Tuesday, April 17, 2007

God doesn't play dice...or does he?

Einstein hated Quantum Theory even though he was one of its founding fathers along with Niels Bohr, Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg. He hated it because of the seemingly "Alice in Wonderland" properties that sub atomic particles possess, properties that allow electrons, for example, to tunnel through solid surfaces and single photons to go through multiple slits at the same time or entangled particles being "instantaneously" connected no matter how far apart they may be. Because of this inherent strangeness, (Richard Feyman - If you're not mystified by Quantum theory, then you don't understand it.) Einstein proclaimed that "God does not play dice with the universe." and, to the naked eye, Einstein appears to be right but theorists have long conjectured that Quantum Weirdness should scale to macro levels without a problem save that decoherence. a property that prevents ordinary matter from being in more than one state at a time, shields us from seeing the true nature of reality - until now.
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics have devised an exquisite experiment to see how quantum effects can be applied to the macroscopic world, something that has never been done before. If this experiment works, it shows how man is touching the very fabric of reality, something that Einstein would appreciate even though it looks like God may play dice after all.

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