Meet my husband/5: The Quantum Entanglements in New York City

Da domani saremo a New York, dove Jonathon installerà Quantum Entanglements, che aprirà giovedì 12 all'AC Institute. Spero che all'inaugurazione molte persone decidano di sperimentare l'unione quantica. 

Durante questa settimana proverò a occuparmi del blog con regolarità, ma non posso garantirlo. Intanto ecco un po' di stampa - in inglese - sul quantum entanglement.

With five millennia of history, and a plethora of religious and civil ceremonies, marriage is a popular means of producing families. Yet matrimony isn't the only method of uniting people, nor even is it the most effective technique. Modern science suggests a far more profound alternative, one that does not operate by religious tradition or civil mandate, but rather bonds couples by a law of nature: quantum entanglement. 

According to quantum mechanics, when two or more particles are entangled, they behave as if they were one and the same. Any change to one instantaneously and identically changes those entangled with it even if they're a universe apart. While the phenomenon has been applied to fields such as military encryption, Jonathon Keats has put entanglement to work for the more worthy purpose of fostering human relations.

The technology is straightforward: Exposed to solar radiation, a nonlinear crystal entangles photons. Pairs of entangled photons are divided by prisms. The photoelectric effect translates their entangled state to the bodies of a couple who wish to be united, entangling them in a quantum wedding.

There are no restrictions on who may be entangled to whom. The process is unsupervised. No records are kept. Even those who get entangled will have to take their entanglement on faith, as any attempt to measure a quantum system disentangles it: A quantum marriage will literally be broken up by skepticism about it.

The potential of quantum marriage will be fulfilled by those who choose to engage it. After five thousand years of manmade laws, often exclusionary or punitive, science promises to liberate marriage through technology freely offering entanglement to everybody.

On the News Blog at Nature.com you can read: “...'Conventional weddings must meet church or state standards for couples to be married,' Keats says,'the nuptial entanglement process is totally open, as nondenominational and nonpartisan as the laws of physics.'

So open, that if you wish to be entangled to more than one person, that is also possible, although only two people can be entangled at a time because of the size of the aisle and the experimental set up. 'Entanglement with non-humans is also feasible,' Keats adds.

So far Keats has tested the process only on himself and his wife, who he says are now happily entangled, “it certainly feels more significant than some government-stamped document.” If you fancy showing your love through physics, you can be entangled for free, just show up between May 12 and June 18 in the South Alcove of the AC Institute, 547 W. 27th St, 6th Floor, in New York City, and walk down the aisle.

 

Bruce Sterling, on the Wired blog Beyond the Beyond, is also happy that "Mr. Keats... is now happily entangled with his wife." "(((Gosh, that’s nice to hear.)))," he says.