6w40b
Albert Einstein he may have been a genius, but even he can be wrong from time to time. In the 1920s and 1930s, the renowned scientist said that he could not the strange theory that “merely measuring a particle would affect its position in space”.
Now, a team of scientists from Japan and Australia has proven that this “haunted action from a distance”, as Einstein called it, happens in a photon.
Einstein did not believe that the phenomenon, technically called “collapse of the wave function” existed, as it violates the theory of relativity, which says the limit on how fast any kind of information can travel. The paradox was resolved years later, when experiments showed that although the interaction between two quantum particles happens faster than light, it is impossible to use this to send information.
Nearly 90 years later, by splitting a single photon between two laboratories, scientists used homodyne detectors to show that the collapse of the wave function it's a real effect. The report adds that while other experiments have demonstrated entanglement with two particles, the new study has entangled a photon with itself.
This phenomenon is the strongest evidence to date of single-particle entanglement, an unusual form of quantum entanglement (quantum entanglement, in English) that is being increasingly explored for the communication e computação quântica. To understand better, watch the video below:
"Einstein never accepted orthodox quantum mechanics, and the original basis of their contention was this single-particle argument,” said the Professor Wiseman. “That is why it is important to demonstrate the collapse of the wave function nonlocal with a single particle. the vision of Einstein was that the detection of the particle only at one point could be much better explained by the hypothesis that the particle is only at one point, without invoking the collapse of the wave function instant to nothing at all other points. However, instead of simply detecting the presence or absence of the particle, we use homodyne measurements, allowing one team to make different measurements and another using quantum tomography, to test the effect of these choices. Through these different measurements you can see the wavefunction collapse in different ways, therefore, proving the existence of showing that Einstein was wrong,” concludes the Professor Howard Wiseman from Griffiths University, who worked with the University of Tokyo on this project.
they proved that Einstein he was wrong, at least in one of his convictions. Not every scientist can have this on their resume.
Bonus: sand you still don't understand the implications of this novelty, it's worth taking a look at the documentary "The Secrets of Quantum Physics" (The Secrets of Quantum Physics, BBC, 2014), from the physicist Jim Al-Khalili, which explains in a practical and simple way the mysteries of this field of science.
Source: Live Science.
