What if the most basic assumptions about reality, that objects are separate, and distance is real… are completely wrong? For centuries, classical physics described a predictable, local universe where nothing influenced anything faster than light. Then, quantum entanglement arrived, breaking our entire assumption of reality and terrifying even the most brilliant minds, including Albert Einstein.
00:00 Quantum Entanglement Theory That Breaks Reality. 01:32 The Theory of Quantum Entanglement. 10:58 The Collapse of Local Realism. 20:44 Why Reality Doesn’t Look Quantum. 23:35 The Psychological Consequence of a Nonlocal Reality.
Aperture explores the ideas shaping how we think — philosophy, psychology. and the hidden forces behind human behavior. New perspectives, every week.
───────────────────────────── LISTEN ───────────────────────────── 🎙️ Aperture on Spotify: https://bit.ly/aperturepod.
───────────────────────────── JOIN THE COMMUNITY ───────────────────────────── 💬 Discord: / discord. 📸 Instagram:
The Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser explained simply provides a shocking answer to whether the future affects the past. Could it be possible that that the future can influence the present? An enhanced version of the famous double slit experiment, called the delayed choice quantum eraser implies exactly that mind blowing scenario – that future events can influence past results.
What exactly is a delayed choice quantum eraser, and how can it possibly show that the future is affecting the past? In 1978, a physicist by the name of John Archibald Wheeler proposed a thought experiment, called delayed choice. Wheeler’s idea was to imagine light from a distant quasar being gravitationally lensed by a closer galaxy. Wheeler noted that this light could be observed on earth in two different ways. This is called a delayed choice because the observer’s choice of selecting how to measure the particle is being done billions of years from the time that the particle left the quasar.
But how could this be?…the light began its journey billions of years ago, long before we decided on which experiment to perform. It would seem as if the quasar light “knew” whether it would be seen as a particle or wave billions of years before the experiment was even devised on earth. Does this prove that somehow the particle’s measurement of its current state has influenced its state in the past? The act of measurement gives reality to the quantum particle. So in the delayed-choice experiment, this means the quantum doesn’t become “real” until you measure it. So this experiment does not prove that the present has influenced the past because the light could have been a wave and particle at the same time, and only become real when it was measured.
However, another more recent experiment set up used a more complicated method to determine this idea of the future influencing a past. It introduced something called the quantum eraser to the delayed choice. So it is called the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser designed by Kim, Kulik, Shih and Scully in 1999.
It is a complicated construction that introduced entangled pairs of photons to Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment.
I am going to show you a much simpler set up that will illustrate this concept in easier-to-understand terms. The results of this experiment are pretty amazing — because Here’s what happens. It tells us that when the which way information is known, that is, when the detector can ascertain which slit the photon came from, it always presents as a particle. But when the detector cannot ascertain which slit the photon came from, that is, when the which way information is erased, then the photon acts like a wave.
Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger conducted ground breaking experiments using entangled quantum states, where two particles behave like a single unit even when they are separated. Their results have cleared the way for new technology based upon quantum information.
0:00 The 2022 Physics Nobel Prize 0:51 Is the Universe Real? 1:58 Einstein’s Problem with Quantum Mechanics 5:09 The Hunt for Quantum Proof 7:37 The First Successful Experiment 11:06 So What?
#Einstein #nobelprize #entanglement.
Interested in what I do? Sign up to my Newsletter. 100% free forever and good for the environment. https://drbenmiles.substack.com/
Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! / pbsspacetime.
Quantum mechanics has a lot of weird stuff — but there’s thing that everyone agrees that no one understands. I’m talking about quantum spin. Let’s find out how chasing this elusive little behavior of the electron led us to some of the deepest insights into the nature of the quantum world.
Quantum physics once shocked scientists by revealing that particles can behave like waves—and now, that strange behavior has been pushed even further. For the first time, researchers have observed wave-like interference in positronium, an exotic “atom” made of an electron and its antimatter partner, a positron. This breakthrough not only strengthens the weird reality of quantum mechanics but also opens the door to new experiments involving antimatter, including the possibility of testing how gravity affects it—something never directly measured before.
Scientists have created a powerful new way to control quantum systems, achieving the first-ever demonstration of quadsqueezing—an elusive fourth-order quantum effect. By combining simple forces in a clever way, they made previously hidden quantum behaviors visible and usable, opening new frontiers for quantum technology.
Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! / pbsspacetime.
In his essay “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics”, the physicist Eugine Wigner said that “the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious”. This statement was inspired by the observation that so many aspects of the physical world seem to be describable and predictable by mathematical equations to incredible precision especially as quantum phenomena. But quantum phenomena have no subjective qualities and have questionable physicality. They seem to be completely describable by only numbers, and their behavior precisely defined by equations. In a sense, the quantum world is made of math. So does that mean the universe is made of math too? If you believe the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis then yes. And so are you.
Does quantum mechanics allow the future to retroactively influence the past, as in the infamous delayed choice quantum eraser experiment? How about we get an actual quantum physicist–who many of you already know–to show us how to do this experiment at home, and hopefully set this matter to rest.
