Summary of George Musser's Spooky Action at a Distance

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 Enrique Galvez’s lab at Colgate University is about the size of a two-car garage and jam-packed with stuff. Entanglement is the best known of several types of nonlocality that modern physicists have observed, and the one that scared Einstein.
#2 The first step in teleportation is to create and distribute the entangled photons. This is done by creating a pair of entangled photons and positioning one on each side of the lab. Then, you take the photon you want to beam and let it interact with the left particle.
#3 The setup of the quantum entanglement experiment is shown in the image above. The red beams are sent to polarizing filters, which allow some photons to pass through and others to be blocked. The detectors, which are sensitive enough to pick up individual photons, pulse wildly because the slightest sliver of light will set them off.
#4 The pattern of heads and tails is always the same, no matter how many times you flip the coins. But if you flip a pair of suitably prepared quantum entangled coins, they will always land on the same side. This is a result of the coins being magic coins.

Sujets

• Physique
• Physical attractiveness
• Physics
• Quantum theory

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 25 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669364122
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on George Musser's Spooky Action at a Distance
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Enrique Galvez’s lab at Colgate University is about the size of a two-car garage and jam-packed with stuff. Entanglement is the best known of several types of nonlocality that modern physicists have observed, and the one that scared Einstein.

#2

The first step in teleportation is to create and distribute the entangled photons. This is done by creating a pair of entangled photons and positioning one on each side of the lab. Then, you take the photon you want to beam and let it interact with the left particle.

#3

The setup of the quantum entanglement experiment is shown in the image above. The red beams are sent to polarizing filters, which allow some photons to pass through and others to be blocked. The detectors, which are sensitive enough to pick up individual photons, pulse wildly because the slightest sliver of light will set them off.

#4

The pattern of heads and tails is always the same, no matter how many times you flip the coins. But if you flip a pair of suitably prepared quantum entangled coins, they will always land on the same side. This is a result of the coins being magic coins.

#5

The researchers at the Centre for Quantum Technologies have been able to stretch the distance between two filters by one hundred miles, and still maintain the photons’ synchronized behavior.

#6

Nonlocality is a mystery that has confounded scientists for decades. It is the ability of particles to act as if by magic, which shocked Maudlin when he learned about it in the fall of 1979. His physics professors never explained why not.

#7

The famous debates between Einstein and another founder of quantum mechanics, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, in the 1920s and ’30s, were about nonlocality. Einstein argued that it was an aspect of nature that we didn’t understand, while Bohr argued that it didn’t matter what weirdness lay behind the scenes as long as the theory could predict what experiments saw.

#8

Bell’s paper was not cited by a single other paper for four years, and not mentioned in textbooks until 1985. It was a very attenuated form of magic that wouldn’t win you any wizarding cups.

#9

The old walls between physicists and philosophers are falling down, and they are beginning to see nonlocality in other domains of science. They are beginning to see how important it is in understanding the world around them.

#10

The center of the galaxy, Sagittarius A*, is a black hole. Its gravity is so powerful that what goes down never comes up. Material can and usually does orbit around it, but if you tried to touch what you thought was its surface, your hand would just pass through.

#11

The two main theories that physicists have to explain the fate of swallowed material are gravity theory and quantum theory. Gravity theory says that falling into a black hole is irreversible, while quantum theory says nothing is irreversible.

#12

The theory states that subatomic particles are rubber bands or guitar strings that vibrate in different ways, making the world a symphony of unimaginable complexity. The theory had languished in obscurity since the late 1960s, but its few proponents were able to convince the majority of its internal consistency.

#13

The hole argument is based on the assumption that quantum mechanics is wrong and that information is transmitted through black holes irreversibly. However, quantum entanglement is subtle, and does not overtly contradict any other law of physics.

#14

The night sky is dark, and it looks the same everywhere. It is one of the foundations of the big-bang theory, for it means that the universe is finite in age or size or both.

#15

The uniformity of the night sky didn’t become a mystery until two observational breakthroughs in the 1960s. First, astronomers discovered quasars, which look like stars at first glance but have colors like no star anyone had ever seen. The second discovery was the cosmic microwave background radiation, which showed that the universe was uniform.

#16

The cosmological horizon problem is similar to the particle problem. We can see two galaxies on the cosmic horizon even when they can’t see each other, which looks spookily like what Galvez sees in his lab.

#17

In the late 1970s, Russian and American physicists discovered a way to solve the horizon problem without ditching either locality or Einstein’s theory. The idea is that the two galaxies on opposite sides of our sky used to be close together, and were dragged apart when the universe went through an early growth spurt.

#18

One of the inflation skeptics is Fotini Markopoulou. She believes that the big picture has engrossed her since she was a kid. She loves art, archaeology, and architecture, and she didn’t know what major to list on her college application. She ended up deciding theoretical physics would be the most interesting choice.