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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity


 

Quantum Mechanics

Erwin Schrödinger coins the term "entanglement"

 


 

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From the documentary "Atomic Physics and Reality": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFvJOZ51tmc

 

“One of the great peculiarities of quantum mechanics, which Schrodinger already realized in 1926, is that, in many situations, two distinct physical systems are characterized by a single state, in such a way that, if you try to characterize the state of one part, you must refer to the state of the other part; if you refer to the state of the second part, you must refer to the state of the first.

“The two systems, as he put it, are entangled. Now, the various advocates of hidden variable theory wanted to interpret this entanglement in terms of human knowledge. They wanted to say, ‘There is no real entanglement of the states of these systems. The entanglement is of our knowledge. If we know something about system #1, we can infer something about system #2; and vice versa.'

“One of the most fundamental, if not the most fundamental results of [Alain] Aspect, is to say that this entanglement is objective, it’s not just a matter of human knowledge; that Nature itself is constituted in such a way that systems – two well distinguished systems – can have entangled states.”

 

 

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