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332 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?

[Image: Two landscape photographs showing a coastline or mudflats]

Effect of Polaroid Lenses

When scientists examine the polarization of these photons, they get random results. Sometimes the photon is oscillating side to side, sometimes up and down and sometimes part way in between. This can be determined simply by taking a lens out of a pair of Polaroid glasses, holding it up at an angle and seeing if the photon can pass through. Obviously laboratory grade Polaroid material is available, so scientists don’t have to destroy an expensive pair of designer glasses, but the principle is identical.

Very strange things happen when the measurements are made. The polarizations appear to have no discernible pattern, but once one of the photons has gone through a polarizer in the first town, its sister photon will always be found to have the opposite polarization (or the same if it was a type I)..

Einstein was uncomfortable with this for two reasons. The first related to his famous statement, “God does not play dice with the Universe.” He was deeply uncomfortable with the idea that the polarizations were random. Even more troubling to him was the idea that the sister photon somehow instantaneously had the opposite polarization. How would it know? For the sister photon to immediately have the opposite polarization, information would have to travel faster than the speed of light from the first photon to tell its sister what to do. In 1935, Einstein wrote a paper with Jacob Podolsky and Samuel Rosen describing this ‘EPR’ paradox. Since faster than light communication was impossible – it breaks the law of special relativity – they concluded quantum mechanics must be wrong, or at least incomplete. A deeper theory would be needed to explain the particles’ behavior. One very simple explanation is by analogy to socks! (Clothing analogies are one of the ways physicists try to make quantum mechanics less intimidating.)

Consider sister photons as if they were right and left socks. If we found a left sock on the bedroom floor, we would be unsurprised to find the matching sock was a right one. There is no need for messages to flow

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