There is much of science that we understand.

If I threw a ball into the air,

and I was

given the right data about the forces acting on it, I could tell you exactly
where it would

land. Science explains through chemistry the molecules

that make the ball up. We can predict the energy levels of the sound

it would make when it lands. Much like a candle being held up in the dark,

science illuminates our view of the world around us… but there is a limit
to how far

the light currently falls. Even today, when it feels like there is so

much of the world and the universe that we can explain, there is darkness,
too. Answers we don’t yet have, and worse; confusing

results that erode our confidence in what we think we do know. There are
experiments that seem to suggest

that light is lying to us, and call into question the very nature of reality.
Are we real? Is time linear? …Perhaps not. But are you ready for the
comforting veil

of understanding to be torn away, and for the strangeness at the edges of

our understanding

to be brought into the light? If so, have I got some experiments for you.
I’m Alex McColgan, and you’re watching

Astrum. And in today’s supercut, I will show you

nine experiments that will challenge your understanding of the

fundamental laws of physics

in a way that will almost certainly leave you with something between a
headache and

existential dread. You have been warned. And curiously, almost all of
these experiments

have something to do with light. Light is so much stranger than you might
think. Sure, it may seem simple enough, travelling

around the universe delivering energy from one place to another. It helps
us see. It provides life to plants, and thus to our

planet generally. It has a reputation for being very fast. And yet, for a
source of energy that has become
synonymous with greater understanding, light is surprisingly difficult to
understand. Light helps us see other things better, sure,

but when scientists tried to look at light itself, it was surprisingly difficult.
No, I don’t mean that they started staring

into any lamps – please, don’t do that at home - but experiments in the
last 200

hundred years or so have proven that what light appears to be and what
light is are

actually two different things. The first experiment on our list highlights

the following mystifying fact: light behaves differently when you’re not
looking at it,

compared to when you are. But to understand that, let’s begin with

the basics. What is light? In the early 1700’s Isaac Newton theorised

that light was made up of tiny little particles that he called “corpuscules”,
but in 1801

– nearly 100 years later - a man named Thomas Young discovered that
light must actually

be more wave-like than particle-like. He proved this using an important

method known

as the double slit experiment. He set up a source of light, and shone it

through two narrow slits onto a board. Young noticed that rather than
getting two

bands of light on the other side of the slits, a strange striped pattern was
forming. This was known as an interference pattern,

and was incontrovertible proof that light had been travelling as a wave.
Why? Let’s talk about waves for a moment. When waves travel, they
oscillate up and down. But when two waves try to oscillate the same

point in space at the same time, you get something known as

interference. Imagine you had a bathtub with a rubber duck

sitting on the surface. Two waves reach the duck at once. One wave tries
to raise the duck up at the

exact same time the other wave tries to drop it down. What happens?
Provided the waves are of the same magnitude
and are perfectly out of phase, they will cancel each other out, and the
duck would

not move at all. This is called destructive interference. Similarly, if the

waves both tried to raise

the duck up at the same time, the duck would be raised twice as high.
This is known as constructive interference. Because waves tend to expand
in a circle,

two waves next to each other will start to both constructively and
destructively interfere

with each other. Here are two waves in water. See these lines? These
calmer patches are where the waves are

cancelling each other out: This is the effect we see with light travelling

through the two slits. As the light from one slit propagates, it

cancels out the other wave of light at certain points, creating the
interference pattern

that Young noticed on the board. So, the mystery was solved. Light was a
wave, and not a particle. Except, there is more to this experiment than

meets the eye. Let’s fast forward another 100 years, to

1905. Scientists around this time had become puzzled

by something known as the photoelectric effect. It turned out that when

you shone a light

on a metal surface, electron-like particles were coming off it. This was
deduced to be because electrons in

the metal were getting knocked off it by the increased energy the light
was imparting. Imagine it like fruit on a tree. If you pull the fruit off the
tree, you need

to use a certain amount of energy. Once the energy is greater than the
strength

of the fruit’s connection to the branch, the fruit pops off. This was
happening with the light and the

electrons. Once the light hit an electron and gave it

enough energy to pass the threshold, it broke free from the metal.
However, what surprised scientists was that
if you increased the intensity of the light, they had expected the electrons
to be knocked

