God Awful Things

Well, it feels like it’s been a while since one of those good ol’ fashioned quantum physics posts.. but much like the idea of then, that time has passed.

From The Economist

Since its birth in the 1920s, physicists and philosophers have grappled with the bizarre consequences that his theory has for reality, including the fundamental truth that it is impossible to know everything about the world and, in fact, whether it really exists at all when it is not being observed. Now two groups of physicists, working independently, have demonstrated that nature is indeed real when unobserved. When no one is peeking, however, it acts in a really odd way.

Ah yes, that old problem, do things exist when I can’t see them.

The reality in question—admittedly rather a small part of the universe—was the polarisation of pairs of photons, the particles of which light is made. The state of one of these photons was inextricably linked with that of the other through a process known as quantum entanglement.

Hello, my favorite subject.

What the several researchers found was that there were more photons in some places than there should have been and fewer in others. The stunning result, though, was that in some places the number of photons was actually less than zero. Fewer than zero particles being present usually means that you have antiparticles instead. But there is no such thing as an antiphoton (photons are their own antiparticles, and are pure energy in any case), so that cannot apply here.

My head explode.

And just because I am a huge fan of double negative double speak

The only mathematically consistent explanation known for this result is therefore Hardy’s. The weird things he predicted are real and they can, indeed, only be seen by people who are not looking.