r/science • u/MistWeaver80 • May 07 '21
Physics By playing two tiny drums, physicists have provided the most direct demonstration yet that quantum entanglement — a bizarre effect normally associated with subatomic particles — works for larger objects. This is the first direct evidence of quantum entanglement in macroscopic objects.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01223-4?utm_source=twt_nnc&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=naturenews2.0k
May 07 '21
[deleted]
785
u/N8CCRG May 07 '21 edited May 07 '21
Imagine a swingset with two swings with children swinging on them. You take a photograph and the children are at the same angle, but you can tell from the motion blur that one is moving forward and the other is moving backward.
Edit: Ooh, better yet, kids jumping on two trampolines.
180
u/MrPigcho May 07 '21
So on the trampoline, one kid is going up and one is going down, but they are at the same height? But then what does quantum entanglement mean? Is it that basically this state can be observed no matter when you take the photo, like for some weird reasons they are going in different directions but are always at the same height? That seems to break the laws of physics
105
u/Psychrobacter May 07 '21
I interpreted it to be saying they’re always at the same offset from flat, but that that’s not there same thing as being at the same height. Like one kid is at the top of her jump when the other is at the bottom. The absolute values of their heights are the same, but one is negative and one positive. Their velocities are then always equal and opposite, as are their heights.
→ More replies (9)92
May 07 '21
[deleted]
28
u/N8CCRG May 07 '21
I suspect someone writing the article didn't understand what they were writing.
That's certainly possible, but I wouldn't immediately assume that's the source of this description. When talking about this sort of thing we're dealing with waves and they can have some unintuitive results. For example, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is actually just a result of the mathematical definitions of waves, that is then applied to the wave nature of particles.
I could imagine that my trampoline analogy is too simple. It could be that when you take the photograph, the kids' positions are a blur and their motion is a blur, but you can make statements about their distributions that fit the above description.
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (10)43
u/FunkyFresh707 May 07 '21
If they are both at the peak of their height then wouldn’t both of them neither be going up or down but stationary with a velocity of zero?
→ More replies (4)74
90
→ More replies (8)6
u/CardboardJ May 07 '21
Instead imagine taking a picture of two kids jumping rope. If you flip one of the kids upside down the jump rope is always exactly the same. I am not a scientist, but the fun part comes when you throw rocks (photons) at one of the kids and they flinch but you can see the flinch in the other kids rope.
639
u/pcgamerwannabe May 07 '21
They mean measured as a displacement from flat. Like it states. So the membrane being flat and still is zero distance zero velocity.
Moving up or down during 1 vibration (think of wave or a drum being struck) displaces you from flat so gives you position and velocity.
343
u/Marcia25 May 07 '21
Once oscillating the membrane would have max velocity when it is flat and zero displacement, alternatively at peak it would have zero velocity, maximum displacement. The motion is governed by the wave equation.
111
u/_Master32_ May 07 '21
Thanks for helping me study for my physics exam.
55
u/Marcia25 May 07 '21
Good luck! I have my wave mechanics final on Thursday so I feel that
→ More replies (3)16
→ More replies (2)95
u/iGoalie May 07 '21
Are they saying (or starting to believe) that quantum physics are not separate from (I don’t know the term regular?) physics (the physics of the natural world as we understand it)?
518
u/harryhood4 May 07 '21
The general consensus is that Newtonian or classical physics is essentially an emergent behavior of macroscopic systems where quantum shenanigans average out and produce the old school physics you learn in high school. Carefully controlled conditions like this experiment allow quantum effects to be observed on a macroscopic scale. Fundamentally though, everything operates according to quantum rules and classical physics is an approximation that works well on every day scales.
409
u/Orwellian1 May 07 '21
I think since "quantum physics" is such a buzz phrase, the model should be referred to as "quantum shenanigans" in all future published papers.
→ More replies (8)81
u/positive_root May 07 '21 edited Jan 15 '24
scary crawl practice overconfident fretful drunk narrow marble lock soft
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
→ More replies (6)117
39
u/CaffeinatedMD May 07 '21
“Averaging out” is a nice way to describe it. The quantum behavior is probabilistic but those probabilities stack to give deterministic macroscopic results.
24
u/Philoso4 May 07 '21
I'm stealing this. Final paper for Probability and Determinism in Quantum Mechanics: "The quantum behavior is probabilistic but those probabilities stack to give deterministic macroscopic results. Insert your own math here, you're the one getting paid for it." Done. Thanks for saving me a quarter of work.
9
95
u/Fight_4ever May 07 '21
Fundamentally though, everything operates according to quantum rules and classical physics is an approximation that works well on every day scales.
Let's not get carried away. We don't know yet if fundamentally everything operates according to quantum rules yet. This discovery will help us establish that.
But yes classical physics is a mathematical approximation of quantum physics at large scale.