away faster. If you pulled the fruit off the tree harder,

it would come off faster. More energy = more departing kinetic energy.
However, this did not appear to be the case. Instead, increasing the
frequency of the light

increased the velocity of the departing electrons. The intensity of the light
didn’t affect

the departing electrons’ velocity at all, but did affect the quantity of
electrons being

emitted. This was a bit of a puzzler. Albert Einstein was the man who
solved the

puzzle. He deduced that light must be travelling in

little packets of energy, so sending more of them – increasing the

frequency – was

the only way to increase the energy going to the electrons. He called
these packets photons, and later

earned a Nobel prize for his work. Light, it seemed, was more like a
particle

again. Or both a wave and a particle at once? Of course, even this is not
the full picture. To be honest, we aren’t completely sure

about the full picture even now. Instead, we have more results that are
contradictory. Let’s go back to the double-slit experiment. Armed with the
knowledge of photons, physicists

once again took a look at the double-slit experiment. Experimental

techniques had improved in the

last 100 years, and it was now possible to emit a single photon of light at
a time. So, the double-slit experiment was done again. This time, only a
single photon would be sent

through the slit, onto a detector on the far side. When this was done, the
detector registered

the arrival of the photon at just a single point. So, light was behaving like
a particle again. But then, why had it interfered with itself

in the previous version of the experiment? Scientists had an idea. They

sent through multiple photons, one at
a time, and plotted the results on the detector. And this is where the result
became really

strange. Once again, the detector started seeing the

photons arriving at single points, one at a time. But bafflingly, the arriving
photons started

creating a pattern: It was the interference pattern. The proof that light
behaved like a wave. But strangely enough, this was occurring only

when a single photon was going through at a time. Somehow, the single
photon – which was leaving

the detector like a particle and was arriving at its destination as a particle
– was apparently

in some way travelling through both slits at once, enough to then interfere
with itself

on the other side, like a wave. If light was just a particle, then when it

went through the slits, you wouldn’t see this pattern. You would see only
two blobs of light – one

for particles that went through the one slit, and one for particles that went
through the

other. And yet, here was the interference pattern

with its multiple lines of light, disproving that. Scientists tried to pin light
down. They set up the experiment, but this time

with two more detectors at the slit, so that scientists could observe
whether it was indeed

passing through both at the same time. It didn’t. But at the same time, it
stopped creating

an interference pattern on the furthermost detector. And from this,

scientists began to realise

something. Light cared about being observed. To be clear, it didn’t matter

whether it

was observed by a human eye or a machine. The moment light was

interacted with in some

way, by any particle – which is the only way we can detect light, there’s
no other
way to observe it - it started behaving differently than if it hadn’t been
detected at all. It was as if light was snapping into focus

any time the universe asked it the question of where exactly it was, when
without that

scrutiny it appeared to relax into something a little more nebulous.

Bizarrely enough, to me this seems to imply

that light actually is more like a wave of probability, rather than any
discrete particle

or wave. Any time it was asked where it was, it confidently

provided a definitive answer – it WAS at this point on the detector, it WAS

NOT at

any other point. But with no-one checking up on it, light seems

to be travelling in all directions at once, in accordance with certain

probabilities. If you ran the experiment multiple times,

you could quantify those probabilities, discovering that it was more likely
to be on the bands

of the interference pattern, and less likely to be in the gaps. But any time
a single photon of light was

asked, it gave an answer that was 100% concrete. This is highlighted

through something known

as the three-polariser paradox. Consider for a moment a pair of polarising

sunglasses. Obviously, these reduce the amount of light

that can pass through them; usually by about 50%, depending on the type
of lens and the

wavelength of light. They work by being formed of thin chains of

molecules that run lengthways across the lens. Any light that oscillates in
the same orientation

as this lens gets absorbed. Any that is perpendicular to the chains can

pass through without trouble. The interesting case occurs when a single

photon is passed through in an orientation that’s diagonal to the lens. In

this case, you don’t get half a photon

going through. Apparently you can’t just absorb the part

of the oscillation that is parallel to the lines and let through the part that is
perpendicular. Instead, the photon “snaps” into either

