some axis. When they collide, they'll be sent along some random directions and each with some spin, and their spins are going to add up to the original spin of the moving ball (angular momentum is conserved in frictionless interactions in classical mechanics too). Now, when the ball arrive at a long distance away from each other, two experimenters which can't see the balls measure their spin. They each choose some direction and measure how much their ball spins along that direction. They repeat the experiment lots of times, keeping good track of each individual result. When they later compare notes, they'll measure how much their respective results for each individual experiment were correlated. Since they were measuring along different axis, they didn't both see the exact same result: maybe for the ball that reached one was spinning at one revolution along the 45° axis every two seconds, and the other was spinning at half a revolution along the 1° axis every second. Ultimately, they'll find that the correlation between their experiments was about 75% (each time they measure along unrelated axis, they get no correlation, when they happen to measure along the exact same axis, they get perfect correlation, and when it's in between, it's some subset of that). However, if we repeat the same thing with quantum particles, we actually find a higher correlation, about 85%. This can only happen if (a) measuring one particle changes the other - and we've quickly ruled out that this can happen at slower than light speeds, or (b) the particle pair don't share a definite state to begin with, but assume an appropriate state only when they are measured [or (c) the axis chosen by the experimenters in each measurement somehow depends on the spin of the particle pair].
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
I think it's possible that evolution still has some tricks up its sleeve which our physics isn't up to the task of explaining. You could be right.
quantadev 2y ago
I think once we fully understand consciousness (and physics in general) at a deeper level, then not all, but a very large amount of stuff that was previously labeled as "magical thinking", "ghosts", "telepathy", etc will turn out to have been not only real but perfectly explainable by science. Of course I'll now be slammed for "woo woo" unscientific thinking as is always the case on HN, when someone who "knows all" encounters someone who doesn't.
dotnet00 2y ago
It's a big chunk of confirmation bias (you don't remember all the times when that doesn't happen) and all sorts of less obvious behavioral correlations, like, if you tend to talk to someone weekly, and it's been a week since the last time, it wouldn't be surprising to have them reaching out to you around the same time you're thinking of them. I think this also holds up with how ad tracking aims to hoover up all sorts of data to find correlations. There are probably a lot of non-obvious correlations in there, which causes ads to sometimes eerily seem to read minds. These same correlations may cause people to exhibit very similar thoughts without needing to invoke quantum entanglement.
bastawhiz 2y ago
It can't possibly be true. Such an idea presupposes there are particles in your body that are entangled with particles in someone else's body. Even setting aside that there would need to be vast biological machinery to suck up and put those particles in a useful place and that the particles would need to be able to interface with your physiology such that they are capable of activating neurons, the phenomenon wouldn't exist for people who have never met face to face. If there's a non-psychological explanation for the phenomenon you're describing, it's not quantum entanglement, it's an entirely new kind of science that we have yet to contemplate.
- itsanaccount 2y ago
  A new kind of science -you- have yet to contemplate. You shouldn't project your or HN's particular lack of imagination on the rest of humanity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake
  - bastawhiz 2y ago
    Describing a phenomenon is not contemplating the science behind it. Without evidence or observations, it's not science.

I 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 ago

It seems like HN's community very much lacks humour, given the response to your comment.

smolder 2y ago
I 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 ago

Not likely. That's not what entanglement does.

qwertox 2y ago

Nobody ever texts me. Maybe you just text too much to realize that its unrelated.

atoav 2y ago

Nope. 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 ago

I feel like that's just a combination of coincidence and confirmation bias

quantadev 2y ago
Kind of like how 99.99% of Alien Encounters were not aliens, but .01% were, tho amirite? :)

layer8 2y ago

It’s not.

Yoric 2y ago

Answering in case this is not humor: no, it isn't. From the top of my head, quantum entanglement is something: 1/ that happens at quantum level, so typically with measurable effects on a scale smaller than one atom (way smaller than one neuron); 2/ that requires specific operations on a specific group of particles (the probability that such entangled particles end up in two different brains of related people is infinitesimal); 3/ that requires many measures to confirm – and you can only do so once per group of particles (so it would not be sufficient to have two entangled particles one in each brain, you'd probably need tens of thousands).

dyauspitr 2y ago

No, but it’s the very definition of new age pseudo science work that was all the rage in the 90s.

hansoolo 2y ago

I call it synchronicity

jgalt212 2y ago
Best Police album

ivanjermakov 2y ago

Joke aside, seems like a frequency illusion[1] to me. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

