Entanglement - A layman's Approach

For our amateur scientists who are curious...
Quantum Reality
Point of No Return
Theory of Everything
The God Particle

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The Quantum Realm is full of uncertainties and probabilities and asks questions that our state of the art physics still don't have an answers to. Once a great scientist said, "At the Quantum Level, every probable event is a 100% possible event" and quantum experiment has proved it.

Here at this level subatomic particles behave like a wave holding all of their particle properties at the same time, the wave-particle duality. Particles, here, doesn't acquire a particular spacial position but they are present at all probable space at all the times, the quantum superposition. The interesting thing about this realm is that "the act of measurement" decides what place and property a particular particle is going to have among all the other probabilities that it can have.

At this Quantum Realm particles interact with each other in a wholly different way. Two particles interacted at the beginning can exchange their properties, no matter the distance, without actually interacting with each other. That's Quantum Entanglement or "Spooky Action At Distance", as quoted by Dr. Albert Einstein. Till this day our science doesn't have an answer to this phenomena!

Let's have an insight to this spooky problem, say, or phenomena. Take two electrons, entangle them at source and keep one at Earth and send other to Moon. Well thanks to Pauli's Principle we know that both the electrons have opposite spin. Now carefully changing the spin of Electron on earth simultaneously changes the spin of electron on moon. It happens in just the opposite way, like if you up your right hand I'll up my left and vice-versa. You can take distance to be relativistic, still the exchange of information between the two entangled particles happens in real time, somehow breaking the speed barrier. This very phenomena made Dr. Einstein cry like a baby for decades and say statements like, "God doesn't play dice", or "Spooky action at distance".

One of the most controversial aspect of Quantum Entanglement is "Teleportation". At Canary Island on The Coast of Africa there are two laboratories. Dr. Anton Zylinger and his team produced a pair of Entangled Photons, kept one at La Palma and sent the

other to Tenerife Island 143 KM away by Laser. Now he introduced a Third Photon and made it interact with the one at La Palma. Quantum Data of the third photon was taken and sent to Tenerife and then something happened that was no less than a miracle. The third photon vanished at La Palma and appeared at Tenerife without actually covering the space in between. The damn little Photon was "Teleported".

Thanks to Dr. Anton Quantum Entanglement is not a spooky thing from Science Fiction anymore. "Give me the Quantum State Data of all the particles and I can teleport anything, even Humans", said Dr. Zylinger. It took us more than 10,000 years to understand that Earth is not the centre of the Universe and took us mere 500 years to get in the world where every new discovery gets old on the very next day of its birth. How long do you think is when we start using teleportation for our day to day life ?!

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For our amateur scientists who are curious...
Quantum Reality
Point of No Return
Theory of Everything
The God Particle

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Quantum Reality

For our amateur scientists who are curious...
Event Horizon
Theory of Everything
The God Particle
Gravitational Lensing

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The meaning of reality, in our day to day life, is so vague. Talking scientifically, Reality can be understood at two levels: Macro and Micro.

When we talk about reality at the macro level we generally mean the reality of the bodies/objects we see around us and also the bodies/objects we see at the grand scale i.e, planets, star, galaxies, etc. up to the Event Horizon.
This reality, on the macro scale, has Newtonian Mechanics and General Relativity as its DNA and at this level we can define past, explain present and predict future of any given body provided with some essential data like velocity, space-time coordinate, momentum, etc. with 100% certainty. Here we use words like certainty, spatial coordinates, etc.

Apropos reality at the micro level we generally mean the Quantum level. Here we use words like uncertainty, quantization, superposition, probability space, etc. At the Quantum level reality has its own meaning.

Let's consider the Double Slit Experiment as an example. In the exp. first a beam of electron was passed through one slit and its impact on the detector screen was observed. The beam made impression on the screen just behind the slit. Now here's the chase, when the exp. was continued with two slits the result was fascinating. This time there was not two wide dark bands on the screen(as expected) but was multiple bands with decreasing intensity i.e, the interference pattern was observed.


Now the twist. When electrons was beamed one at a time through any of the slit, each electron took some random position on the screen(makes sense) but when continued for many electrons a pattern was observed which was same as the pattern observed earlier. Remember electrons was sent one at a time through only one slit but somehow each electron knew what positions to take on the screen to have that pattern and that makes no sense. Also the interference pattern can only be observed if a single wave crosses both the slits at the same time. This concludes that single electron was present at both the slits at the same time no matter that it was targeted towards only one slit. This is a classical example of Quantum Superposition.