the one orientation, or the other. It either is completely absorbed, or

passes

through entirely – but now with a new, perpendicular polarisation, to

match what it would have

had to have been to pass through easily. How do we know that the photon
wasn’t this

orientation all along? Because of what happens when you start adding

more lenses. When you place a second lens behind the first,

you can block out the light entirely, provided the two polarisations are
perpendicular to

each other. Let’s say, we rotate the second lens 90

degrees compared to the first one. Any light that gets through the first
lens

has a 0% chance of getting through the second, like trying to post a letter
through a chain-linked

fence. As a result, we only see black. But add a third lens, and place it at a
45-degree

angle between the other two, and bizarrely light starts making it through
all 3 lenses

again. This may seem counter-intuitive – how does

adding more blockages increase the amount of light that makes it

through? But this result actually rules out the possibility

that the light has a fixed orientation. It must be snapping into focus at
each new

lens, rolling a quantum dice each time to see if it was the right orientation
all along

or not. If it makes it through the first lens (a 50%

chance), it only did so because it was oriented perfectly perpendicular to

the lens’s polarisation. Which means once it reaches the second, it’s

coming at it from a polarisation that’s diagonal. So, once again there is a

50:50 chance that

it makes it through. It rolls its quantum dice again, and once

again has a 50:50 chance of proceeding. If it gets through this hurdle too,
then it

again snaps to the new orientation, as if it were that new orientation all
along (which

it obviously wasn’t). Which means that it’s now polarised diagonally

relative to the third lens, meaning that it now has a final 50% chance of
getting through. Of course, some photons do not make it through

all 3 of these probabilistic gauntlets. Only about 12.5% of them make it.
But that’s more than 0%, which is what was

happening previously when you had only two lenses. Light likes to behave
in discrete quantities. It is “quantum”. It seemingly snaps to a discrete
value when

observed. And honestly, we don’t really know why. If you think about a
wave, there is no reason

why you couldn’t simply have half a wave. You could halve it again and
again an infinite

number of times and still have an answer that makes mathematical sense.
And yet it seems that down on a low enough

quantum scale, you can’t halve light past a certain point. You can’t have
half a photon, or even one

and a half photons. And if you try to do so, the photon instead

snaps to one or the other nearest integer, based on probabilities: but only
when it’s

asked. Otherwise, it’s quite content to exist probabilistically,

interfering with itself like a wave as it travels along, before jumping to an

answer

when later asked exactly where it is. What is going on here? This is still
being theorised about. The closest comparison we have to it is something

known as harmonics, where on a bounded string, only a certain number of

waves can exist. On a guitar string, you can have one wave,

or two, or more, but never any number that isn’t a whole number. It
seems that light works in the same way. Perhaps something pinches the
beginnings and

the end of the path light travels down – although what this might be, and
what mechanisms drive
it, are unknown as of now. Fundamentally, though, perhaps the craziest

thing about all of this is that this isn’t just about light. Although we’ve
focused on light behaving

like a wave, and behaving probabilistically, all particles of matter do the

same. Light is just another form of energy, and

energy and matter are linked. Particles of matter – atoms and even
complex

molecules – have been shown to have wavelengths. Electrons are just as

quantifiable and just

as driven by probabilities as photons are. We are apparently all driven by

probability,

if you scale things down small enough. So, what is everything truly made
of? What makes up energy and matter, that causes

it to behave in the way that it does? What Is going on under the hood of
reality? Why is the universe behaving different when

looked at compared to when not? And what does it imply to think that
even

you are on some level probabilistic? What this all means is anyone’s
guess. The person who figures it out will be the