Johanx64 2y ago

My idiots understanding of quantum entaglement is that if you take two boxes A and B, and each gets either a plus or a minus stored in them and then those boxes get sent galaxies away from each other, the moment you open either of the boxes and see a plus in it, you know that the other box by necessity has minus in it - even if it's very far apart. This simple observation is something physicists have hard time wrapping their head around for some reason. The reason I suspect being that it clashes with their religious beliefs about free will and whatnot. It's weird.

tbrownaw 2y ago
Except that experiments have ruled out hidden variables. (Go read about Bell inequalities.) > something physicists have hard time wrapping their head around for some reason The problem is that it's fundamentally different from anything you can do in classical mechanics. And because of that, attempts to explain it in simple terms with casual language are doomed. And attempts to take shortcuts in reasoning by analogizing it to something from everyday life are doomed.
- Johanx64 2y ago
  > Except that experiments have ruled out hidden variables. (Go read about Bell inequalities.) Nobel Prize in physics 2022 “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”
rcxdude 2y ago
It stops working nicely like that once you go to slightly more complicated than measuring two photons with spin up and spin down. Then you find correlations that make no sense at all if you assume that each photon has a definite state before you measure them (for example, it's as if some events have negative probabilities).
tsimionescu 2y ago
To some extent, that is in fact how entanglement works. In fact, if you perform a Bell-style experiment exactly like this (with the two measurements in the two galaxies along the same axis), you'll get this same un-interesting result. The problem is that it works like more than this too. Say you have two billiard balls on a very very large table with almost no friction. One ball is stationery, the other is moving towards it and spinning along some axis. When they collide, they'll be sent along some random directions and each with some spin, and their spins are going to add up to the original spin of the moving ball (angular momentum is conserved in frictionless interactions in classical mechanics too). Now, when the ball arrive at a long distance away from each other, two experimenters which can't see the balls measure their spin. They each choose some direction and measure how much their ball spins along that direction. They repeat the experiment lots of times, keeping good track of each individual result. When they later compare notes, they'll measure how much their respective results for each individual experiment were correlated. Since they were measuring along different axis, they didn't both see the exact same result: maybe for the ball that reached one was spinning at one revolution along the 45° axis every two seconds, and the other was spinning at half a revolution along the 1° axis every second. Ultimately, they'll find that the correlation between their experiments was about 75% (each time they measure along unrelated axis, they get no correlation, when they happen to measure along the exact same axis, they get perfect correlation, and when it's in between, it's some subset of that). However, if we repeat the same thing with quantum particles, we actually find a higher correlation, about 85%. This can only happen if (a) measuring one particle changes the other - and we've quickly ruled out that this can happen at slower than light speeds, or (b) the particle pair don't share a definite state to begin with, but assume an appropriate state only when they are measured [or (c) the axis chosen by the experimenters in each measurement somehow depends on the spin of the particle pair].

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago

I think it's possible that evolution still has some tricks up its sleeve which our physics isn't up to the task of explaining. You could be right.

quantadev 2y ago

I think once we fully understand consciousness (and physics in general) at a deeper level, then not all, but a very large amount of stuff that was previously labeled as "magical thinking", "ghosts", "telepathy", etc will turn out to have been not only real but perfectly explainable by science. Of course I'll now be slammed for "woo woo" unscientific thinking as is always the case on HN, when someone who "knows all" encounters someone who doesn't.

dotnet00 2y ago

It's a big chunk of confirmation bias (you don't remember all the times when that doesn't happen) and all sorts of less obvious behavioral correlations, like, if you tend to talk to someone weekly, and it's been a week since the last time, it wouldn't be surprising to have them reaching out to you around the same time you're thinking of them. I think this also holds up with how ad tracking aims to hoover up all sorts of data to find correlations. There are probably a lot of non-obvious correlations in there, which causes ads to sometimes eerily seem to read minds. These same correlations may cause people to exhibit very similar thoughts without needing to invoke quantum entanglement.

bastawhiz 2y ago

It can't possibly be true. Such an idea presupposes there are particles in your body that are entangled with particles in someone else's body. Even setting aside that there would need to be vast biological machinery to suck up and put those particles in a useful place and that the particles would need to be able to interface with your physiology such that they are capable of activating neurons, the phenomenon wouldn't exist for people who have never met face to face. If there's a non-psychological explanation for the phenomenon you're describing, it's not quantum entanglement, it's an entirely new kind of science that we have yet to contemplate.

itsanaccount 2y ago
A new kind of science -you- have yet to contemplate. You shouldn't project your or HN's particular lack of imagination on the rest of humanity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  Describing a phenomenon is not contemplating the science behind it. Without evidence or observations, it's not science.