Quantum Rules

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Wheat Field with Cypresses Vincent Van Gogh

We live in a Quantum World. Physicists have been exploring the strange, counter-intuitive effects of the microscopic quantum realm for 100 years, and thought that these weird effects did not have any influence on the behavior of objects larger than an atom. Until now.

Perhaps the most famous thought experiment in physics was posited by Erwin Schrodinger in 1935. In it, he showed how the mere act of observation could change the outcome of an experiment. Other experiments followed which showed that a tiny particle such as a photon, atom, ion, etc., can exist in two opposing states or two different locations in space, at the same time! Not only that, but atoms separated by distance seem able to communicate their states to each other and change the direction of their spin, what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” This is called entanglement. Recent experiments have scaled-up their quantum entanglement experim…