Also it was observed that when a particle detector was placed at either of the two slit or at both the slits the interference pattern vanishes and we get a desired dark band behind the slit on the screen. The reason was when we put the detector at the slit we knew the position of the electron only to have its momentum(in this case direction) uncertain. And this my friend is a classical example of how reality at the quantum level can be altered just by the measurements you make for the particle only to have all the other properties of that particular particle uncertain.

This sole exp. was sufficient enough to have some glimpse of the quantum realm and the uncertainty it consists of. There are many more examples to support these facts and others too. At quantum level one can't know both the position and momentum data for a given particle at the same point of time. That's the Uncertainty Principle. Also the particles have spin in all the directions at the given point of time and particles can be present at more than one place at the same time. That's the Quantum Superposition. Also there are specific positions particle takes in the 3-D space(no in-between positions) thus, giving birth to the term Quantization.

This world of uncertainty is nothing like what we see at the macro scale. It is not wrong to say that particles at this level have their own Quantum Miniverse powered by quantized reality. So, in layman's term every probable event is a 100% possible event which further depends on the act of measurement, yes it can change the outcome of an event.


"Reality doesn't exist until we measure it", quantum experiments has confirmed.

***I've left Quantum Entanglement  for my future post***

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For our amateur scientists who are curious...
Event Horizon
Theory of Everything
The God Particle
Gravitational Lensing

Read More

Point of No Return - The Event Horizon

For our amateur scientists who are curious...
Quantum Reality
Theory of Everything
The God Particle
Gravitational Lensing

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An Event Horizon for a layman, is an outer covering of an extreme astrophysical phenomena known as Gravitational Singularity. Just like a magnet has its magnetic field, Singularities have a gravitational field. Near the singularity escape velocity is much much grater than the speed of light but moving away it decreases and at a certain distance it is exactly equal to the speed of light or "c"(say). This one dimensional distance in 3-Dimension corresponds to a sphere which surrounds the singularity and known as the Event Horizon. Since the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light and nothing can cross the speed barrier so it is a one way route to the centre and also known as the Point of No Return.



It makes impossible to see inside a black hole or a naked singularity.

As an object or dust particles from comets, planets or even stars rotating around a black hole gradually reaches near the event horizon it starts gaining speed, breaks into pieces and gets heated up due to the collision between different bodies at high speed and thus forms Accretion Disk which in turn covers the Event Horizon up and makes it impossible to see it.

Event Horizon is the point where we observe certain events varying in properties than we normally observe in day to day life. Let's assume an Astronomer falling into a black hole. Closing into the event horizon he will experience tremendous amount of gravity. Gravity will change drastically from his head to neck to chest to other parts of the body that his body will be elongated and stretched infinitely and be torn apart.

The most interesting thing about this place is we can't see any object actually crossing the event horizon because of the General Relativity. The speed of the falling object is approaching "c" thus time is dilated to infinity. So the object, for an observer (in his frame of reference), will appear taking forever to fall into the black hole and will appear to have frozen to a stationary state and seize to go beyond. But in reality (object's frame of reference) it would have easily crossed the barrier and would have fallen into the singularity very long ago.

Now this property of gravity to dilate time could be harnessed to have a inter-planetary sling-shot into the future. A little maneuver around the event horizon for like 5-6 minutes will account for aprox. 100-150 earth yrs. Thus, someone can go past centuries without actually living it i.e. into the future. Also the maneuver is above the horizon so the risk of falling into the black hole is under control.
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For our amateur scientists who are curious...
Quantum Reality
Theory of Everything
The God Particle
Gravitational Lensing

Read More

Theory of Everything

For our amateur scientists who are curious...
Quantum Reality
Event Horizon
The God Particle
Gravitational Lensing

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A Theory of Everything, as the name suggests, is the ultimate theory which can describe all the 4 forces in nature through a single equation. It is believed to be the final chapter in understanding the working of The Universe and its birth.

Till now we have two theories :

(1.) General Theory of Relativity (GTR) : General Relativity, in layman's language, is the theory of Gravitation. It provides a unified description of gravity as a geometric property of space-time. What we perceive as the force of gravity is in fact a depression in the fabric of space-time due to the mass of the body. More mass, more depression and thus more gravity.

