One hundred thousand'gamers' participate in an investigation that dismantles the local realism postulated by the brilliant German physicist.
He is the most important person of the 20th century (as Time magazine named him in 1999): Albert Einstein, the most brilliant physicist of our time and icon of our time. His most relevant and well-known contribution to the generality of society, the Theory of Relativity, laid the foundations of our understanding of the universe, and in fact such a contribution, which is more than a hundred years old, has obtained its evidence (gravitational waves) on repeated occasions.
However, Einstein was not always right. Research conducted by the Institute of Photonic Sciences of Barcelona (ICFO) and involving 100,000 volunteer gamers, contradicts his ideas regarding quantum entanglement, which is the cornerstone of quantum mechanics, or the physics of subatomic particles.
What is quantum entanglement?
Quantum entanglement is the term coined to refer to a special connection between pairs or groups of photons, or any object described by quantum mechanics.
Apparently, two objects far enough apart cannot interact with each other. It seems a pretty logical postulate, and that's what Einstein postulated, in a hypothesis called local realism or quantum realism. But the laws of quantum physics are different from what we know on the scale of larger objects.
In the same way, Einstein posed a universe independent of our observations, in which no influence could travel faster than light.
Well, the hypothesis of the local realism of the physicist has been refuted by a global investigation, which has involved the participation of one hundred thousand volunteers. Through certain games for smartphones and other devices, players sent out some 90 million bits in binary code (zeros and ones), which helped researchers test Einstein's quantum realism.
In a Bell test (in honor of physicist John Stewart Bell), pairs of intertwined particles, such as photons, were generated and sent to different locations to later measure their properties.
As the ICFO details in a statement, if the results of the measurement tended to coincide, regardless of the properties we chose to measure, it would imply two possibilities: either the measurement of one particle instantly affects the other (despite being very far apart from each other in distance), or even that the properties of the particles never existed.
The results of the experiment showed that quantum particles that are separated by a long distance can affect each other simultaneously, which contradicts Einstein's principle of local realism, for whom quantum entanglement was impossible under the traditional laws of physics.
In fact, it remains a mystery how the physics that governs subatomic particles and the physics that governs large bodies can coexist, and the assimilation of both is one of the great challenges of science, something that Stephen Hawking has already tried to find a theory of everything.