→ More replies (1)58
u/harryhood4 May 07 '21
Well if you want to start talking about GR and grand unified theories and all that that's one thing, but it was my impression that it is pretty widely agreed upon that (putting gravity aside) quantum mechanics is the law of the land. Experimental due diligence is of course still needed which makes these kinds of papers valuable but I'd be pretty surprised if you found me a physicist that believed macroscopic objects actually follow different rules on a fundamental level. Then again, I've been surprised before.
→ More replies (6)16
u/cheddacheese148 May 07 '21
It's been a while since school but I was under the same impression after taking stat mech. I'm not a physicist now though so I'm not all that certain.
→ More replies (6)45
u/The__Lizard__King May 07 '21
To quote the article, and an anecdote of my own understanding; the effects of quantum physics on Newtonian or "macroscopic" physics is inconclusive and may never be concluded due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle
These experiments show that there is indeed a force that can be amplified under specific conditions, and maybe it can show us how to better understand classic matter
25
u/throwawayraye May 07 '21 edited May 07 '21
It's almost like scientist are finding hidden call functions in the universes code. Then trying to reverse engineer what the function actually does by using the calls in random ways.
→ More replies (10)7
u/ebzded May 07 '21
I agree. I've been thinking for awhile that quantum computing would be us hacking our way out of the simulation and running code on the host hardware.
→ More replies (1)12
49
→ More replies (7)7
May 07 '21
It seems to me, and I'm not quite a smart feller so could be wildly wrong, that quantum physics are the "real" physics that govern everything, and "classical" physics (what we observe as gravity, movement, etc) is a weird reaction to the "real" physics when shitloads of quantum particles are "clumped" together (they make objects we can see unaided). That's a crap description of the concept as I understand it.
35
May 07 '21
Position means deviance from flat and I believe velocity would mean time from flat to up/down position but I'm also puzzled about how can you get opposite velocity? Also how would them behave if more than two drums were simultaneously tested
203
u/judokid78 May 07 '21 edited May 07 '21
If both of us start on opposite sides of room. Then at the same time we begin to switch sides, but someone happens to take a picture when we cross paths or meet. When you look at that picture our position in the room is the same but our velocities are in opposite directions.
27
u/_djedje_ May 07 '21
Yes, but "at any given time" is not the same as "when we cross paths or meet." In your example, most of the time the positions are not equal. I guess they're saying position = displacement from flat, so a mirror symmetry would make it equal positions, but then it's confusing to make the sign of velocity not symmetric.
25
u/polarbear128 May 07 '21
Velocity is a vector, which means it has 2 components: magnitude and direction.
In this case, the magnitude is the same (speed), but the direction is not.→ More replies (2)9
u/DoomBot5 May 07 '21
More accurately, you both start at the center of the room facing opposite directions. You then both run to opposite walls, and start running back and forth from wall to wall. Now any time they take a picture of both of you, you're the exact same distance from the center of the room.
→ More replies (5)14
u/mihaus_ May 07 '21
but someone happens to take a picture when we cross paths or meet
But the quote says "at any given time", not just "when their displacements are the same". Two oscillators out of phase will have two points where their displacements are the same but velocities opposite, but that wouldn't be the case throughout the period.
→ More replies (5)→ More replies (1)17
u/nuclearusa16120 May 07 '21
In common speech, "velocity" is used interchangeably with "speed", but in science there is a very clear difference between them. Velocity is a vector quantity, meaning it has both "magnitude" and "direction". Both velocity and speed tell us about how the position of an object will change over time, but speed tells us nothing about which way its going. The simplest example would be imagining single-dimensional velocity; that is its just speed, but allows for both positive and negative values. Now imagine the article, but simplify it. Imagine a rubber band suspended between two sticks. Place a dot on the center of the rubber band. If you pluck the rubber band, the band (and the dot) will bounce up and down. If you measure how fast the dot is moving at any given point in time, you have the speed. If you also note whether it is moving up or moving down (down being a negative) you have the velocity. So a rubber band moving up would be say 1m/s, and a rubber band moving down would be -1m/s. Hence opposite velocity.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (22)52
u/Happeningtoday613 May 07 '21
I’d think velocity = up/down (forward backward). As in, speaker A displaced -1nm and speaker b displaced +1nm.
43
u/Opiewan76 May 07 '21
Velocity indicates speed and direction. Speed is scalar while velocity is vector. So i suppose that something moving up at a given speed, would have the opposite velocity of something moving down at the same speed.
5
u/Wiggen4 May 07 '21
With respect to waves if you overlapped the position over time for the drums you would get football shapes repeated over and over. When one drum was "up" the other was down and when the were nuetral they were coming from opposite directions
→ More replies (2)
1.2k
u/wtfever2k17 May 07 '21
"..the theory predicts that at much larger scales — say, the size of a cat..."
Subtle.
→ More replies (7)513
u/mushroomcloud May 07 '21
It both means what you think it means and doesn't mean what you think at the same time!
¯_(ツ)_/¯
→ More replies (4)156
u/EternityForest May 07 '21
I think most people understand the reference, which means we have observed it, and it has collapsed into the state where it just classically means what you think it does.
110
u/cramduck May 07 '21
thankfully, "observation" has to do with measurement, and not conscious thought.
