The Kavli Foundation Spotlight Live: Hey Einstein, It Really Is a Quantum World

WHAT KIND OF UNIVERSE DO WE LIVE IN? Dutch physicist Ronald Hanson has given us the best answer to that question to date. And Albert Einstein wouldn’t like it.

The question revolves around a phenomenon called quantum entanglement, which predicts that changing one particle instantaneously changes the other – even if they are on opposite sides of the galaxy, 100,000 light-years apart.

Einstein called this idea “spooky action at a distance.” And he dismissed it, arguing that nothing could move faster than light, so entanglement couldn’t be real. Instead, he proposed that unknown “local factors” must determine the strange properties of these so-called entangled particles.