Entanglement

More on entanglement its meaning and implications.    How  things at very great distances communicate, influence?

Untangling Quantum Entanglement

Two quantum particles can be intimately connected even when they are far apart, forming patterns beyond the scope of classical physics. When vast numbers of them link up, the outcome seems beyond comprehension altogether. The pattern-matching power of neural networks may be the key.

June 9, 2020 Series 25th Anniversary

When Miles Stoudenmire began to study artificial neural networks, they seemed oddly familiar. A physicist who focuses on condensed matter, he was doing his postdoc at the Perimeter Institute and, like many people, got interested in how neural networks had become adept at interpreting images and translating languages. He didn’t expect they would have any relevance to his own work. He says he remembers thinking, “Wait a second, this is a lot like the techniques we use to store quantum wave functions.”

Physicists have made a lot of connections like that in recent years. Not just condensed matter and neural networks but also quantum computing and quantum gravity turn out to have unexpected parallels in their mathematics and methods. The common theme of these connections is … connections. Things in the world form bonds with one another. They begin to act in harmony. The things might be electrons in a metal, building blocks of space-time, qubits in a quantum computer, or computing units in a neural network. In all these cases the connections among them follow common principles.

When the basic elements are quantum in nature, they can develop a peculiar linkage known as entanglement. Twenty-five years ago, entanglement was a niche subject, and the few who studied it focused on two, maybe three particles at a time. Today, researchers puzzle over vast numbers of particles in unimaginably intricate webs of interaction. As if the sheer quantity of particles weren’t demanding enough, the number of possible configurations grows exponentially, and in a quantum system all their probabilities have to be tracked. “This is really at the origin of all the problems we are trying to solve at CCQ,” says Giuseppe Carleo, who works with Stoudenmire at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Quantum Physics. “When you have many electrons, such as those that you find in a typical material, providing a full, complete description of the system is impossible.”

Given recent progress, however, it is a fair bet that in the next 25 years, they will make sense of entanglement in these seemingly intractable systems. Armed with that knowledge, they might have systematic ways to predict material properties and could even home in on a unified theory of physics.  ... '