Chinese Researchers Achieve Quantum Entanglement Record

It's just an expression of the conservation of energy. Much in the same way the double slit experiment conflates a particle transporting itself through two windows at once, so too, do these experiments conflate the polarizers as causing the effect.

Ask yourself: if you construct a gun, with two diametrically opposed barrels, with exactly opposed rifling twists, and you aim the gun at two opposing (but identical) abrasive knurled metal rasp targets, such that if the bullet spins one way, the ricochet off rasp target will send it to a blue target, but if the bullet spins the other way, the grain of the rasp target is such that the bullet is sent to an orange target, will you be surprised to find that the behavior of the projectiles remains consistent?

Fire those bullets out of that gun, and as the bullets leave the opposing twists of the barrel, and the spin of the bullets encounters the friction of the knurled surface, they will consistently be sent in whichever direction the spin of the barrels rifling puts them. When one side sends spins the bullet to hit the blue target, the other barrel's twist always puts the other corresponding bullet onto the orange target, by bouncing it off the polarizer rasp.

So, now, to shrink downward to the realm of particle physics, what we find is that the ballistic particle guns are such that the emitter source is an array of many guns with varying rifling twists, but like pulling a lever on a slot machine, we cannot know which of the guns embedded in the radiation source will fire next.

We won't know the turn of the rifling of the gun's barrel prior to whichever one happens to go off. We stick out our rasp target to have it send the bullet to a colored target, and we declare that the polarizer rasp directed the bullet particle, but not really. The emitting source's gun barrel imparted the spin. The polarizers induced behavior on particles that would have behaved as reciprocals anyway.

Many deep profound things are intellectually boring. For many people that's a big obstacle to overcome in order to learn them. I can't see how "being boring" is any substantive argument for or against any question discussed here.

The original author used his "objective measure of excellence" as an argument for not developing quantum computing technologies to be used in personal devices. In this specific instance, in this practical regard (even though it's probably 50 years too early for this question) - I argue that yes, the position of personal freedom (to use quantum computing in cell phones, exaggeratedly) does indeed trump the other position which is to actively exclude quantum computing from phones for the vague fear that people might waste their lives on it, by failing to fit into some objective measure of excellence.

No, no, no. There is almost half a century of experimental evidence against you. The experimental results of Bell test experiments are incompatible with the assumption that the states of both particles are fixed when the pair is generated and are only classically correlated because of the way their states are fixed. All your analogy attempts are flawed and bound to fail exactly because entangled pairs of quantum particles do not behave like pairs of classical particles. You are making up classical experiment and assume that quantum particles will behave in the same way, but they don't. And that's the entire point.

EDIT: I just came across an illustration which might be helpful. I will place three coins on a table and cover them so that you can not see whether they are heads or tails. You get to pick two of them and I will reveal them for you but you can never look at the third one. Your task is to figure out by which rule I am placing the coins on the table.

In the first round you pick coins one and two, I reveal them to be heads and tails. In the second round you pick coins one and two again, now they are tails and heads. You continue picking coins one and two for a few thousand rounds and always see heads and tails or tails and heads, they are never the same.

Then you switch to picking coins two and three for a few thousand rounds and again they are always heads and tails or tails and heads, they are also never the same. Now you have figured out what I am doing, I am randomly choosing between heads, tails, heads and tails, heads, tails for coins one, two, and three.

So in the next round you pick coins one and three and I reveal them to you. Heads and tails. WtF?!? They should have been the same if I always choose between heads, tails, heads and tails, heads, tails. You try again. Heads and tails. Again. Tails and heads.

No matter what you try, you never get to see two coins with the same side up. That's ridiculous, you think. There are only two sides to a coin but three coins on the table. At least two of the coins have to have the same side up in each round and if you select the two coins to reveal at random, then you should at least sometimes get to see two coins with the same side up no matter which rule I use to place them. But you don't.

Assuming that I choose heads and tails for each of the coins when I placed them on the table and before you make your choice is incompatible with your observation that you never see two coins with the same side up. But if you assume that I can magically turn the coins around at the moment you tell me which two coins to reveal, then you can explain your observation. It may however trouble you because your explanation now involves magic.

And that is roughly how entangled pairs in Bell test experiments behave. Or more formally, classically P(1=2) + P(2=3) + P(3=1) >= 1, at least two coins always have the same side up no matter what the underlying distribution is. Entangled pairs in Bell test experiments violate this inequality, the probability of two coins having the same side up is less than 1. Not 0 as I portrayed it but 0.75.

Excellent context to frame this discussion.

"They won't be remembered."

-otakucode

The explanation you're supposing for the "spooky action at a distance" is called a hidden variable theory, and as others have said, this explanation has been disproven. You might be wondering how, and I'll tell you the scenario (adapted from The Elegant Universe) that helped me understand.

Imagine you and I each have a device: a small box with one openable window on the top, one on the front, and one on the back. When one of these windows is opened, it shows either white or black. Further, I tell you that these boxes are entangled: if we both open the same window, the same color will be displayed on both boxes. This only works for the first window opened and only if we both open the same window: if a second window is opened or if we open two different windows, the colors shown will no longer be correlated in any way.

I actually have many of these pairs of boxes, each pair numbered uniquely to identify its matching twin, and we run the experiment for an arbitrarily large number of them until you're satisfied that my claim holds true. You see nothing special about these boxes and argue that they're simply preprogrammed from the factory to display a set of colors the first time a window is opened (for example, BWB or WWB). I counter that entanglement is special and the boxes are not preprogrammed from the factory. In fact, they decide at random which color to show right at the moment one of the boxes' windows is opened!

My claim seems crazy and at first glance possibly even unprovable! But it turns out with a bit of cleverness we can test this.

We take an arbitrarily large number of boxes and begin independently opening their windows at random (without consulting or coordinating with each other when deciding which window to open), recording box numbers, window choices, and the resulting colors. When finished, we compare notes. Sure enough, when we both open the same window on entangled boxes, the colors match as expected. Upon a closer look at the data, we discover something surprising. Ignoring which window we opened, each pair of entangled boxes showed the same color exactly 50% of the time. How is this surprising? A little bit of probabilistic analysis conclusively demonstrates that such a result is fundamentally incompatible with any hidden variable theory.

Assume for the sake of argument that the boxes are preprogrammed. The only possible programming for each box is some form of XXX or XXY. Consider: if both boxes are programmed WWW (or BBB) and we both open a window at random, it will show the same color 100% of the time. If both are programmed WWB (or BWB, or BWW, or any equivalent variant), 2/3 of the time there's a 2/3 chance of displaying the same color when choosing windows at random and 1/3rd of the time there's a 1/3 chance. Combined, whenever the colors are in an XXY configuration, there's a 5/9 chance of showing the same color when windows are chosen at random. Note that in both scenarios the odds of seeing the same color from randomly-chosen windows are greater than 50%! Assuming the preprogrammed colors are chosen at random, some form of XXX will be chosen 2/8 of the time and XXY will be chosen 6/8 of the time, we see that the total odds of seeing the same color if the boxes were preprogrammed should be 2/8 * 100% + 6/8 * 5/9 = 2/3. In theory, our data should have shown a 66% agreement in color, but our experiment consistently shows colors matching 50% of the time.

A hidden variable theory—any hidden variable theory—runs into this probabilistic hurdle.