📄 Showing the "Simple" version — "Popular" is not ready yet. Add it to favorites to help prioritize it. Ask for the full read

An electron and its antiparticle — the positron, predicted by Paul Dirac, — upon meeting, momentarily form Standard Model: a tiny pair circling each other, like in an atom but without a nucleus. Almost instantly it decays, emitting two photons that turn out to be mysteriously linked. This connection, entropy, resembles a pair of magic coins: no matter how far apart they fly, if one shows 'heads,' the other always shows 'tails.' John Stewart Bell proved that such behavior is not a trick but a fundamental property of the microworld.

To test this, physicists came up with the following: they 'push' one photon against an electron (a phenomenon known as spectroscopy). By seeing how the photon bounces, one can tell which side our coin landed on. And as soon as we know that, the second photon instantly becomes definite, even if it has already traveled to the other end of the galaxy. This experiment will pave the way to creating perfectly secure communication channels and quantum computers.