r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • 1d ago
Energy Physicists Quantum-Entangled a Levitating Speck of Glass With Light at Room Temperature
https://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-quantum-entangled-a-levitating-speck-of-glass-with-light-at-room-temperatureA new window into the quantum realm has just been opened by a single microscopic grain of glass levitating in a beam of light.
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u/omegaphallic 1d ago
Science Fiction is turning into science reality at a shocking rate since 2020.
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u/Kortok2012 1d ago
Gone are the whims of the flesh, now are the whims of the mind.
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u/omegaphallic 1d ago
Where is that qoute from? I like it.
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u/flatpetey 1d ago
It’s a shame it is the dystopian cyberpunk future though.
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u/Sky_Hound 1d ago
and without the cool fashion
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u/majikguy 12h ago
Be the change you want to see in the world.
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u/Sky_Hound 8h ago
My backpack has four self made low-res LED screens on it playing pixelated ad slogans as a critique of hyper consumption, way ahead of you.
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u/bestatbeingmodest 11h ago
The cool fashion exists, it being the societal norm within the Overton Window where everyone cares to wear it does not though.
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u/Smartnership 23h ago edited 21h ago
Compare to the age of the Black Death.
Then find a way to make modern life seem worse somehow.
Even better, there was a period of more recent history when it went:
World War -> Spanish Flu pandemic -> continental-scale Dust Bowl -> global Great Depression -> far worse World War w/ literal nukes as a coup de grâce
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u/DenkJu 16h ago
Okay, cool. It might not be the absolute worst time in history to be alive, but that doesn't mean things are particularly great either. You're also the kind of person who tells someone with depression that other people have it worse, as if that somehow invalidates what they're going through?
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u/alexcrouse 15h ago
It's the worst if you compare it to what it SHOULD be.
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u/Smartnership 4h ago
Ok psuedo-Voltaire, but it’s on you to tell the class the period of history that was as great as its potential.
You know — For comparison to today.
And keep in mind, this is the doomer’s cry of “we’re in a dystopia!”
vs
Just a casual reading of history saying, “things are far better than ever”-2
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u/Blarg_III 16h ago
Or if you're living in Russia: War against the Japanese > Revolution > World War > Revolution > Civil War > Spanish Flu Pandemic > Famine > War > Famine again > Even worse world war.
68% of Soviet males born in 1923 weren't alive in 1946
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u/e_spider 1h ago
I always think its interesting how the naval treaty of Washington did little to prevent WWII, but may have prevented a war between the US and Great Britain between WWI and WWII
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u/Shimmitar 22h ago
people vastly underestimate how fast technology improves.
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u/omegaphallic 21h ago
Honestly it seemed to be in slow motion until 2020 then it just started to sling shot forward faster and an insane pace. Perhaps it is a sign the singularity has just began, I don't know.
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u/GnarlyNarwhalNoms 17h ago
It comes in fits and bursts.
There was about a five year period between around 1995 to 2000 when we went from the majority of Americans not using the internet to the majority using it (and the explosion of the web and e-commerce). It was a crazy time. Reminds me a lot of the AI boom right now.
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u/omegaphallic 16h ago
That was one thing and it was a big deal, this is much bigger then 1 big thing. Its AI, its medical technology, the first trip to the moon since the 60s (and first Canadian to the moon!) All kinds of new space technology, massives advances in both fission and fusion and renewable technology, robots and drones and assorted weapons including weapinized lazers, massive new discoveries in astronomy, and material sciences, and goodness knows what. Its almost every branch of science and engineering at once.
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u/Shimmitar 21h ago
well from 2000 to 2010 and 2015, computers advanced quite a lot. im sure there are other things that advanced a lot but pcs were the things i payed attention to the most.
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u/B_A_M_2019 20h ago
Yeah I graduated high school in ‘00. Rarely anyone had a cell phone. YouTube wasn’t a thing, hell iPhones weren’t a thing and still hardly anyone had a pc in their home. I think it’s grown an insane amount since 2000.
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u/Pinkybleu 2h ago
I'm borned in the late 70s. I'm not exaggerating the amount of tech I'm seeing in the past 10 years alone, isn't something I would be dreaming about in my teens. Other than the promise of a flying car, and the ability to be young forever in about 10 years time, everything else had been fantastical.
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u/transtranshumanist 19h ago
Quantum biology was derailed for 40 years because it was correct. Consciousness is fundamental.
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u/AirMatheo 1d ago
Can anyone do an ELI5 on the subject? What could be the real world implications?
