A group of physicists at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, has found via experimentation that the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox still holds even when scaled up. Paolo Colciaghi, Yifan Li, Philipp Treutlein and Tilman Zibold describe their experiment in Physical Review X.
In 1935, Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen published a paper outlining a thought experiment that suggested that quantum mechanics did not give a complete description of reality. They argued for the existence of “elements of reality” that were not part of quantum theory—and then went further by speculating that it should be possible to come up with a new theory that would contain such hidden variables.
Their experiment has since come to be known as the EPR paradox because of the contradictions it reveals, such as one particle in a system influencing other particles due to entanglement, and also that it can become possible to know more about the particles in a given system than should be allowed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
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