Quantum Chance by Nicolas Gisin

Author:Nicolas Gisin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Origin of Quantum Correlations

To end this chapter, let us ask how the mathematical formalism of quantum physics describes nonlocal correlations. After all, the formalism works very well. Can it not explain how these nonlocal correlations come into being.

According to this formalism, these peculiar correlations arise from entanglement and this in turn is described through a kind of wave that propagates in a much bigger space than our 3-dimensional space. This space in which such ‘waves’ propagate, known to physicists as configuration space, has a dimension that depends on the number of entangled particles, in fact, 3 times the number of entangled particles. In configuration space, each point represents the positions of all the particles, even if they are widely separated from one another. In this way, a local event in configuration space can involve quite remote particles. But we simple human beings cannot see configuration space, only shadows of what is actually going on there. Each particle projects a shadow in our 3-dimensional space, a shadow corresponding to its position in our space. The shadows of a point can thus be far removed from one another in our space, even if they are the shadows of a single given point in configuration space (see Fig. 5.2). This is indeed a weird explanation, insofar as it can be called an explanation. In a certain sense then, reality is something that happens in another space than our own, and what we perceive of it are just shadows, rather as in Plato’s cave analogy used centuries ago to explain the difficulty in knowing the ‘true reality’.

Fig. 5.2Quantum theory uses a high-dimensional space to describe particles. For two particles only allowed to propagate along a straight line, this space is 2-dimensional, like a sheet of paper. Hence each point on the figure represents the positions of two particles. The diagonal represents our usual space. An event in the large space then projects two shadows in our space and these shadows may be widely separated from one another

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