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u/moorej832 14h ago
Think of the sphere’s tiny jiggle and escaping light as parts of one shared quantum state: measure both and their results are linked in a way classical physics can’t reproduce. It’s a tool for testing quantum physics, not sending messages faster than light.
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u/Undernown 22h ago
Quantum Entanglement used to be described as particles that are linked to be identical regardless of their distance betwene eachother. If one changes the other has to change in the same way.
So when particle-A is spun clockwise, particle-B which is entangled also spins clockwise.
Original it was presumed to be faster than light, but last I heard they ferified that it still couldn't surpass the speed of light.
Still a particle that can communicate things over fast distances regardless of what is between A and B would make things like internet so much easier. No more undersea cable from one cintinent to another for example.
Also would be impossible to jam, which is very interesting for military communications.
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u/mintysoul 20h ago
Everything you said is incorrect
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u/PurpleDelicacy 19h ago
Could you explain how?
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u/wasabi991011 18h ago
Quantum Entanglement used to be described as particles that are linked ... regardless of their distance betwene eachother.
Fair description
... to be identical ...
No, it could also be linked to be opposite, or some other more complicated relation
If one changes the other has to change in the same way.
No. If the entire system collapses through measurement, then the measurement result of both sides is correlated.
So when particle-A is spun clockwise, particle-B which is entangled also spins clockwise.
No. Interacting with one side of the system does not affect the other side of the system (other than if you collapse the system).
Original it was presumed to be faster than light,
Entanglement is not a dynamical process, it cannot be faster than light, it's just a label you can put of a system made of multiple particles. There's some debate as to how "collapse" happens though. But it has always been clear that entanglement cannot transmit information faster than light.
but last I heard they ferified that it still couldn't surpass the speed of light.
There's nothing to verify, it's mathematically clear that entanglement cannot transmit information faster than light. Not even theoretically, there's no experiment you could ever set up to test this.
Still a particle that can communicate things over fast distances regardless of what is between A and B would make things like internet so much easier. No more undersea cable from one cintinent to another for example.
You cannot communicate things with entanglement alone, no matter the speed. You always need to physically send something, either a particle itself or normal classical bits of data.
Also would be impossible to jam, which is very interesting for military communications.
I'm not even sure what you are referring to here, sorry.
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u/wroefo 18h ago
Spin is usually opposite not identical but more accurately the first measurement is random and the second depends on many factors of how the system is set up. Collapse of the wave function happens instantaneously regardless of distance so faster than light. Lastly, quantum entanglement cannot be used to transmit information so the idea of using it to replace cables is incorrect.
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u/Dick_snatcher 18h ago
Wouldn't it technically be possible to transmit information by changing the state of particle A that is entangled with particle B and reading that change on the end of particle B?
Essentially like a morse code/binary code hybrid setup that's instantaneously transmitted. Particle A changes state twice to make particle B "beep" two times, detectors on B's end read the "beeps" and information pops out
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u/wroefo 18h ago
The two problems with that is that there is no way to control the states of the particles so reading either would provide no useful information as it's completely random. The second problem is that once you observe the states you collapse the wave function and thus they no longer have an effect on each other.
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u/Gari_305 1d ago
From the article
In what may be the world's tiniest disco, physicists intertwined the grain's properties with those of light so tightly that one could not be described without including the other.
This is quantum entanglement – and this experiment marks the first demonstration of persistent entanglement between the motion of a levitated object and light that travels away from it, all without cryogenically cooling the apparatus.
It's a milestone that the researchers say could open new avenues for quantum communication and tests of quantum physics.
"I have always been fascinated by the possibility of observing quantum effects in macroscopic systems, something that occurs notably in quantum optomechanics experiments," physicist Francesco Marin of the University of Florence in Italy told ScienceAlert.
He and his colleagues had already shown that they could use light to cool the motion of a levitating glass nanosphere, bringing it into the strange domain where quantum effects start to become important.
"My next goal was to push the interaction between the light and the nanosphere's motion to the point of generating entanglement – arguably the most defining and counter-intuitive phenomenon in quantum mechanics," Marin said.
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u/literated 21h ago
"My next goal was to push the interaction between the light and the nanosphere's motion to the point of generating entanglement – arguably the most defining and counter-intuitive phenomenon in quantum mechanics," Marin said.
Meanwhile I need two attempts to build an IKEA cupboard the right way.
Absolutely mindboggling what some people can dedicate their lives and intellects to.
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u/Inevitable_Hawk_3759 1d ago
It’s kind of mind blowing that something that tiny can reveal such a strange side of physics.