Einstein of our time. But for now, all we can say is that when it

comes to reality, it seems the universe is playing dice. You and the world
around you might be a lot

less certain than you might have thought. So completes our first few
experiments highlighting

the strangeness of light. Take a breather for a moment. Give your brain a
chance to unknot itself. From here-on in, it’s only getting weirder. If there’s
one thing I’ve learned about

light, it’s that for unthinking energy, light seems to love messing with us.
As I just showed you, scientists debated about

whether it was a particle, or a wave, because it keeps exhibiting elements

of both, seemingly

unable to settle. Bizarrely, it behaves one way when you’re

looking at it, but a different way when you’re not. But at least its speed is
consistent. Light travels at the speed of light. No matter your frame of
reference, that one
thing remains the same... I have some bad news for you. It turns out the
constancy of light’s speed

might not be right either, and the next few experiments I’m about to show
you proves

it. Light might go slower than physics would predict

in certain circumstances. And no, I’m not just talking about light

slowing down in denser mediums like glass, although that’s what I

originally intended

this video to be about. We have an explanation for that. I’m saying that in
some circumstances, light

seems to travel a path through time and space that has it either going
slower or faster

than the speed of light, even if dense mediums aren’t present. But the
really weird thing is that it ends

up at the same destination in time and space anyway. Let me show you
what I mean. Light travels at 299 792 458 m/s. According to relativity, this
is the only

speed light can travel at, and interestingly seems to stick to that number
regardless of

your frame of reference. Two people could be travelling through space

– one at 1% the speed of light, and the other at 50% the speed of light –
but if

they both look at the same beam of propagating photons, they will see
them travelling at

the same speed. Time and distance would seemingly rather warp

than allow you to see anything other than light travelling at light speed. Of
course, when scientists say this, they

are only talking about light travelling in a vacuum. We’ve known for a long
time that as soon

as you get matter involved, light gets bogged down and travels slower.
Light travelling in air only goes at 299,705,000

m/s, a full 87,458 m/s slower than light in a vacuum. Light in water goes
around 225,000,000 m/s. Light going through glass caps out at around

200,000,000. The reasons for this are intriguing, but fairly

well understood, and certainly not physics-breaking. When light travels
through matter, its constantly

waving electromagnetic fields gets the electrons within the matter to also
start moving, like

ships bobbing on water. But, as electrons moving up and down also

generate an electric field that in turn creates a magnetic field, a second

light wave is created

by these moving particles that crucially overlaps the waves of the original
light, albeit one

that waves at a slightly different pace to the original light (exactly what
speed varies

depending on the material). When two waves meet, they interfere with
each

other – they take an average, sometimes interfering constructively to

build each other

up, and sometimes working against each other. So, when you take the
grand total of all the

ups and downs of each wave, you actually end up with a new wave – one
that travels at

a different speed to the other two, and one that goes slower than the
speed of light. Eventually, this propagating wave can reach

the edge of the blocking material and, without those electrons interfering
anymore, you’re

left with just the original light again, which is then free to travel along its
original

path again at its original speed as if nothing had ever happened.

Scientists have had a lot of fun with this

concept over the [Link] Lene Hau at Harvard in 1999 was able
to slow down light

to an astonishing 61 km/h by sending it through a cloud of sodium atoms

that had been cooled

to 1 billionth of a degree above absolute zero. 2 years later, Hau managed

to slow down light’s
speed to 0, before warming up the cloud and sending it on its way again.
You might find that result surprising. However, strange things have
happened in the

opposite direction too. In 2000, researchers at the NEC research institute

in Princeton, New Jersey sent a pulse of light through a cloud of caesium

atoms. Alarmingly, when they timed to see how quickly

the pulse exited the cloud, it seemed that it exited before it had entered.
While this might appear to mess with causality

– how can you leave a building before you go inside it, after all? –
fortunately there was a simple explanation

that saved us from creating too many paradoxes. Although the light pulse
travelled faster

than light, the light itself did not. This was more an optical illusion than a
refutation

of Einstein’s relativity. Let’s take a closer look at a photon of

light. As Einstein showed us, each photon represents

a tiny packet of waves, moving up and down. The speed the waves inside
the packet propagate

is known as its phase velocity, while the speed at which the packet as a
whole is travelling

is known as the group velocity. You can also have a wavefront velocity,
which

is how fast the first photon in a wave of photons can travel. This is a little
heavy in its terminology,

so let’s explain it with an example. Think of a crowd of people doing a

Mexican

wave. The wave that the people are doing is the

phase velocity. You can see the wave travelling along through

the crowd, it might look like it’s travelling quickly. But the crowd itself isn’t
going anywhere,

