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	Re: General musings...
	Posted By: Ben Potter	Date: 11/9/01 1:31 p.m.
	In Response To: Re: General musings... (Ben Potter) Here's something that's really weird: (from Science 294:1265, "Spooky Twins Survive Einsteinian Torture" by Charles Seife) It's a nagging truth that all physicists must face: Relativity and quantum mechanics don't mix, and when they square off, Einstein loses. Now Swiss physicists have brought the two great theories into the arena again. In an experiment that turns commonsense notions of causality on their head, the scientists showed that relativity's tools for dealing with the flow of time are irrelevant in the submicroscopic realm of quantum processes. The experiment, conducted at the University of Geneva, explored the properties of pairs of particles whose fates are linked through a mechanism called entanglement. As long as physicists don't examine them, such so-called Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) pairs enjoy a wishy-washy existence, not committing themselves to any particular states of properties such as polarization. But jolt one of the particles into choosing--say, by noting its existence with a detector--and the other instantly feels the tweak, even if it's millions of light-years away. If one particle is detected with horizontal polarity, for instance, the other might instantly assume vertical polarity. ...Lab experiments have repeatedly confirmed that this "spooky action at a distance" operates faster than light, although physicists have shown that it doesn't violate relativity because it can't be used to send faster-than-light messages....The results, Suarez says, leave the theory he and Scarani proposed no wiggle room. "The notion of time makes sense only in Einstein's world," he says. "It doesn't make sense in the [quantum world]. It cannot be described in terms of before and after." And for those who prefer to live in a world of cause and effect, spooky action at a distance just got even spookier. Pretty odd indeed, Cheers, Ben

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Replies:

	General musings...	Cannibal Harry	11/9/01 8:26 a.m.
	Re: General musings...	Arsonperbuilding	11/9/01 12:40 p.m.
	Re: General musings...	Ben Potter	11/9/01 1:06 p.m.
	Re: General musings...	Ben Potter	11/9/01 1:31 p.m.
	Re: General musings...	Cannibal Harry (vidboi)	11/9/01 7:49 p.m.
	Re: General musings...	Inverted Sock Puppet	11/9/01 10:25 p.m.
	Re: General musings...	whocares	11/12/01 4:32 p.m.

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