Remember when your sixth grade science teacher told you that nothing is faster than the speed of light and you raised your hand and said what if you were riding a light wave and threw a football forward in space, wouldn't the ball be moving faster than the speed of light? and he gave you that sympathetic look not unlike those you gave to the really overweight kid who tried with all determinedness to jump to touch the bottom of the basketball net even though he always came up two feet short?
You remember that? Good. Because this will blow your mind.
Researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland tried to determine whether entanglement—the fact that measuring a property of one particle instantly determines the property of another—is actually transmitted by some wave-like signal that's fast but not infinitely fast...Um, dude? If the larger world operated like the quantum world everything would look liked a tricked out Dali painting, only it would make less sense and smell funnier.
The photons were indeed entangled, the group reports in Nature. But in reality, no experiment is perfect, so what they end up with is a lower limit on how fast the entanglement could be traveling: 10,000 times the speed of light.
3 Comments:
Thank you for reminding me why I always skipped Mr. Noel's physics class.
My physics teacher had a neon sign that read "Physics is Phun" and you know what? It is. Keep up the good posts Joel.
It really is fun...and it is really fun.
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