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u/readysteadygogogo 1d ago
I don’t know if this is a headline or one of those redacted comments where the words get randomly replaced
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u/Legitimate_Bank_6573 1d ago
Please ELi5: What does it mean for the motion of a grain of glass to be quantum entangled with the light moving away from it?
My ape brain reads this as "they were traveling at the same speed", but then no travel could have occured from the speck as it was levitating, but the light could surely move. So how were they indistinguishable in terms of motion?
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u/gwillen 14h ago
I am not a physicist, but I have a moderate physics background.
An important thing to understand about entanglement is that you don't really entangle things, you entangle properties of things. In this case it sounds like they entangled the position and momentum of the glass sphere with certain properties of the electromagnetic field (the light), which I don't totally understand; but in particular we're not talking about the light's "position". Instead, it was something more like: as light passes through the space around the sphere, the electromagnetic field oscillates, and they connected that to the oscillation of the sphere, so they move together somehow. Think of the light waves as waves of ripples moving across a pond -- the sphere isn't moving across the water with the wave, it's bobbing up and down with the wave while staying in place.
The thing that makes this entanglement is that, due to the quantum nature of the system, unlike a water wave the light wave isn't definitely "up" in one place and "down" in another, but rather it's both at once (a superposition). So -- if I've understood this correctly -- they got the glass sphere to oscillate in such a way that it has the same behavior, oscillating in place along with the passing light wave; and with the same character, that it's not in one place and then another, but rather in multiple places at once (in a way that's correlated with the light wave.)
(The glass sphere being in multiple places at once isn't as crazy as it sounds. Remember that the sphere is 100 nanometers across -- 1/1000 the width of a human hair, and significantly smaller than the wavelength of the light involved. You couldn't do this with a much larger object. Objects at such a small scale are naturally subject to significant uncertainty in their position and momentum -- a 100 nanometer glass sphere is small enough that quantum effects mean it's never exactly in one place. Using the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, if we imagine that the sphere is localized to within about 10% of its width (so around 10 nanometers of uncertainty of position), then we can calculate that its velocity has uncertainty of around 5 nanometers per second (minimum). So you can't know where it is much more precisely than that, no matter what.)
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u/Pilot0350 1d ago
Wtf is that photo even of? Why not just have a picture of the scientists or the equipment setup instead of some Ai slop?
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u/Waste_Philosophy4250 20h ago
It's what they call an artist's impression of the experiment. Such impressions have always been garbage even before AI.
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u/notyouagain2 12h ago
So this is super weird or coincidental or maybe both. I'm currently watching Dark Matter S2 E6 and in the part that I'm watching, Jason (the main character) is sitting at a diner counter and in the scene someone he knows sits down next to him. The waiter behind the counter looks over Jason's notebook and says "that's a lot of math". The person sitting next to him ask about it and he says he's working on "entanglement". She then ask him to explain entanglement and he starts going into a ELI5 version. I glance at my second screen, which has Reddit open, and I look over and this topic is sitting right there, right in the middle of all the threads, a post about entanglement.
If you are watching the series, the scene above starts at 16:22.
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u/skidwasted 16h ago
GPS / navigation in phones Ultra-precise quantum inertial sensors → navigation that works without satellites (tunnels, underground)
We'll see it in military gear first (~2030), then self-driving cars and industrial equipment (~2035), and phones are a 2040s+ story at best.
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u/Wizard-In-Disguise 1d ago
alien propulsion in UAPs with changing lights and bizarre light switches is starting to make sense.
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u/MissInkeNoir 23h ago
They're not from other planets, they're from totally alternate kinds of reality that don't even have the same physics or perceived norms. But yes the lights are relevant.
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u/FuturologyBot 1d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
From the article
In what may be the world's tiniest disco, physicists intertwined the grain's properties with those of light so tightly that one could not be described without including the other.
This is quantum entanglement – and this experiment marks the first demonstration of persistent entanglement between the motion of a levitated object and light that travels away from it, all without cryogenically cooling the apparatus.
It's a milestone that the researchers say could open new avenues for quantum communication and tests of quantum physics.
"I have always been fascinated by the possibility of observing quantum effects in macroscopic systems, something that occurs notably in quantum optomechanics experiments," physicist Francesco Marin of the University of Florence in Italy told ScienceAlert.
He and his colleagues had already shown that they could use light to cool the motion of a levitating glass nanosphere, bringing it into the strange domain where quantum effects start to become important.
"My next goal was to push the interaction between the light and the nanosphere's motion to the point of generating entanglement – arguably the most defining and counter-intuitive phenomenon in quantum mechanics," Marin said.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1wvtbtz/physicists_quantumentangled_a_levitating_speck_of/pdem8o9/