“The
fundamental nature of reality could be radically different from our familiar
world of objects moving around in space and interacting with each other,”
physicist Sean Carroll suggested in a recent tweet. “We shouldn’t fool
ourselves into mistaking the world as we experience it for the world as it
really is.”
Scientists are
like prospectors, excavating the natural world seeking gems of knowledge about
physical reality. And in the century just past, scientists have dug deep enough
to discover that reality’s foundations do not mirror the world of everyday
appearances. At its roots, reality is described by the mysterious set of
mathematical rules known as quantum mechanics.
Conceived at the turn of the
20th century and then emerging in its full form in the mid-1920's, quantum
mechanics is the math that explains matter. It’s the theory for describing the
physics of the micro world, where atoms and molecules interact to generate the
world of human experience. And it’s at the heart of everything that made the century
just past so dramatically unlike the century preceding it. From cell phones to
supercomputers, DVDs to pdfs, quantum physics fueled the present-day
electronics-based economy, transforming commerce, communication and
entertainment.
But quantum theory taught
scientists much more than how to make computer chips. It taught that reality
isn’t what it seems.
Carroll’s perspective is not the
only way of viewing the meaning of quantum math, he acknowledges, and it is not
fully shared by most physicists. But everybody does agree that quantum physics
has drastically remodeled humankind’s understanding of nature. In fact, a fair
reading of history suggests that quantum theory is the most dramatic shift in
science’s conception of reality since the ancient Greeks deposed mythological
explanations of natural phenomena in favor of logic and reason. After all,
quantum physics itself seems to defy logic and reason.
It turns out that in the
micro world — beyond the reach of the senses — phenomena play a game with
fantastical rules. Matter’s basic particles are not tiny rocks, but more like
ghostly waves that maintain multiple possible futures until forced to assume
the subatomic equivalent of substance. As a result, quantum math does not
describe a relentless cause-and-effect sequence of events as Newtonian science
had insisted. Instead science morphs from dictator to oddsmaker; quantum math
tells only probabilities for different possible outcomes. Some uncertainty
always remains.
Quantum
entanglement goes into overdrive in the newly fashioned material. Even atoms on
opposite sides of the lattice share entanglement, or quantum links, meaning
that the properties of distant atoms are correlated with one another. “It’s
very, very entangled,” says physicist Giulia Semeghini of Harvard University, a
coauthor of the new study. “If you pick any two points of your system, they are
connected to each other through this huge entanglement.” This strong,
long-range entanglement could prove useful for building quantum computers, the
researchers say.