(2.) Quantum Field Theory (QFT) : Quantum Mechanics or QFT is a fundamental theory in physics which describes the working of nature at the smallest scale of energy levels of atoms and sub-atomic particles. In QFT energy, momentum and other quantities are restricted to a discrete value(quantization), objects have characteristics of both particle and wave(wave-particle duality) and there are limits to the precision with which quantities can be known(uncertainty principle).

GR works at the macro level and can accurately predict the cosmic phenomena such as the motion of celestial bodies, gravitational lensing, gravitational waves, etc. On the other hand QFT works at the micro level and tells us about the quantization of physical properties, can predict the probability of finding an electron, etc.

Everything is like happy go lucky. But as it turned out that the theories are inconsistent in regions of extremely small-scale and high mass, such as those that exist within a black hole(singularity) or during the beginning of the universe. When scientists try to incorporate Gravity into QM things start to go bizarre and results become unacceptable and drastically wrong.

Both the theory explains the physical world yet they can't be combined together unless we have the quantum-gravitational data which can be found inside of a black hole. And again we can never go inside a black hole so we can't get the data. This is like a closed loop for the astrophysical community and it really sucks.

The Theory of Everything is the the solution of the two theories GR and QFT solved using the quantum-gravitational data and when it's complete it can predict the past, present and even the future(to some extent and accuracy). With this theory we can complete our knowledge of the Universe and can even answer the biggest questions of all time, "Why the Big Bang happened?" or "Why the Universe is like as we see it today?".

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For our amateur scientists who are curious...
Quantum Reality
Event Horizon
The God Particle
Gravitational Lensing

Read More

Higgs Boson-The God Particle

For our amateur scientists who are curious...
Event Horizon
Theory of Everything
Consequences of Approaching 'c'
Gravitational Lensing

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Higgs Boson, one of the five Bosons, is the particle which gives mass to the matter. Without the Higgs Boson the universe would be massless and can't be in a stage as we see it now. If a particle is massless then it is impossible for it to stay at one place and it will always be zooming here and there at the speed of light. Without mass, the particles wouldn't hold together-and there would be no matter.

Higgs Boson creates a sticky energy field and whenever a fundamental particle like quark interacts with this field it slows down and becomes a candidate for coupling with another quark and thus creates atoms. The more the particle interacts with the field the more mass it gains. The Higgs particle brought the full stop in the early chaos of the universe after the inflation. And for all these properties it is known as "The God Particle".

The existence of the particle was theorized in 1964 by the British physicist Peter Higgs to explain why matter has mass. The Higgs is part of many theoretical equations underpinning scientists' understanding of how the world came into being. It is the most basic particle of the Standard Model and the scientists were worried that if it remains a hypothetical particle, the physics we know is wrong, all of it.

The Higgs boson is so elusive that only about one collision per trillion will produce one of them in the collider. But on March 14 2013 LHC replied.

"To me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," said Joe Incandela, a physicist who heads one of the two main teams at CERN, each involving about 3,000 scientists.

Since the Higgs field is scalar, the Higgs boson has no spin. The Higgs boson is also its own antiparticle and is CP-even, and has zero electric and colour charge. It's mass is between 115 and 180 GeV/c2 and has a mean life of about 1.6×10−22 s. One way that the Higgs can decay is by splitting into a fermion–antifermion pair.

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For our amateur scientists who are curious...
Event Horizon
Theory of Everything
Consequences of Approaching 'c'
Gravitational Lensing

Read More

Bosons - The Force Carriers

For our amateur scientists who are curious...
Event Horizon
Theory of Everything
The God Particle
Consequences of Approaching 'c'

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There are two types of particles in nature, one is Fermions and the other is Bosons. In quantum mechanics, a Boson is a particle that follows Bose–Einstein Statistics. It was named after the Indian Physicist Satyendra Nath Bose who worked with Albert Einstein in developing Bose–Einstein Statistics—which theorizes the characteristics of Elementary particles.

In the Standard Model there are five Bosons which are elementary :
The four Gauge Bosons - photons (p); gluons (g); W, Z
The only Scalar Boson - Higgs Boson (H)
Additionally, Graviton (G) of Quantum Gravity is a hypothetical elementary particle yet to discover.

Some examples of Bosons include fundamental particles such as photons, gluons, and W and Z bosons

(the four force-carrying gauge bosons of the Standard Model), the Higgs Boson, composite particles [e.g. mesons and stable nuclei of even mass number such as Deuterium (with one proton and one neutron; mass number = 2), Helium-4, or Lead-208; and some Quasiparticles (e.g. Cooper pairs, plasmons, and phonons)].

