Sometimes a bond exists between things which effectively means they are halves of a whole, and change to one also changes the other, irrespective of how far apart they are.
This sounds like magic, but it’s not.
It’s physics, kids!
Quantum entanglement is the term used for this phenomena at the subatomic level.
Scientists have entangled a pair of photons, and found that no matter how you separate them, changes to one photon are instantly replicated by the other.
People got very excited.
The photons seem to be ‘tethered’ in a way that transmits information (a change to one) to the paired photon instantly, i.e., delivers that information faster than light.
Which everybody knows is impossible, right Albert?
Then the killjoys weighed in.
Professor Thomas Vidick of Caltech poo-pooed this, saying “There can be correlation without communication,” and that the particles “can be thought of as one object.”
Thanks Professor, but that explains fuck-all to be honest.
Because entanglement doesn’t just occur between cossetted particles in a lab, it occurs everywhere.
Putting aside the antics of ant colonies and the business of bee hives, anyone who’s watched the murmuration of starlings would need no convincing.
Entanglement, like love, is all around us.
Brainiacs in the field of Extended Network Generalized Entanglement Theory are busily studying how this weird magic applies to the human body. Not only how we heal ourselves, but how we heal others.
Google the “Jim twins”.
Separated at birth, they lived uncannily parallel lives including the names of their sons, wives, and pets, their preference for Chevrolet cars, carpentry, brand of cigarettes, nail biting, tension headaches and more.
Were they somehow entangled?
Synergy — how the whole is often significantly greater than the sum of its parts — is observable everywhere, and breathes life into Bill Clinton’s statement that “hardly anything worth doing can be done alone.”
Maybe success is entangled?
Entanglement doesn’t even need to exist from the start. It can be created, although artificially induced quantum states are currently so fragile that researchers joke that even looking at an experiement can destroy it.
Wherever this takes us, I think we’ve discovered the Lego of life. Such a pity it was entrusted to human hands.
Knowing us, the first thing we’ll do is make something that should not exist. We are, all of us, Schrödinger’s cat.
Quantum science is tugging a loose thread, and maybe we’ll all get to stand around to marvel as the fabric of space and time unravels.