CERN Looks for Origins of Quantum Randomness

every time I talk about particle physics I get complaints when I say this stuff is nonsense people complain it's not nonsense when I say it's not nonsense people complain it's nonsense but today's news is different it's both nonsense and not nonsense at the same time so everyone will have something to complain about it'll be glorious let's have a look this news is about a test that particle physicists have done with data from the large hon Collider they wanted to know whether the particles in their collisions play by the rules of quantum physics whether they have quantum entanglement entanglement is a correlation between Quantum particles that can be stronger than any correlation you can get without Quantum effects it's the smoking pun of quantum physics so to speak this test is nonsense because we have tested this thousands of times before there was even a Nobel Prize for confirming that yes entanglement is real and of course you already know that the new test confirmed quantum physics because otherwise Fox News that have declared all of physics wrong and yet it's not nonsense because none of these other experiments were done at such high energies as the large hron collider reaches and doing the test at such high energies could reveal the origin of the randomness of quantum mechanics that wasn't my idea unfortunately it came from Gerard to he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1999 together with martinus vman for his contributions to the development of the cnut model but before I tell you what he's been going on about for a few decades now let me tell you what they did at Sun the atlas collaboration at CERN tested quantum entanglement with pairs of particles a top quark and an anti-top Quark that can be created in proton collisions if the energy is high enough quarks have a spin and what you want to know is how strong ly the spin of the top Quark is correlated with its anti-top partner the top quarks are geared candidates because they're heavy and shortlived and since they're shortlived there isn't enough time for the correlations to be washed out the correlations get passed onto the particles that the top quarks Decay into they catch these Decay products in the detectors and calculate what the spin must have been they reconstruct the spin values of the original particle and quantify their correlation in a number they call D if D is smaller than minus1 over3 then you have true Quantum and tanglement and as you can see here that's what they find indeed all works as expected now one way you can look at this result is that it's nothing new boring boring boring but I look at it as a test of an idea that's so underappreciated you've probably never heard of it it's the idea from gerro to who I mentioned earlier he thinks that the randomness of quantum mechanics that we observe in the laboratory has an explanation it comes from information that's hidden on very short distances in the so-called hidden variables in tabletop experiments like those typically done for testing quantum physics you can't see what's going on at very short distances for that you need a big collider that's why they buil them because High energies test short distances no it's not just because they like really big and expensive machines at least I don't think so somewhat ironically particle physicists themselves tend to be not excited about testing the foundations of quantum physics most of them probably think what to says is crazy this is because of how their current theories work they always assume that what happens on short distances is not relevant for what happens on longer distances it's called the decoupling of scales but the key feature of chaotic systems is that what happens on short distances doesn't stay on short distances what with a butterfly effect and all so I'm totally with toughed just because we haven't found an origin of quantum Randomness in tabletop experiments at low energies doesn't mean we won't find one at high energies and yes that would be an example of what's called a super deterministic Theory now let me be clear it's not that to is saying you can see evidence for that at the large headen collider it's that generally if you look at shorter distances you have better chances to find those hidden variables that's why I think this test is not nonsense to the contrary it's one of the things that keeps me up at night that the guys at CERN are sitting on a breakthrough Discovery in the data but they don't know it because they haven't draun the right data analysis or worse they might actually have thrown the data away way the other thing that keeps me up at night is the squeaky hinch on our fireplace cover but let me say a little bit more about Geral to's idea because I'm afraid basically no one takes him seriously and I understand why his idea belongs to the realm of quantum foundations but to isn't a Quantum foundations person he's a particle physicist he doesn't speak the right language so the quantum foundations people don't get it and the particle physicists don't get it either because they don't think Quantum foundations matters so no one cares and this ladies and gentlemen is one of the reasons I'm here on YouTube telling you about this to draw attention to ideas I think haven't received the attention they deserve no I made this up I'm just here to make jokes about particle physicists did you know I have a quantum mechanics course on brilliant.org it's a beginner's course that you can take without any background knowledge it'll introduce you to topics such as interference superpositions and entanglement the uncertainty principle and B theorem and afterwards you can continue learning more about your favorite topics in science computer science or maths all courses on brilliant come with interactive visualizations and follow-up questions and of course I have a special offer for viewers of this channel if you use my link brilliant.org Saina you'll get to try everything brilliant has to offer for free for full 30 days and you'll get 20% off an annual premium subscription links in the description below so go and check those out thanks for watching see you tomorrow

Channel: Sabine Hossenfelder

Views: 207,559

Keywords: science without the gobbledygoook, hossenfelder, science news sabine, science news, science humor, CERN, physics, large hadron collider, particle physics, quantum physics, entanglement, quantum entanglement, Bell's theorem, Bell theorem test, bell inequality test, LHC, physics news

Id: lt7a3wjf3qY

Length: 6min 47sec (407 seconds)

Published: Sat May 11 2024