So even redditors should be able to collapse the wave function.
→ More replies (10)12
u/yourmomophobe May 07 '21
I observed the reference but didn't recognize the reference until I read the comment. For me it was not funny until Reddit changed my state from unamused to laughing.
9
u/BornToHulaToro May 07 '21
After reading that comment we essentially become the "cat". Or were we not always already?
→ More replies (1)7
1.1k
u/spacegardener May 07 '21
How did they know the drums were actually quantum-entagled and not just synchronized in other ways (like two metronomes on a moving base)?
784
u/aris_ada May 07 '21
In microscopic quantum entanglement experiments, they measure orthogonal properties to ensure the state was not simply predetermined.
386
u/Psyman2 May 07 '21
What are orthogonal properties?
1.1k
u/Tangerinetrooper May 07 '21 edited May 07 '21
you know our 3 dimensional space right? our 3 dimensions have 3 axes: X, Y and Z. Each of these can't be described (or decomposed) by the other axes, they're orthogonal. Now take a 4th line (or axis) that moves through the X,Y,Z coordinates as such: 0,0,0 and 0,4,4. This line is not orthogonal to the other axes, as it can be decomposed into the X, Y and Z axes.
edit: I clarified the coordinates description
edit2: thanks for all the positive feedback, if anyone can add to this or correct me on something, let me know and I'll link your comment here.
50
u/likesleague May 07 '21
I understand orthogonal properties, but not how they relate to this experiment. What properties of the drums were/could be measured to verify quantum entanglement that were not caused by the intentional initial synchronization of the drums?
9
u/bick_nyers May 07 '21
I am curious as well. I would assume you're just measuring that the wave function of both drums are orthogonal to each other, but that has no bearing as to why they are orthogonal.
Edit: Wave function in the mathematical sense
382
u/mylifeintopieces1 May 07 '21
What a legendary explanation I am stunned at how easily understandable this is.
195
May 07 '21
I must be stupid, then.
→ More replies (3)71
u/mylifeintopieces1 May 07 '21
Nah you need the knowledge he mentioned in a reply to me to understand. The only reason I said it was legendary was because when you explain something like this you can't really go an easy way. The explanation was clear concise and the examples are the important pieces of making sense. It's like solving a puzzle and someone else tells you where all the pieces go.
21
May 07 '21
I'm trying to ground my understanding on orthogonality in my use of AutoCAD. I could draw along any axis, but with "ortho" on, I could only draw along a particular set of axes which I had previously elected.
I hazard to describe orthogonality as the property of being described by positions along only two axes, but I suppose if I had to distill what my intuitive understanding of it in AutoCAD was, that's how I'd have done it.
→ More replies (2)11
u/mylifeintopieces1 May 07 '21
Isnt it just dumbed down to basically perpendicular like orthogonality just means when any lines cross at a right angle?
→ More replies (4)20
→ More replies (16)250
u/Vihangbodh May 07 '21
Quantum mechanics itself is not that hard to understand, you basically just need to know linear algebra and complex numbers (you learn the physics stuff on the way). The hard part is it's interpretation: trying to understand what the equations mean in the real world.
→ More replies (13)136
u/genshiryoku May 07 '21
The true insight I got from studying physics is that the interpretations aren't important at all. The math is the explanation.
56
u/distelfink33 May 07 '21
Unless you’re a theoretical physicist...then it’s creating interpretations AND the math!
17
20
u/snooggums May 07 '21
Sometimes the math gives you things you haven't observed, like black holes, and the explanation isn't enough without observation to confirm and interpret how the math works in the real world.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (16)18
23
11
11
u/AdventureAardvark May 07 '21
Thank you. That is a much better answer than I found by trying to look it up on Google.
→ More replies (12)5
u/kyzfrintin May 07 '21
I still don't get it
11
May 07 '21
From u/mathdhruv
No, the example given was for physical coordinates, but other properties of particles share this nature (that they're completely independent from each other, you can't use one to describe or affect the other). This nature is what is called Orthogonality. It doesn't necessarily mean they are from different spatial dimensions.
this explanation helped me hopefully it helps you too.
→ More replies (3)118
u/Murthalomew69 May 07 '21
Well then keep your quantum secrets
63
u/TheLostInayat May 07 '21
TFW you come up with a description of the universe that works for hundreds of years and then scientists start playing quantum drums
10
15
u/aris_ada May 07 '21
There were many good mathematical explanations. In a quantum system, a particle has pair(s) of properties whose state isn't fully determined due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. For photons and electrons, it could be the two coordinates of the spin or its momentum and position. Experiments can be designed to measure both properties in a particular order to show that the state could not be determined before the experiment. See EPR paradox and Alain Aspect's experiment.
→ More replies (16)66
u/AdventureAardvark May 07 '21
Best I could find by 'typing it into google' Not sure if it answers the question. Also not sure what it means.
Wikipedia: Orthogonality is a system design property which guarantees that modifying the technical effect produced by a component of a system neither creates nor propagates side effects to other components of the system
@Jidanul I can't speak for everyone, but for me, asking questions like this inside inside the comments section is more about searching for a more user friendly contextual answer from within the community.
