Einstein called it "phantasmagoric action". Here is an image for the first time

If you're sitting on a beach in Florida and your bestie is stung by a bee on a Colorado mountain, our intuitive understanding of the physical world tells us that you can not feel your friend's unhappy encounter. But in the field of quantum mechanics, a close pair can be split and separated by a significant distance while remaining "entangled" in a way so strange that Einstein himself called it " scary. "

And now, for the first time, physicists have managed to capture this weird quantum phenomenon, called "Bell entanglement", on a photo.

In the world we live in, you and your friend could separate you and experience different adventures for the summer. It's only when you reconnect to share what you've done that you're getting "entangled" again.

But at the quantum level of the particles, a pair of photons can be drawn from a laser together, then separated by a beam splitter and sent in very different journeys. But when researchers observe separate photons, they behave as if they were still connected.

The Glasgow University physicists have come up with a complex experiment to capture in a single image what Einstein has called "Spooky Action at a distance". A pair of photons were shot with the help of a laser, split and sent in very different travels before being captured by a special camera. The resulting image systematically shows what looks like a pair of photons reflecting one another to form a ring shape.

"The image that we managed to capture is an elegant demonstration of a fundamental property of nature, seen for the very first time," explained Dr. Paul-Antoine Moreau of the School of Nature. physics and astronomy of the University of Glasgow in a statement. Moreau is also the main author of an article on the process released Friday in Science Advances.

To better understand the process, imagine that you and a friend were going down two separate water slides at the same time. Your friend's zipper is straight and narrow and he goes down the feet first all the way. Your slide, on the other hand, is a vast and swirling affair that makes you completely pivot so that you end up hitting the pool at the bottom of your head first. Yet when a bottom camera takes a picture of you both hitting the pool at the same time, you are both in the same sitting position as when you started your trip.

Spooky indeed. And now, this phantasmagoria has been made visible to the eye for the first time. In a way, it's worth noting that such an image was not produced earlier, because Bell's entanglement is already used in practical applications such as the # 1, # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # 39, quantum computing and cryptography.

"This is an exciting result, which could be used to advance the emerging field of quantum computing and lead to new types of imaging," added Moreau.

Perhaps we will soon be living in a world of quantum images where what you see in a photo is determined not by the photographer, but by the viewer. Someone calls Netflix and Charlie Brooker and tells them I have an idea for following on Bandersnatch.