so our wave’s true speed is 0. These people are the group velocity, or
possibly

the wavefront velocity. Let’s imagine that we wanted to send our

crowd marching. They could do so, and could keep doing a Mexican
wave as they travelled. But although their waving hands might make

the wave go really fast in the direction of their travel, it would vanish
whenever it

reached the front of the crowd. Information exchange couldn’t go faster

than the walking speed of the crowd itself, regardless of how fast the
peaks in the waves

seemed to be travelling. Einstein in relativity never claimed that

phase velocity couldn’t exceed light speed. He just claimed that

information couldn’t

travel faster than light. And if you’re trying to deliver a message

to someone by sending a crowd of Mexican wavers in their direction, it

really doesn’t matter

how fast they’re waving. Until the first person in the crowd arrives,

no information can be delivered. Still, this difference between the waves

within

light and the speed of light itself will become interesting in our next
experiment. And this is where things start to get a little

weird. Oh, you thought it was weird already? Oh, no, this is the really
physics-defying

part. Let’s think back on the double slit experiment. There, researchers
explored how light can

sometimes behave like a wave, and sometimes like a particle. However, in

2023 researchers from the Imperial

college figured out a way to separate the slits of this experiment, not in
space, but

in time. The way they did this was simple. They took a transparent
material called indium-tin-oxide,

that under specific conditions can be made to be reflective. Indium-tin-

oxide is the stuff they use in

most mobile phone screens. They fired a laser at it, and then rapidly

changed the material from transparent to reflective and then back again.
This left only a slim window – a few femtoseconds

– where the laser was reflected. They called this a “time slit”. They
recorded what the laser looked like after
it had been reflected, and found that its frequency had spread out a little
bit in the

process, but other than that nothing too crazy had happened. The weird
thing was what happened when they

sent two laser pulses through these “time slits”, in rapid succession. The
position of the emitter, the mirror and

the receiver remained the same – the only thing different was the time the
lasers went

through. Oddly enough, when two went through, an interference

pattern happened. This was not an interference pattern in the

same sense as with the regular 3D space double slit experiment, though.
This was an interference pattern that affected

the laser’s frequency. Certain frequencies of light within the laser

faded out, exactly in line with the way intensity faded out in the regular
version of the double

slit experiment. To visualise why this might be happening,

let’s draw out this experiment in regards to time. The time slit experiment
can be drawn in a

similar way to the double slit experiment, except we’re going to need to
visualise

the change in the experiment over time. To do that, let’s create a 4D

graph where

space is along the x-axis and time is along the y-axis. This is easy enough
to do – it just looks

like this: The photon leaves the emitter to the left,

hits the time slit, is reflected and arrives at the receiver. I’ve drawn this as
a continuous line just

to make things simpler later, but the idea works just as well either way.
Later, a second photon is released from the

emitter, it reflects and arrives at the receiver at a slightly later time,

represented in how

it takes place higher up (further into the future) on our time graph. If light
behaved normally, travelling along
at the speed it was supposed to go at, this would be the end of it. Instead,
light is interfering with itself. This means it must be travelling along a path

that takes it through the other slit as well as its own. This is the only way
that light would come

in with the pattern that we see. And just like in the double slit experiment,

it’s likely happening on the other side of the slits too: As for why it’s
frequency and not intensity

that’s being messed with here, think about the implications of what you
might see if

light did indeed come in at a different angle like this. Photons come in
little packets of waves, as

I’d previously mentioned. Now, look at what happens if you change the

angle at which those waves arrive. Here’s how it normally might look:

I’ve added a black timeline here, and have highlighted every time the
receiver sees a

new peak in the wave. Here’s what happens when you alter the direction

of the wave’s arrival: Suddenly, the peaks are coming in much more

frequently. The frequency of a wave over time is very

much connected to the colour we perceive light to be. Low frequency light
is redder in colour, while

increasing the frequency shifts light’s colour towards blue. So, this colour
variation makes sense. What makes less sense is what’s going on

with the paths this light is taking through time. Remember, the straight
lines we started with

represent the 299,792,458 m/s that we see light travelling. So what can
we say about the photons that

are travelling along these paths? For some parts of their journey, they are

travelling slower than the speed of light, taking more time to arrive at a
destination

that’s the same distance away. And yet, for other parts of their journey,

they are travelling faster than causality ought to allow. From their
perspective, they are travelling

backwards in time. As a reminder, these two emitters on the left

are actually the same one, just at different points in time. The same for
the receivers on the right. It is a mind-bending result. And yet, according
to the results of this

experiment performed by a research team at the Imperial College in

London, this is what

is occurring. The implications of this are startling. Light always travels the
path of least time