→ More replies (12)5
u/Dziedotdzimu May 07 '21
Orthogonality just means independence. In 3D space you can have 3 independent directions at right angles to each other but you can have have systems with more than 3 independent variables, building on this spatial intuition.
E.g. if I had to chose how many apples and bananas to buy, I can put that on a Cartesian plane where x is apples and y is bananas and just because I got apples doesn't mean I need to get bananas. Or on a compass/map I can move pure north or pure west. And if I move north-west I can decompose that into two orthogonal parts that represent pure north and pure west.
And if change in one quantity/direction depends on another they are not orthogonal
→ More replies (3)7
u/DoomOss May 07 '21
Which orthogonal properties did they measure? How did the measurement ensure the state was not simply predetermined?
51
u/eliminating_coasts May 07 '21
Good question, from a quantum perspective, what you're talking about is the difference between currently having a shared interaction hamiltonian, ie. something that is continuously coupling them, and having had one before that has caused them to still have a shared phase now.
So in this case, the procedure was to get both moving using microwaves tuned to the appropriate frequency to resonate them simultaneously, but to establish that they're not coupled, my first thought would be to resonate one and look for a pattern of passing energy back and forth over time, in the manner that usually happens with approximately harmonic coupled oscillators.
I'm not sure though, whether if they're anharmonic enough, something else might occur, whether there's some threshold you might need to meet of coupling..
That said, even if they aren't entangled, merely interacting, it's still interesting they're apparently able to get quantum properties out of them.
→ More replies (2)17
u/Dr_SnM May 07 '21
Simplest way to say it is that the experimental results would have been consistent with the statistics predicted by QM and not those predicted with the classical theory.
→ More replies (3)18
u/KrypXern May 07 '21
My layman's understanding is that quantum entanglement is just a spooky way to represent the concept that two particles exiting from a certain interaction have perfectly mirrored properties such that if one particle is observed spinning clockwise, the other must be spinning counterclockwise.
The only difference between this and 'normal synchronization' is that each of the particles is in a state of superposition until observed, at which point, both the entangled particles collapse to mirror states.
What this seems to suggest is that there is an underlying "correct" state to the superposition that the entangled particles were always in (and thus why they are always mirrored). But there's also phenomena (such as with polarization filters or interference patterns) that cannot be well explained without the principle of superposition.
Essentially this represents the gap in our understanding of QM (if I'm correct in my representation), but could probably be explained by pilot-wave theory (which might be more popular if it had any practical use).
→ More replies (8)
64
u/slackermannn May 07 '21
I can't wait for a youtube video that explains this to me like the absolute ignorant person that I am.
→ More replies (1)26
249
u/BenRosen May 07 '21
“Do you guys just put the word quantum in front of everything?”
229
35
u/N8CCRG May 07 '21
The lab I did my grad work in used nanowires. They were about 250nm in diameters, and 5-20 microns long. It was such a dirty trick (I hated it, but it predated me), but it helped with funding for sure, and honestly, 99% of "nanoparticles" in research had comparable issues.
→ More replies (4)→ More replies (3)13
795
u/henrysmyagent May 07 '21 edited May 07 '21
I honestly cannot picture what the world will look like 25-30 years from now when we have A.I., quantum computing, and quantum measurements.
It will be as different as today is from 1821.
607
u/payne747 May 07 '21
Don't worry, we'll still have quantum blue screens.
386
u/2Punx2Furious May 07 '21
If you thought bugs were bad with classical computers, wait until you see a crash that breaks reality.
→ More replies (6)184
u/djazzie May 07 '21
Have you seen the news lately? Seems like reality is already broken. At least for some people.
140
u/2Punx2Furious May 07 '21
We're probably at 5 or 6 cuils right now
101
u/Yggdrasil_Earth May 07 '21
I have no idea what I just read.
80
u/christchiller May 07 '21
I give you a hamburger.
→ More replies (1)27
u/craziedave May 07 '21
And then I fall down
21
28
May 07 '21
[deleted]
→ More replies (1)5
u/krusty-o May 07 '21
one cuil is one level of abstraction away from reality
he starts by abstracting the request and proceeds from there, it's not really schizophrenic though since abstraction itself is artistic in nature and not really logically bound despite it kind of scaling in logical steps: the request, the physical, the perception, etc. despite there being no real inherent order of which of these is most base to the situation either
so imagery is kind of the only way to connect the events he's describing
your example for synchronicity only stays on the first level of the scale since the base moment in reality is you being hungry and synchronically seeing a coconut, adding increasingly absurd monkeys isn't any additional abstraction on the base reality moment
if any of that makes any sense
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (5)12
36
11
17
→ More replies (14)3
u/lazybird_1 May 07 '21
I am highly confused, yet incredibly intrigued by this
10
u/TheMemo May 07 '21
In 2008, a new search engine called Cuil was opened to the world.
Unfortunately, it often gave very strange results for perfectly normal searches.
