To me, greatest coincidence ever occurred is this planet we live on. For some reason life happened, creatures emerged and evolved. Along came humans, us. Ironically world produced a creature which is able to study reasons for it's own existence. Were we put here to find out why we were put here? That question may be closer to theology than science but I think that as long as you don't stop asking questions your soul is doing just fine. Luckily world has almost infinite amount of riddles for a curious mind.
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| Liverpool rules the waves, powerful advantage indeed. |
I'm not sure what I was thinking of that sculpture at the time I took the picture above but now it resembles particles with entangled spin to me. Spin is a property of a individual particle that can be described as a angular momentum. But not like the angular momentum as in common sense world. When you spin me Round Like a Record (Another accidental quantum physics reference pointing to Liverpool) I could have one well defined angle while spinning around my hypothetical axle. Same doesn't go with the quantum world.
In the quantum world spin is a weird mathematical phenomena which raises more questions than it answers to. Spin can have only certain quantized values times ħ. Particles that have spin number half-integer are considered drastically different than those which have integer as spin number. Those particles that have half-integer are called fermions and those integer ones are called bosons. It's hard to describe or even imagine what does it means in practical terms but the important bit is that fermions (e.g. electrons) can't be in same quantum state and bosons (e.g. photons) can.
So for example electron has a spin of 1/2ħ which means that if we draw electron spinning around it's axel, that axel could point either up or down (much like those two balls in the picture). If these balls were close together they would interact and become entangled. This entanglement would cause the other ball to spin up and other down, since same quantum state would not be possible. Also no other balls could join in the party because there are only two possible orientations and they have been taken like seats. This is actually the reason why there is electron orbitals around an atom. When first two electron occupy space around nucleus, they get entangled and reserve all the two possible quantum states. If other electrons also wish to join in they will have to go further away from the nucleus to avoid the quantum state of those two which were there first.
Bosons can get entangled too, and spin is not the only property that can get entangled. But the most unimaginable thing about entanglement is that when you separate particles they still stay entangled. That may not sound that much of a big deal at the first thought but it can basically permit a way to communicate faster than light travels. Just send one photon from space station to polarizer in France and other to moon (cheap and easy), you would instantly know in which angle polarizer is on the moon by looking at the polarization results in France. So information on the moon was acquired faster than the light would travel from moon. And since nothing travels faster than light, we have this thing called dilemma.
In the quantum world spin is a weird mathematical phenomena which raises more questions than it answers to. Spin can have only certain quantized values times ħ. Particles that have spin number half-integer are considered drastically different than those which have integer as spin number. Those particles that have half-integer are called fermions and those integer ones are called bosons. It's hard to describe or even imagine what does it means in practical terms but the important bit is that fermions (e.g. electrons) can't be in same quantum state and bosons (e.g. photons) can.
So for example electron has a spin of 1/2ħ which means that if we draw electron spinning around it's axel, that axel could point either up or down (much like those two balls in the picture). If these balls were close together they would interact and become entangled. This entanglement would cause the other ball to spin up and other down, since same quantum state would not be possible. Also no other balls could join in the party because there are only two possible orientations and they have been taken like seats. This is actually the reason why there is electron orbitals around an atom. When first two electron occupy space around nucleus, they get entangled and reserve all the two possible quantum states. If other electrons also wish to join in they will have to go further away from the nucleus to avoid the quantum state of those two which were there first.
Bosons can get entangled too, and spin is not the only property that can get entangled. But the most unimaginable thing about entanglement is that when you separate particles they still stay entangled. That may not sound that much of a big deal at the first thought but it can basically permit a way to communicate faster than light travels. Just send one photon from space station to polarizer in France and other to moon (cheap and easy), you would instantly know in which angle polarizer is on the moon by looking at the polarization results in France. So information on the moon was acquired faster than the light would travel from moon. And since nothing travels faster than light, we have this thing called dilemma.
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