this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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Feels like a shower thought, but I seriously want to know if there are any implications, because it seems like identical twins are able to sense, understand, and almost be extensions of each other - finish each other's sentences/thoughts. Some even claim to be able to sense their twin when they're separate. Hard to believe, but at all possible?

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[–] count_of_monte_carlo 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That’s not really how quantum entanglement works. When particles are entangled, their quantum mechanical states cannot be described independently. So you couldn’t write down a waveform for just one particle and have it correctly describe reality, you would need the waveform of the entire state and therefore all entangled particles.

As a consequence, certain physical observables can be highly correlated between the particles. For example, if the spin of the overall entangled state of 2 particles is 0, then the spin of 1 particle will be exactly opposite the spin of the other. But these spins are only defined upon measurement (interaction with a system that is deterministic), and at that point the entangled state is collapsed. There’s no mechanism for transporting information while maintaining an entangled state.

Ignoring this fundamental issue, it still wouldn’t be possible to maintain an entangled state between particles in a pair of twins for any practical amount of time. Maintaining coherence in qubits (entailed bits) is one of the big challenges in quantum computing. If the qubits interact with the environment it breaks their entanglement. Even just thermal vibrations will destroy the state. So typically qubits are held at near absolute 0 in a dilution refrigerator. Even still, the longest a qubit has been kept coherent is 5 seconds.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks, been studying a bit about entanglement, super determinism and all that. I thought it was an interesting thought about the twins but I realized it wasn't likely for the reasons you gave. It's almost like distance between objects is the weird part about our universe, not it's quantum material, thus why the entanglement seems strange at a distance. The more I study about it, the more that our 3 dimensions isn't fundamental, but only a result of wave collapse - this is why the photon doesn't seem to care how much we try and passively manipulate it, only how it's finally collapsed. Like how qubits can only exist in their uncertain phase for 5 secs - it's hard to keep it from interacting/collapsing. Perhaps antimatter annihilates with our matter because of how differently the two matter types collapse their particles from each other?  It's all so interesting...