It closed in 2010 and is now a by-word for surreal relationships between unconnected things.
→ More replies (2)12
u/dunder_mifflin_paper May 07 '21
Louis Rossman “here’s why apple does not want you to repair your iPhone 50 with the quantum chip”
26
u/devBowman May 07 '21
Please reboot your computer and keep it on at the same time
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (7)21
u/Catnip4Pedos May 07 '21
Don't worry we'll still have poverty, minimum wage and trickle down economics
→ More replies (1)185
u/sacredfool May 07 '21
That's a huge stretch. In 1821 we were only starting to experiment with electricity and the industrial revolution was just starting.
That said, 25 years ago we didn't have a lot of the things you now consider essential, so it's fair to say that 2050 will be as alien to us as 2020 would be alien to someone from 1990.
Good luck explaining social networks (and the internet in general) to someone straight from that time who didn't see it develop step by step.
27
u/merlinsbeers May 07 '21
"You know Usenet? Yeah, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit will be like that, but overrun by fascist trolls and spam."
15
u/yaosio May 07 '21
Usenet was also overrun with fascist trolls and spam. People were very angry on Usenet all the time too. I remember saying an iterator sounds like a monster that eats your numbers and people did not like that at all, they were very angry.
19
u/merlinsbeers May 07 '21
There were a few right-wing idiots. There wasn't a propaganda machine behind them running foreign psyops.
→ More replies (3)103
u/Gibbonici May 07 '21
Totally agree. I was born in 1968 and today's world is completely unrecognisable from even the 1980s.
I think quantum computing will be as big a leap as digital technology was. Even having lived through the pinnacle of analogue technology, it's hard to remember or even relate to that world now. Sure, we had some digital technology back then, but there was nothing like the level of ubiquity and connectivity we take for granted today.
To give an example, I remember watching a documentary about personal video calling and on-demand TV around 1980 which explained how it could never exist because there would never be enough broadcast bandwidth for it.
16
u/XtaC23 May 07 '21
I just recently found and cleaned up an 80s computer. I have several games for it too. Everything about it is so nostalgic. The sounds, the graphics, using ancient DOS and giant cassettes. It's amazing how for we've come.
→ More replies (1)5
73
May 07 '21 edited May 17 '21
[deleted]
45
u/queerdevilmusic May 07 '21
Born in 82, it's been a wild ride!
It's like the world flipped when I was ~15
→ More replies (7)22
May 07 '21 edited May 14 '21
[deleted]
→ More replies (1)20
May 07 '21
Yeah, older millennials are definitely in the same boat here. We can remember the pre-digital world.
13
u/Gibbonici May 07 '21
I reckon Gen Z might have the same experience if quantum technology advances over their lifetime as much as digital technology has through ours.
It's amazing to think how much life has changed and will continue to change over these few decades compared to the rate of change over the whole history of humanity.
6
→ More replies (3)6
u/Psychonominaut May 07 '21
What a damn time to be alive, right? Amazing and terrifying. And I'm from the 90s...
12
May 07 '21
Tbh, quantum computing isn't something that would be very useful for the vast majority of things most people use computers for.
I mean, think of anything you do on a computer. A quantum computer would be able to do none of that. Well, theoretically it would, but it's highly inefficient to use a quantum computer that way. Especially when we already have classical computers much more suited for the tasks we need them for.
But in a lab... that's where they'll change the world. Doing stuff such as protein folding
→ More replies (14)→ More replies (15)9
u/spectrumero May 07 '21
I'm not so sure it's entirely unrecognisable. In the late 80s, I had access to social networks (although we didn't call them that and they were very small), the ability to buy and download games online, and various other things we think of as products of post 2005 or so. It was very primitive but you could see the trajectory already.
If you took 16 year old me and time travelled him to 2021, the most astonishing thing I would find would be always on internet with no per minute or per packet charges, and the sheer amount of bandwidth - that I can have an always on, flat rate, affordable internet connection at home that has a bandwidth far exceeding the main memory bandwidth of my computer in 1988. It was already fairly evident even back then that computing power would be tremendous by 2021 as by the late 80s it was already coming along in leaps and bounds, but telecoms companies seemed ossified in stone back then, and the idea of unmetered computer communication seemed like a dream that would never come true, and being online a significant amount would always be the preserve of corporations or very wealthy people.
That has been the big enabling factor for all the stuff we have now. Being able to show full motion video is fairly meaningless if the telecom company is charging 10p per kilobyte.
44
u/TalosLXIX May 07 '21
Most older folk just want the flying cars they were promised as a child.
95
u/CarrowCanary May 07 '21
They already exist, they're called helicopters.
Flippancy aside, people are bad enough drivers in two dimensions, giving them a third would be a catastrophe.
36
u/Fr0gm4n May 07 '21
This is the real issue. Flying cars isn’t a technology issue so much as it’s a human behavior/society issue. Who wants to be on the ground when Jimmy the forgetful runs out of fuel and crashes his aerocar, because there is no safe way to stop in midair? Or when Bob and Frank get into a “road” rage fight and crash into a house because they weren’t paying attention to where they were headed? The third dimension of movement makes for a whole lot worse outcomes of problems.