– the route that allows it to arrive at its destination along the path closest
to

299,792,458 m/s, the fastest anything in the universe apparently can go.
And yet, it seems to me that in its efforts

to locate exactly what path that might involve, light is testing the waters –
putting out

feelers that check to see if other paths, and seemingly other paths
through time itself

– might present a more viable solution. These feelers are interfering with
photons

that travel alongside it, but also with photons that travel a little ahead or
behind it in

time. To be clear, we never actually detect photons

taking any of these other paths. We don’t see photons coming in from the

future. We never see photons travelling slower than

the speed of light, provided there is no supercooling gases providing an

explanation for why they

slow down. And yet, for interference patterns to occur,

to at least some extent light must be trying out alternative routes through
time. Perhaps it’s like lightning, testing many

different directions to find the optimal path to its destination, before

finding the one

that works and collapsing down that path in one giant boom, all other
feelers vanishing

and collapsing: Or perhaps some other phenomena is at play. Who can

say? For now, all we know is that light has proved
once again that it doesn’t play by anyone’s rules. At least, not rules that
we can figure out. Again, now might be a good time to pause,

and reflect. This experiment we just saw hints that not

everything in the physics world goes through time in the way we might
expect. Light might be playing a little fast and loose

with the linear nature of reality. We are comfortable with causality – with

the idea of things happening one after the other, and things in the past
influencing

things in the future, rather than the other way around. This last
experiment could be interpreted

as throwing a bit of a spanner in that. But sadly for our aching minds, it’s
not

the only experiment to do so. Ok, break time is over. Can information
travel backwards in time? It’s the sort of thing that would be really

useful, if it were true. You could tell your past self not to eat that

burrito that didn’t agree with you, or could reveal to yourself the winning
lottery numbers. But it just doesn’t happen; the resulting

paradoxes alone make the whole thing laughable. In our universe, time
always seems to flow

in one direction – forward. The idea of travelling backwards in time,

or even simply communicating with your past self, seems so outlandish, it

can’t possibly

be true. So, why is it that on the quantum level, information

seems to be doing just this? “Alex, stop!” you might be saying. “You’ve
already shown us that the solid

universe around us might be nothing more than probability waves, and

that light has some

weird element to it that causes it to interfere with other light in its past
and its future. But this? Surely its impossible for information to travel

backwards in time.” I understand the sentiment. It goes against all

intuition, and by all

accounts, it doesn’t seem possible. In previous videos I’ve mentioned that

objects
would require infinite energy to even go fast enough to reach the speed of
light. So how could something go so fast as to reverse

the usual direction of time, and arrive at a destination not just instantly,
but before

they left? Not even light can do that, and it’s the

fastest thing we know of. Well, this rule about causality’s speed

limit seems to mostly apply to the macro-scale universe. And by macro-

scale, I mean everything significantly

larger than an atom. But down on the quantum level, time might

be obeying different rules… or at least, the speed of causality seems to

come with

some significant caveats. And to demonstrate this idea, we need to look

at a man called John Stewart Bell, and quantum-entangled particles. I

should apologise in advance for what I’m

about to do to your understanding of causality. Ok, but what are quantum-

entangled particles? In quantum physics, it’s possible to hit

two particles together in such a way as to link them together, so that by

measuring the

one particle, you learn things about the other. For instance, if you know
that the particles

originally had a total of 0 momentum, and you learn the momentum of

one of the new quantumly

entangled particles, you know the momentum of the other particle will be
the exact reverse

