this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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The analogy that makes most sense to me so far, is this:
You rip a photograph in half and put both halves into envelopes. Now you send one of the envelopes to your friend in Australia. You open the other envelope. Boom! Instantaneous knowledge of what's in the envelope in Australia. Faster than light!!!
In quantum terms, you "rip a photograph in half" by somehow producing two quanta, which are known to have correlated properties. For example, you can produce two quanta, where one has a positive spin and the other a negative spin, and you know those to be equally strong. If you now measure the spin of the first quantum, you know that the other has the opposite spin.
The important distinction here (and I get it, analogies are always imperfect) is that the photograph analogy has "hidden variables". That is, each half is fixed at the moment of their separation and you just don't know what's in the envelopes until you open one. That's not how entangled particles work though, and which "half" is which is not determined until the instant of measurement, at which point the state of both are known and fixed.
I'm open for counterarguments, but I always felt this was a silly way of looking at things. You cannot measure stuff at the quantum level without significantly altering what you measured. (You can never measure without altering what you measured, since we typically blast stuff with photons from a light source to be able to look at it, but for stuff that's significantly larger than photons, the photons are rather insignificant.)
As such, you can look at measuring quanta in two ways:
Well, and isn't quantum entanglement evidence for 1.? You entangle these quanta, then you measure one of them. At this point, you already know what the other one will give as a result for its measurement, even though you have not measured/altered it yet.
You can do the measurement quite a bit later and still get the result that you deduced from measuring the entangled quantum. (So long as nothing else altered the property you want to measure, of course...)
The whole idea is that the quantum particle can't have had the state you're measuring all along. If it did, then measuring a particular set of outcomes would be improbable. If you run an experiment millions of times, you have a choice in how you do the final measurement each time. What you find with quantum particles is that the measurements of the two different particles are more correlated than they should be able to be if they had determined an answer (state) in advance.
You can resolve this 3 ways:
1: you got extremely unlucky with your choice of measurement in each experiment lining up with the hidden/fixed state of each particle in such a way as to screw with your results. If you do the experiment millions of times, the probability of this happening randomly can be made arbitrarily small. So then, the universe must be colluding to give you a non uniform distribution of hidden states that perfectly mess with your currently chosen experiment
2: the particles transfer information to each other faster than the speed of light
3: there is no hidden state that the particle has that determines how it will be measured in any particular experiment
See https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-bells-theorem-proved-spooky-action-at-a-distance-is-real-20210720/ for a short explanation of what 'more correlated than expected' means
There's so many explanations for this (that don't require magic) I don't even know where to start