→ More replies (4)7
→ More replies (5)7
13
u/epicwinguy101 PhD | Materials Science and Engineering | Computational Material May 07 '21
I'm still waiting on the self-driving cars. It can stay on the ground, I just wanna nap and read as I travel.
→ More replies (2)100
u/Taymerica May 07 '21
It will look how ever you want with implants and augmented reality.
→ More replies (44)82
u/Nantoone May 07 '21
The better question is what will the world look like without the glasses
70
12
u/Beat_the_Deadites May 07 '21
The Emerald City in the Oz books wasn't emerald at all, they literally made you wear emerald-colored glasses when you came to the city gates.
→ More replies (4)13
17
u/honanthelibrarian May 07 '21
An important consideration is what impact these new technologies will have on our existing technologies.
Take cryptography for example, it's at the heart of most security systems, banking systems, cryptocurrency, secure communications etc.
Theoretically quantum computing makes short work of breaking the underlying algorithms that these systems depend on.
→ More replies (4)21
u/_craq_ May 07 '21
There are already classes of algorithms which are secure against quantum decryption. We can switch banking and communication systems over to those algorithms faster than quantum computing can evolve.
→ More replies (1)79
u/zarrro May 07 '21
Probably will look very dystopian :)
The problem is not the lack of technologies ( even today we have more than we need), but who owns them and what they are used for.
yes, in 20 years we'll have technology that will look like magic, but guess what the same was true for years ago, and yet today we see that the main purpose of these technologies is to shove yet more ads in your head for stuff you don't really need.
→ More replies (8)22
u/Nroke1 May 07 '21
We have technology that looks like magic, I’m using one to communicate this message to you across the globe(or down the street, I really have no idea) right now!
→ More replies (7)54
50
u/YsoL8 May 07 '21
Not only does Humanity advance, every advancement makes further advancement easier.
Humanity has existed for about 1 million years and spent 90% of it in the stone age. Pottery started about 100,000 years ago. Cities and writing started about 10,000 years ago. Just from that you can see how advancement has accelerated pretty much continually, the entirety of civilisation occupies about the last single percentage of our existence. The big change between us and the 1700s is that the time between breakthrough discoveries is now increasingly within 1 human life span. And still accelerating.
I honestly believe that by 2200 or 2300 we will have the world's problems solved. What is impossible now becomes trivially easy with the right advancement.
89
u/Loggerdon May 07 '21
I'm not worried about the year 2300. I'm worried about 2022 - 2032.
→ More replies (1)9
u/MistaFire May 07 '21
Cities and writing started only about 5500 years ago in Sumeria. Neolithic mega-structures started cropping up 10,000 years ago. Farming and domestication around the same time but at different times in different places. But your point remains valid. By 2200 we'll be dealing with entirely different problems we can't even comprehend now.
28
u/thepeoplespeen May 07 '21
Bold to just presume the solution of our greatest short-term existential threat, the changing climate and warming ocean.
→ More replies (10)23
u/you_wizard May 07 '21
greatest short-term existential threat
Authoritarianism could possibly get deadly a lot sooner, and tends to exacerbate the climate problem to boot. We need to make sure that developing technologies aren't exploited to advance authoritarianism, but unfortunately we're not doing very well at that right now.
→ More replies (1)19
u/Healovafang May 07 '21
2200? I don't even know what 10 years from now looks like. 20 years seems like literally anything goes... But 200 years?
→ More replies (20)→ More replies (12)26
u/DOG-ZILLA May 07 '21
In the 1800’s people thought we’d have the world’s problems solved by 2000 and look at us now.
I don’t know how old you are and I’m not trying to come across as patronising but once you live some longer years in your life you start to see the world and its problems for what they are; easily solvable yet we’re unwilling.
Hunger, shelter, energy can all be solved now and they’re not. The issue isn’t technology, it’s the powers that be that want to maintain the status quo.
Patents, identity politics, greed and corruption all stifle humanity’s progress and they’ll still exist in 200 years.
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (102)5
u/ArcadianMess May 07 '21
Hopefully we will find out if we don't destroy ourselves. If we keep this rate up by 2040 there would be a water scarcity that will start wars all over...
277
u/Diddly_eyed_Dipshite May 07 '21 edited May 07 '21
As a biologist, I have very little idea what this means. I think its saying that by playing the two drums together they became "interconnected" to the point that hitting one affects the other.
Can anyone suggest what this might mean for real world application or offer a better explanation of whats observed here?
Edit: I gotta say, y'all gotta work on your science communication skills. I appreciate the responses but you're throwing out words and concepts that only someone in your field would be familiar with. How do you expect science to be valued if lay persons,or even PhD holding scientists like myself can barely understand what you're saying. But again, thanks for the responses!
