QUANTUM entanglement

The incredible tightness of being

MUKUL SHARMA


QUANTUM entanglement, as mentioned here earlier, is an essential characteristic of modern physics. It means that the properties of one subatomic particle depend on the properties of another particle independent of the distance between the two. Both particles without such properties before a measurement receive their properties instantaneously at the moment of the measurement. The two particles are said to be entangled . Einstein may have hated it and fought the notion unsuccessfully till his death but today, weird as it sounds, its a fact. A highly secure back transaction was carried out in Geneva recently using the technology.
But the idea of instant connectivity implies that space itself could be an illusion and, therefore , so could distance. Meaning that everybody and all objects are at a fundamental subatomic level somehow intimately connected with even the most distant parts of the universe and that were all at one place. And that there arent , in fact, what we believe to be separate places. More disturbingly , since space is inextricably tied up with time as the great physicist himself theorised with his continuum of spacetime time too might be only an illusion and actually everything exists always at the same moment. And finally, if both space and time are not real then all change should be an illusion too for change can only happen in space over a finite period of time.
Can good-old empirical physics really be painting us such a phantasmagoric picture of reality Well, seems theres a catch. (But the catch itself is a mindboggling one.) Yes, subatomic particles are entangled in exactly the way described above but as they develop into increasingly complex structures, as patterns are created out of them, and forms such as bacteria, people and galaxies come into being on a macro level, this illusion of space, time, change and causality is also somehow created.
As the quantum physicist Nick Herbert puts it: . . . the bricks that make up these patterns are not that way at all. They dont know anything about space and time, and theyre connected instantaneously . Now, why make a universe that way But whoever made this universe, or if it made itself, she/he did it with parts that were better than the whole, in some sense. Maybe the socalled mystics have been telling us the same thing all along: know the difference between appearance and reality.