One of the coolest areas of development at the moment is quantum theory. Initially studied to allow us to explain the colors of stars, the behavior of dense gases, and other such phenomena we don’t generally experience, quantum theory is starting to take a practical turn as folks work to develop quantum computers: computers that don’t limit their bits to ones and zeros but instead view everything as the probabilities of the result being one or zero. But how do you store a probability? This is where quantum entanglement and spooky action at a distance come into play.

According to quantum mechanics and demonstrated in many senior lab classes at universities around the world, it’s possible to produce two particles together that will have mirrored properties, and while one particle’s characteristics might change from measurement to measurement, they will still, somehow, stay instantaneously in sync, even if separated by distances that make communications at lightspeed far too slow.

If this hurts your brain, don’t feel bad. Einstein coined the phrase “spooky action at a distance” because he didn’t really like this part of quantum theory.

Initially, folks entangled photons (particles of light) and then electrons, and over time, they sorted out how to quantum entangle larger and more complex systems. According to a Gizmodo article: Physicists have entangled as many as 18 photons at a time, where the state of one photon is related to the other 17.

While that’s cool, it doesn’t help sort quantum computers. What we need is a system that can be a one or a zero and has states in between while it transitions. Through a creative leap that amazes me, scientists came up with the idea of using tiny aluminum drums, ten microns across, that can be excited into beating by hitting them with microwave-colored photons. By quantum entangling two such drums, they have two systems that can be separated, that have a probability of being one or zero at any given moment, and because the drums can be separated, this single innovation has the potential to be used as either quantum bits or the backbone of a quantum internet, maybe. This stuff is hard, and it’s sometimes difficult to know when our theories wander into the land of sci-fi where our actual technology can’t follow.

This work was led by Shlomi Kotler and appears in two papers in science Science with summary articles appearing just about everywhere. We’ll be linking to the Gizmodo and Nature articles I read to help understand these results. This stuff is hard, but if it works, this is the next big development in computing. This could be the follow-on to the vacuum tube, the transistor, and the silicon circuit.

And this could be the start to understanding how to send information instantly between points without the lag of light travel time. While stuff can’t move faster than light, the wavefunction connecting two vastly separated objects is a single thing, and a change to one connected particle changes the entirety of that wavefunction. No rules of physics need to be broken. We just might be able to make the vastness of space a bit easier to bear with the help of quantum mechanics.

More Information

These Drums Beat in Perfect Synchrony Because They’re Quantumly Entangled (Gizmodo)

“Direct observation of deterministic macroscopic entanglement,” Shlomi Kotler et al., 2021 May 7, Science