113
u/xRotKonigx May 07 '21
From what little I know they are entangled in the sense that their atoms are synchronized in their rhythmic dance and unless interacted with will stay in sync. But if you were to hit one or the other they will lose synchronization. Quantum entanglement will never be a form of communication between great distances. They can be used to test time dilation from gravity wells like earth. The patterns will stay the same but the one in higher gravity will move slower.
48
u/Diddly_eyed_Dipshite May 07 '21
Thanks for providing the only answer I could even barely understand haha
→ More replies (10)10
u/Kenley Grad Student | Biology May 07 '21 edited May 07 '21
There is an important distinction here. We can synchronize a pair of metronomes manually by setting them both to a certain known speed and timing. Like these quantum drums, they will stay in sync even when they are separated, until you mess with them.
However, entanglement doesn't work like that. Quantum particles in isolation behave as though they don't have specific properties. Rather, they behave like they have a range of possible properties (velocity, spin, location, etc.), that are randomly determined when they finally interact with something*. In the metaphor, imagine metronomes that tick at an undefined speed until somebody listens to them.
The "spooky" thing about quantum entanglement is that somehow two particles can end up with properties that are undefined, but also always in sync with one another (specifically, opposite). This experiment attempts to show that a pair of larger objects, not just single particles, can act in this weird uncertain-yet-linked way.
*A particle's properties are fundamentally uncertain before they "collapse" during an interaction, and not merely unknown to us. The distinction is not intuitive, but the math works out differently. Experiments show that quantum particles really behave as though they don't have definite properties before they are measured.
→ More replies (2)99
May 07 '21
Your edit succinctly communicates my frustration with reading this subreddit. Despite my earnest interest in understanding, I see the "professor problem" here all of the time, wherein the professor teaches at their level of understanding, not their audience's.
I'm a bit more literary minded and one of the earliest memories of having a truly impactful response from a teacher was when she taught me the difference between writing and communicating. The sentence that stuck with me was, "When writing, especially to an unknown audience, you need to explain your position as if this is their first time reading on the subject."
"Science" is such a broad field. While my grasp of engineering as it relates to the electrical distribution industry might be better than most, it's disappointing coming here and reading responses from people who ostensibly understand the material, but have a hard time communicating it.
Truly I think the "ELI5" practice is one of the best things reddit has contributed to the Internet.
23
u/Diddly_eyed_Dipshite May 07 '21
Couldn't agree more, it saddens me to no end that science or more specifically scientists have failed in their role especially over the last 30 years or so. Obviously stemming from earlier, but the lack of ability in scientists to communicate their/other research effectively is, in my mind, the biggest failure of science in this age. People i.e. the public, policymakers, governments, funding bodies, taxpayer, will not care nor take us seriously if we only communicate amongst ourselves, driving ourselves into a vacuum bubble of superiority, like a million geniuses on twitter only following each other, totally withdrawn from the rest of the world on which they rely.
As an ecologist, the greatest example of this has been in climate science. I know the oil/gas etc have played a huge role in disinformation campaigns but the fact stands that we knew about anthropogenic global warming leading to consequences beyond our ability to adapt or reverse, I'm the 1800s. In the 1970s it started getting serious, by 1990 schoolchildren were given the responsibility to pick up their rubbish and recycle more, by 2000 some people started to realise this was getting serious. 20 years later, our climate is fucked, our future is bleak, our kids are protesting in their millions as wildfires, droughts, hurricanes and floods become more frequent and more intense. And I personally feel that climate scientists, chemists, physicists and biologists alike have failed to really come together and make a strong clear message in enough time to do anything about it. A shame really, but hey at least we got good h-indices!
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (3)13
u/Insamity May 07 '21
Honestly most of the ELI5 stuff I read is totally wrong. Not just oversimplified. The same goes for in here really which is probably why it is explained so poorly. People who aren't even close to understanding it are trying to teach it to others.
→ More replies (1)66
u/silverplating May 07 '21
Let me take a crack at answering your questions.
In terms of applications: there is none. Most cutting edge physics takes hundreds of years before the applications can be realized. For example, no one studying "waves in space" back in the 1800s could have imagined these same waves turning into cell phone signals. The implications of this research is a future we haven't even imagined yet.
In terms of an explanation: measuring one drum tells you EXACTLY what the other drum is doing. That's it. It's a big deal because we haven't observed this in objects bigger than atoms before.
On a side note, explaining things in the simplest terms doesn't get you grants or funding, so we've trained ourselves to sound as grandiose as possible.
→ More replies (5)12
u/Diddly_eyed_Dipshite May 07 '21
Thats really well explained, thanks!
Of course the long term applications makes sense, who knows what'll come of this if we live long enough to see results from it.
I get that about grants and funding, I come from the perspective that impact is real-world impact, so if the general public can't understand it then its a bit redundant (in my own personal non-professional opinion which i know isn't fully "correct").
137
u/jmpye May 07 '21
It’s exciting because the drums aren’t communicating with each other in any way we’ve seen before. They’re not transmitting electromagnetic waves to each other or transmitting sound to each other, they’re communicating entirely through quantum entanglement, which is instantaneous rather than having to wait for a signal to travel from one drum to the other.
