![]() The article considered a pair of distant particles in a special state now known as an “entangled” state. In a 1935 article with fellow theorists Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, he argued there must be more to reality than what quantum mechanics could describe.Įinstein vs quantum mechanics. No less a figure than Albert Einstein found this idea untenable. In many cases, quantum theory doesn’t give definite answers to questions such as “where is this particle right now?” Instead, it only provides probabilities for where the particle might be found when it is observed.įor Niels Bohr, one of the founders of the theory a century ago, that’s not because we lack information, but because physical properties like “position” don’t actually exist until they are measured.Īnd what’s more, because some properties of a particle can’t be perfectly observed simultaneously – such as position and velocity – they can’t be real simultaneously. Quantum mechanics works extremely well to describe the behaviour of tiny objects, such as atoms or particles of light (photons). To understand why it’s so important, let’s look at this history. ![]() This is the strongest result yet in a long series of discoveries in quantum mechanics that have upended our ideas about reality. But our research, published in Nature Physics, shows they cannot all be true – or quantum mechanics itself must break down at some level. These are all intuitive ideas, and widely believed even by physicists. It is possible to make free choices, or at least, statistically random choices.Ī choice made in one place can’t instantly affect a distant event. When someone observes an event happening, it really happened.
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