Oct 242013
 

There’s times when I read about a scientific advance and wish that my lack of clear understanding of just what’s going on is due to being drunk. (Since I don’t get drunk, that makes that particular delusion kinda hard to hold onto.) Here’s one of those times:

Quantum Experiment Shows How Time ‘Emerges’ from Entanglement

Time is an emergent phenomenon that is a side effect of quantum entanglement, say physicists. And they have the first experimental results to prove it

More directly:

Time from quantum entanglement: an experimental illustration

In the last years several theoretical papers discussed if time can be an emergent propertiy deriving from quantum correlations. Here, to provide an insight into how this phenomenon can occur, we present an experiment that illustrates Page and Wootters’ mechanism of “static” time, and Gambini et al. subsequent refinements. A static, entangled state between a clock system and the rest of the universe is perceived as evolving by internal observers that test the correlations between the two subsystems. We implement this mechanism using an entangled state of the polarization of two photons, one of which is used as a clock to gauge the evolution of the second: an “internal” observer that becomes correlated with the clock photon sees the other system evolve, while an “external” observer that only observes global properties of the two photons can prove it is static.

Buh.

Maybe it’s cuz it’s late and I’m tired. Yeah, that must be it.

 Posted by at 1:08 am