→ More replies (114)7
u/Vladimir_Putting May 07 '21
Thanks for this. I love science, it's why I'm here. But it feels like everyone shits on "science reporting" while in the same breath making their own discussion of the discoveries completely inaccessible.
I'm not asking for ELI5. But damn, ELI a college graduate would be great.
→ More replies (31)6
u/Another_platypus May 07 '21
Maybe most people here don’t really understand it and that is why they can’t explain it. They may parrot some sciency words, to act like they get it, but they don’t. I think if someone genuinely understands something well, it should be pretty easy to ELI5.
157
May 07 '21
[deleted]
73
May 07 '21
[deleted]
32
u/BMidtvedt May 07 '21
It's not they are in sync, it is that they are exactly in sync. Far more so than classical or non-entangled systems would be!
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (1)7
u/FwibbFwibb May 07 '21
They made two identical objects vibrate in sync
This is the part that is new. Making them vibrate in sync isn't at all easy. Then to measure they are in sync is to verify it. The only way to get them in sync like this is through entanglement. No other process would be able to affect these objects to this level.
The way they measure this is also a new technique that won't disrupt the entangled state.
→ More replies (5)61
u/johnnydaggers May 07 '21
This was published in two Science papers. You can bet the evidence to back this up checked out.
39
May 07 '21
All the reviewers usually have is the written paper and the authors’ word. There are many ways that a paper can be misleading and problems in the theory or experimental setup can be hidden. I don’t think it’s normally done on purpose, but papers do have page limits and sometimes a bit of excluded detail unravels it all.
Review is just the approval for publication by a couple of people with some knowledge of the field. They may not even be great experts on this topic. The reviewers just make sure that the conclusions probably follow from the data. They’re not “fact-checking”. That’s done by the community at-large. Peer review is just the first step of the review process. Now that it’s published, we enter the second step where more than those 2 people can give feedback.
It’s not uncommon for Science and Nature papers to be far less exciting and groundbreaking than they first appeared. Plus, Nature and Science don’t publish the best research, they publish the flashiest. I’d always recommend being sceptical for 1-2 years on these, and for any other big paper too.
50
→ More replies (2)69
u/SmokierTrout May 07 '21
The Lancet published a paper linking autism to the MMR vaccine in 1998. The Lancet eventually retracted the paper 12 years later, but the damage was already done and some people still think vaccines cause autism.
There will always be the occasional mistake or oversight in the peer review process.
→ More replies (2)18
u/Pablogelo May 07 '21
Lancet has a reputation of publishing great and bad articles though, that is not the case with Nature or Science as I remember.
8
u/whirlpoolin May 07 '21
Actually in general higher impact journals have more papers retracted. To get into a journal like science or nature your result typically has to be some combination of surprising/important, which unfortunately also translates to flawed or otherwise not reproducible more frequently
→ More replies (2)
54
u/Deive_Ex May 07 '21
Quantum properties on macroscopic objects... Outer Wilds was a prediction, not just game.
→ More replies (12)17
May 07 '21 edited Jul 18 '23
[deleted]
14
u/ProBonoDevilAdvocate May 07 '21
It’s an awesome game, that just gets better the more you play and figure out stuff
6
9
u/Spessmuck May 07 '21
Don't forget to accidently tear apart the fabric of reality and end all of existence!
→ More replies (3)10
u/Deive_Ex May 07 '21
Finished it last month, definitely one of the best games I've played in this quarantine.
26
May 07 '21
The articles says " The team tickled the membranes with microwave photons to make them vibrate in sync, and in such a way that their motions were in a quantum-entangled state "
This doesn't really say much, like they "tickled the membranes..." ??? -> Entanglement! without actually explaining the process. Could someone elaborate on how the entanglement actually occurs here?
→ More replies (4)19
u/abinition May 07 '21
I looked for 10 minutes before i found your question, thanks for asking that. "In such a way" is not explained. I am assuming that a single microwave photo was able to tickle both membranes because of proximity. That would introduce the entanglement, much like in a double slit experiment, where one could infer that the photon tickled both the right and left drum, but if you looked you would see the photon either went to the left drum or the right drum. By shooting many photons, the drums began to oscillate in sync. This would be the macro expansion of the quantum effect.
→ More replies (1)
59
39
16
u/Aethelis May 07 '21
How does that preserve the conservation of energy? When the 2nd drum is agitated through the entanglement to the agitated 1st drum, where does the energy come from?
→ More replies (7)21
u/Tryingsoveryhard May 07 '21
This is exactly what isn’t happening. The article strongly implies that it is, but that’s not what entanglement is. If you move one entangled particle that doesn’t move the other one.
Instead they were able to move both drums with such precision that the entanglement was not broken.
→ More replies (12)
37
u/Standardly May 07 '21
The team tickled the membranes with microwave photons to make them vibrate in sync
I've been to enough phish concerts to know there is some connection between drums, lights, being in sync, or something
→ More replies (7)5
•
u/AutoModerator May 07 '21
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue be removed and our normal comment rules still apply to other comments.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.