The insight of this snip is that quantum entanglement can be explained by the concept of Schrodinger's sandwiches. In an example involving ordering sandwiches, it is suggested that when you and your grandmother both order different types of sandwiches without knowing which one will go where, once you receive a rose beef sandwich, you automatically know that your grandmother received a chicken sandwich, without the need for communication or information travel. This implies that the order of the sandwiches is entangled. In the quantum realm, it is explained that the sandwiches would exist in a superposition of being both rose beef and chicken until you open the box and collapse the superposition, revealing the type of sandwich you have. By this same principle, your grandmother's superposition would collapse into a chicken sandwich. This phenomenon of entanglement remains the same regardless of the distance between you and your grandmother, with the example suggesting that even if you were billions of light years away, you would still know that your grandmother's sandwich would collapse into a chicken sandwich if yours collapsed into a rose beef sandwich.
In this episode we cover the underpinnings of the either/or, cause-then-effect, deterministic, distance-separates-things, no-info-travels-faster-than-light, orderly world of classical physics. It is the world inhabited by such luminaries as Newton and Einstein.
Then we descend into the merely probabilistic, action-at-a-distance, neither/both world of Quantum Physics to cover the most bafflng and counter intuituve (nay, SPOOKY in the words of Einstein) phenomenon in nature -- Quantum Entanglement.
If you have not listened to the episode on Schrodinger's Cat (HBH 50) it is recommended you do so first. Superposition is a necessary precursor to this topic also.
For more info:
https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/proving-that-quantum-entanglement-is-real#:~:text=The%20Freedman–Clauser%20experiment%20was,2010%20Wolf%20Prize%20in%20physics.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/quantum-entanglement-isnt-all-that-spooky-after-all1/
Art by Ian Armstrong
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