Such "local hidden variable theories" argued against the mind-boggling aspect of entanglement, instead proposing that something more mundane, yet unseen, is going on. Are particles really connected across space?īut are the particles really somehow tethered to each other across space, or is something else going on? Some scientists, including Albert Einstein in the 1930s, pointed out that the entangled particles might have always been spin up or spin down, but that this information was hidden from us until the measurements were made. The beauty of entanglement is that just knowing the state of one particle automatically tells you something about its companion, even when they are far apart. Returning to our dancer metaphor, this would be like observing one dancer and finding them in a pirouette, and then automatically knowing the other dancer must also be performing a pirouette. If the researcher measures the direction of one particle's spin and then repeats the measurement on its distant, entangled partner, that researcher will always find that the pair are correlated: if one particle's spin is up, the other's will be down (the spins may instead both be up or both be down, depending on how the experiment is designed, but there will always be a correlation). Before the particles are measured, each will be in a state of superposition, or both "spin up" and "spin down" at the same time. For this example, let's say the researchers want to measure the direction the particles are spinning, which can be either up or down along a given axis. The entangled particles are then sent off to different locations. When researchers study entanglement, they often use a special kind of crystal to generate two entangled particles from one.
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