A group of researchers at the Kalvi Institute of Nanoscience in the Netherlands were able to manipulate entangled electrons at a distance of 1.3 kilometers, the longest distance obtained so far in a lab.
Future experiments plan to expand this distance, there’s even one planned to put an entangled particle on the international space station.
As for what applications this may have, scientists imagine the possibility of using quantum entanglements to power a worldwide computer network, completely interconnected and communicating instantaneously all around the world.
There would be no such thing as internet speed, everything would happen all at once at all times.
Now imagine that one of those photons were split into two while in superposition, which it turns out is fairly easy to do by shining light through the right type of crystal lattice. Now you have two separate particles in superposition. What would happen if you measured one of them? Would both of their waveforms collapse? Or just the one you measured?
It turns out they both collapse. The change you make in one particle automatically changes the other.
You observe this one, this one collapses, you change the spin of that one, the other one changes. And it happens instantaneously, no matter how far apart the particles are.
Even if the particles are in two galaxies millions of light years away, they change direction simultaneously.
This is quantum entanglement.
But of course, this breaks all kinds of physical laws. How does this information travel faster than light if light is the fastest thing in the universe?
The answer to that question can be expressed in one mathematical equation: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah.
It’s far more than just a strange quirk of the quantum world, though. Because the big bang theory states that the entire universe was created from a single point, so there could be entangled particles all over the universe.
In fact, every particle may be entangled with another particle, or groups of particles, billions of particles scattered all throughout the universe.
And every time we observe a particle or change its spin, it’s altering particles all over the known universe.
There’s even a theory by our old friend John Archibald Wheeler called One Electron Universe theory, which theorizes that every electron in the universe is the same electron moving backwards and forwards through time along a single world line that is folded back in on itself like a giant knot.
Good luck with that one.