He is the most important person of the 20th century (as designated by Time magazine in 99): Albert Einstein, the most brilliant physicist of our time and icon of our time. His most relevant contribution and known by the generality of society, the Theory of Relativity, laid the foundations of the understanding we have of the universe, and in fact such contribution, which is more than one hundred years old, has obtained its evidence (gravitational waves ) repeatedly.
However, Einstein was not always right. An investigation, conducted by the Institute of Photonic Sciences of Barcelona (ICFO), and in which one hundred thousand volunteer gamers participated, contradicts their ideas regarding quantum entanglement , which is the cornerstone of quantum mechanics, or the physics of subatomic particles.
What is quantum entanglement?
Quantum entanglement is the term coined to refer to a special connection between pairs or groups of photons, or any object described by quantum mechanics.
Apparently, two objects far enough apart cannot interact with each other. It seems like a pretty logical postulate, and that is what Einstein postulated, in a hypothesis called local realism or quantum realism. But the laws of quantum physics are different from what we know on the scale of larger objects.
In the same way, Einstein proposed a universe independent of our observations, in which no influence could travel faster than light.
Well, the hypothesis of the local realism of the physicist has been refuted by a global investigation, which has involved the participation of one hundred thousand volunteers. Through selected smartphone games and other devices, players sent about 90 million bits of binary code (zeros and ones), which helped the researchers test Einstein’s quantum realism.
In a Bell test (in honor of the physicist John Stewart Bell), pairs of entangled particles were generated, such as photons, which are sent to different places, to later measure their properties.
As the ICFO details in a statement, if the measurement results tended to coincide, regardless of the properties we choose to measure, it would imply two possibilities: either the measurement of one particle instantly affects the other (despite being very far away each other in distance), or even that the properties of the particles never existed.
The results of the experiment showed that quantum particles that are separated by a great distance can affect each other simultaneously, which contradicts Einstein’s principle of local realism, for whom quantum entanglement was impossible according to the traditional laws of physics.
In fact, it remains a mystery how the physics that governs subatomic particles and the physics that governs large bodies can coexist, and the assimilation of both is one of the great challenges of science, something that Stephen Hawking already tried trying to find a theory of everything.
