I am new, and certainly not a scientist, so I hope I don’t ask an obviously stupid question, but here goes… I think I get the basic premise of entanglement ie. once two particles come into contact there is a “connection” between them that transcends time and space. What happens to one happens to the other one instantaneously - Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance”. If we accept that at the time of the big bang all matter was connected, does that imply that all particles are connected? That we are quite literally “all one”? Would this explain the theory that some hold that there is an underlying sort of “quantum soup” or field that underlies and connects all matter and that our perception of macro objects are just a result of decoherence? I’m probably not explaining this very well, but I’m hoping there are some people that speak “layman”.
It takes more than physical contact. It’s a complicated thing which I don’t fully understand myself because you can either get a) the real science which might as well be in a foreign language or b) the “dumbed down” science which is easily understandable, but not necessarily “accurate”. There is a ridiculous third choice, c) take college courses until you are able to understand option a.
The last I looked into it I got the impression that it wasn’t as strange as we are lead to believe. The two particles are the same, but opposite at the point they become entangled, but that doesn’t mean that I can entangle 2 photons, shoot them through a vacuum and then bounce one off mirrors in a zig zag motion to make the other unimpeded photon zig and zag in step, although that is the impression one normally gets. I may be wrong about this.
Actually, though, the mirrors would definitely not work. Photons do not actually pass through glass. They are absorbed and re-emmitted. So the moment the photon touched the mirror, the entanglement is broken because it’s effectively a “new photon” which is re-emmitted. If I am wrong and what you do to one a hundred years down the road does affect the other it would be gravity, magnetic fields, warped space, etc. you would have to use to affect one while keeping them entangled. And the vacuum has to be perfect. Hit one stray hydrogen atom and it’s a new photon coming out the other side.