332 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?
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332 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?
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 [)..
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
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016022
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