Bosons are the force carrier particles and functions as 'glue' holding matters together. Bosons have a very intersting property that unlike Fermions it has no restrictions for the number of particles that can take up the same quantum state. And this characteristic property of Bosons opened the gate for the introduction of a completely new state of matter - Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC). As a consequence of the Spin–Statistics theorem when a gas of Bose particles [particles with integer spin (s = 0, 1, 2 etc.)] is cooled down to absolute zero then the kinetic energy of the particles decreases to a negligible amount and they condense into a lowest energy level state. This state is called Bose-Einstein Condensation, fifth state of matter.

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For our amateur scientists who are curious...
Event Horizon
Theory of Everything
The God Particle
Consequences of Approaching 'c'

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Read More

Gravity - Not A Gentleman

For our amateur scientists who are curious...
Theory of Everything
The God Particle
Bosons-The Force Carriers
Consequences of Approaching 'c'

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Gravity is the building force of the Universe. At first sight it looks very gentle. It is always attractive in nature and the weakest force in nature. It is the gravity which attracted all the dust and hydrogen atoms to form clouds which then resulted into the formation of stars, planets and galaxies of which we are a part. We can say that gravity is the driving force of nature.

More mass more gravity. Gravity is the mother force behind all the happenings in this Universe. But sometimes it becomes intolerable. When gravity is at its peak it discards all the other forces and dominates over them and that is what we observe inside Black Holes. For a star whose mass(min. req.) is thrice the mass of the Sun, it results into a Black Hole. Inside the Black Hole lies Singularity, a place where space-time framework depress to infinity and gravity is so strong that not even light can escape. In simple terms singularity is just gravity gone mad.

Singularity is hidden inside an Event Horizon and  anything which goes inside remains inside. For a layman the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light and from General Relativity nothing can breach the speed barrier thus, once inside it's impossible to get outside, not even if you're light.

At Singularity gravity is so strong that all the matter collapse in a pin point denying all the known laws of quantum mechanics. Well a new super matter can be observed there in which all the sub-atomic particles are being forced to share the same quantum state simultaneously overlooking the Pauli's Exclusion Principle. At Singularity Space-Time bends to infinity. All the existing laws of science fails here. Singularities or say Black Holes are abundant in our universe and their sole existence is a question to the entire science community. They exist so it must be some physics working there supporting its existence which we don't know yet and this opens the gate for new discovery. To define Singularity we need a whole new branch of science with a whole new set of theories and concept. One thing which we need is the Quantum Gravitational Data which we don't have yet but not for long.

Please post your valuable comments.

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For our amateur scientists who are curious...
Theory of Everything
The God Particle
Bosons-The Force Carriers
Consequences of Approaching 'c'

Read More

Consequences of Approaching "c"

For our amateur scientists who are curious...
The God Particle
Bosons The Force Carrier
Gravity Not A Gentleman
What is Reality

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First of all we should know that nothing but light itself can travel at speed equal to "c". It's physically restricted to get to the speed of light unless you are not light or you're massless. But for instance let's imagine if we could anyhow approach "c" then, what the consequences will be that we have to face.

(a) Length Contraction : As any object approaches "c" its length starts to contract. At "c" length of the object becomes infinitesimally small that it becomes invisible. So, if any of you wants to vanish start running and get that speed.

(b) Time Dilation : As we approach the speed of light, time tends to slow down and it stops exactly at "c". For example if two person set their clocks and one of them takes a rocket, zooms into space at speed of light and then returns after 10 yrs.. then the one who was left behind on earth will be 10 yrs. older than the one who flew away. And this is the twin paradox. This happened because in the Earth's frame of reference time had no meaning for the person who was flying in space at the speed of light. So, if any of you ever want more time to study for exam or wants to gaze into future, get your bike and accelerate it to "c".

(c) Mass : As an object approaches "c" its mass tends to infinity. For instance a dust particle of mass 0.000001 gram if allowed to accelerate to speed of light, its weight will start increasing and reach infinity which is physically not possible because it will require an infinite amount of energy(E = mc²) which is scientifically impossible to generate. So, if any of you wants to increase your weight just drink Glucose and run at speed = "c".

There are much more things but for now that's enough for you all to understand that why can't we approach "c" and if we somehow did, then what would be the consequences we will face.

Please post your valuable comments.

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For our amateur scientists who are curious...
The God Particle
Bosons The Force Carrier
Gravity Not A Gentleman
What is Reality

Read More