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mieubrisse
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Clearly, I am a newb at this. However:
I was reading a bit on qubits and quantum entanglement and -- though I know that QM has no analog to classical mechanics -- the general concept seems to be: two particles interact and become quantum entangled, and then have non-local ties to each other. To me, this sounds kind of like "An immensely tiny billiard ball spinning one direction along an arbitrary axis comes into contact with another stationary ball in a deserted place. Nobody has any idea which direction the balls are spinning in. The two balls are then given to two separate researchers (the researchers have special ideal-environment cubes to contain the balls during transport so they have ZERO effect on the balls). When a researcher determines which axis and direction one of the two billiard balls is spinning along, the other researcher is guaranteed to find that the other billiard ball is spinning along the same axis in the opposite direction.
But of COURSE the researcher was guaranteed to find that the other ball is tied to the first because we know that the first ball will change the state of the second in a known way (in this case, friction between the balls causes the originally-stationary one to move on the same axis as the first in an opposite direction). Seemingly, if we know how the balls came in contact and know that they were not affected in any way since the initial contact (the analog to quantum decoherence??), we can accurately predict the entire system based on one measurement.
I'm sure it's not that simple... what did I miss? Why is quantum entanglement so surprising and magical?mieubrisse
I was reading a bit on qubits and quantum entanglement and -- though I know that QM has no analog to classical mechanics -- the general concept seems to be: two particles interact and become quantum entangled, and then have non-local ties to each other. To me, this sounds kind of like "An immensely tiny billiard ball spinning one direction along an arbitrary axis comes into contact with another stationary ball in a deserted place. Nobody has any idea which direction the balls are spinning in. The two balls are then given to two separate researchers (the researchers have special ideal-environment cubes to contain the balls during transport so they have ZERO effect on the balls). When a researcher determines which axis and direction one of the two billiard balls is spinning along, the other researcher is guaranteed to find that the other billiard ball is spinning along the same axis in the opposite direction.
But of COURSE the researcher was guaranteed to find that the other ball is tied to the first because we know that the first ball will change the state of the second in a known way (in this case, friction between the balls causes the originally-stationary one to move on the same axis as the first in an opposite direction). Seemingly, if we know how the balls came in contact and know that they were not affected in any way since the initial contact (the analog to quantum decoherence??), we can accurately predict the entire system based on one measurement.
I'm sure it's not that simple... what did I miss? Why is quantum entanglement so surprising and magical?mieubrisse
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