Things don’t just decide all by themselves how to act.Īnd yet we already see some decidedly “spooky” actions in quantum physics yet to be fully explained. In Companies Robotics on 24 November 2020 5 min readįor things to move, something needs to cross its location and tell it which way to shift, or how fast. Just what that distant effect happens to be is as perplexing to quantum physicists as it is to the rest of us. Without anything obvious forcing its motion, your eyes would move to the horizon with a sense of wonder what else might be responsible. Of course, ‘something’ must be nudging the vessel, you could argue. Think of a sailing boat zipping along when the ocean is still and the air is calm. In what is now named the Aharonov–Bohm effect, a charged particle can be affected by an electromagnetic potential even if it’s confined to an area where the surrounding magnetic and electric fields are both zero. More than half a century ago, he worked with the renowned theoretical physicist David Bohm on an analysis involving non-local effects on particles in electromagnetic fields. “But of course, all of this has to translate back to elementary particles, and if an elementary particle loses its spin because its spin goes somewhere else – maybe that’s something we can get used to.”Īharonov is no stranger to the Wonderland-like absurdity of quantum physics. “If you’re talking about a cat and its grin, that’s very strange,” Rorlich told Demming over at.
Particles aren’t typically known to let go of things like spin or charge, to have them wander away and affect distant surroundings, no more than a smile is known to remain while a face makes an exit. Putting it simply, a part of the particle’s phase describing its angular momentum, or spin, should change in relation to the opened or closed state of the mirror, according to the physicists.Įven when the particle itself should be nowhere near that end of the corridor, Aharonov and Rorlich found that it’s almost as if the momentum should be capable of reaching out with a ghostly finger to touch the closed door, before carrying back a bit of information with it. There are crests and troughs governing the chances of the particle being found somewhere, and phases as it evolves over time.
That’s because the particle’s wave of possibility has characteristics of any physical wave. If a particle were to be sent down the corridor, its fate would also be a blur of possibility until its journey was made known. In quantum physics, where objects aren’t defined until observed, the door is both open and closed until it’s seen, not unlike the condemned cat in Schrödinger’s proposed thought experiment. Think of a corridor with one end capped in a mirrored door. The experimental model they base their calculations on is surprisingly simple. “And we wanted to see if we can understand it better.” “We found it extremely interesting – the possibility of communication without anything passing between the two people who communicate with each other,” Aharonov explained to Anna Demming at. The theory dates back to 2013 when researchers based in the US and Saudi Arabia suggested a kind of freezing effect applied to a quantum wave still might not be enough to stop it from transmitting information. To be more precise, their analysis argues information could be transferred between two points without an exchange of particles.