As a followup to my last post about Bells inequality, i figured i’d give you a quick link to an article written about a very recent test of it, confirming that indeed, quantum mechanics does not obey the Bell inequality. The next two paragraphs will quickly sum up my last article in case you didn’t read it. Those who did can feel free to skip it.

In “real life” we are used to be able to precisely predict the outcome of results. Say you throw a baseball to your friend, if you were to measure it’s direction and velocity, you could accurately predict exactly where it will land and when, plus how much energy it has etc, this is what is called “deterministic”, since we can accurately determine outcomes. On the quantum scale however,q things are quite different and outcomes of measurements can not be perfectly predicted, in fact different outcomes will be measured with a certain probability, and you have no way of predicting exactly what you’ll get.

Many people did not like this at all, such as Einstein, who proposed that quantum mechanics was simply an incomplete theory, and if only we had the full picture, quantum mechanics would be deterministic as well. In order for this to be true, quantum mechanics would have to fulfill the so-called Bell inquality, and in short, it does not (you can read the older article for a more in-depth view of it, this is just a quick sum-up for those that didn’t feel like reading the whole article).

Like i explained in the article, there have been numerous experimental tests of the Bell inequality at the quantum level, and they agree, it is indeed broken. I figured you might be interested in reading about the largest test of the Bell inequality so far, which spanned two laboratories across two different towns! They had it at this distance so they could make sure that there was no way that the two particles could have exchanged any information before they were measured, and once again, it has been confirmed that quantum mechanics are weird.

As this is not a press-release like most their news, but an actual article written by PhysOrg, i will simply point you towards it rather then recite it here.