– making sure that the total remained 0. Effectively, by measuring the one
particle,

you can learn things about the other. This works for other particle
properties too,

such as position, polarisation, or spin. On the surface, there’s nothing too

weird

about this. It’s no different from me meeting up with

a friend, and discussing our plans for the evening. We agree to go out, and
we agree that I will
pay for the evening and my friend won’t. Then, no matter how far we go
on our night

out, or even if we at some point separate, I know that I will be paying, and
my friend

will know that he won’t. This is how Einstein thought it worked. Only, it
turned out that Einstein was wrong. Because as it happens, me and my
friend did

not discuss in advance who would be paying. And strangest of all, we still
both agree

with each other anyway, 100% of the time, no matter how far apart we
are. This is the strange thing about quantum entanglement,

and quantum physics in general. We like to think of particles as having

fixed

properties. However, our penultimate mind-bending experiment

shows that particles only have properties when you detect those
properties. Yes, it’s like the double slit experiment

again, only that was focusing on a photon’s position. It seems that

particles are also kind of vague

about the whole “properties” thing, instead only relying on probabilities,

as defined

by a quantum wave equation. This doesn’t make sense intuitively. Looking

at a thing shouldn’t be what gives

it properties… right? Well, how would you know? If a tree falls in the
woods, does it make

a sound? According to quantum physics, not necessarily. Let’s talk about

the Bell experiment. The maths for this is pretty complicated,

but bear with me, it’s worth the ride. This experiment was instrumental in
our modern

day understanding of quantum physics, and closing off its loopholes

earned Alain Aspect,

John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger the nobel prize for physics in 2022.
The experiment was first conceptualised by

John Stewart Bell, who wanted to know if particles really did have secret
properties that they
carried around with them, known as hidden variables, or whether they
really were making

some of it up on the spot. He noticed an interesting mathematical fact

about the spin of particles. Before we go any further, I should probably

mention that quantum spin isn’t the same as normal spin. Misleadingly,
quantum spin actually defines

whether a particle is influenced – pushed or pulled – by a magnetic field.

The name isn’t important, but it is important

to note that these particles aren’t actually spinning, and so can have
different “spin”

values in almost any given direction. Now let’s take two quantum-
entangled particles,

and let’s say that we’ve arranged it so that their spin adds up to a total of
0 between

them. This means that if one particle would be pulled

by a field, the other will be pushed by it an equal amount along that

direction (with

the understanding that this doesn’t tell you anything about their spin in
other directions). One of the features of quantum spin is that

if we measure an entangled particle’s spin in a given direction, let’s say

up and down,

it will have a 50% chance to be spinning up, and an equal 50% chance to
be spinning down. But remember, once you measure the other entangled

particle, it will have a 100% chance to be spinning in the opposite

direction to the

first particle. On this fact alone, there’s no way to tell

if the two particles already knew their spin, or are somehow deciding it on
the spot and

conferring with each other now that they’ve been asked. But Bell noticed
a clever thing, by asking

a clever question. If you measured two quantum-entangled particles

from two randomly selected directions, what are the odds that their spins
for different

directions would match? Let’s define that any time a particle is

spinning towards a detector, its spin is “up”, and any time it is spinning
away from a detector

its spin is “down”. What are the odds that both particles would

be spinning “up-up”, or “down-down” when tested, and what are the odds
they would

contrast? Let’s formalise this with a little experiment. Here, we have two
entangled particles, with

three detectors reading their spin in different directions. If particle A and

particle B are both read

with the top detector, then one of their spins will be up and the other will
be down. They are entangled, and this is what we looked

at previously. However, if Particle A is read using the top

detector, while particle B is read with one of the other two, these two
directions of

spin aren’t opposites, so Particle B has more flexibility in which way it

goes. Quantum physics claims the particles are making

up their attributes on the spot, so once you’d measured the spin of

particle A using the

top detector, it was a 50:50 whether the spin on the other particle, using
one of the other

detectors, would match or contrast. But this is not what classical physics
predicted. Let me show you what I mean. Classical physics claims that
particles each

carry around secret information defining their spin in any given direction.
So, for our 3 tested directions, each particle

would have a value already. They aren’t making it up on the spot. Let’s
say hypothetically our particles hidden

information states “Up Up Down” for particle A, and “Down Down Up” for
particle B,

as B must be opposite to A for each of the directions 1, 2, and 3. Let’s pick

out a random detector for A. We select detector 1. Detector 1 tells us that
Particle A is spinning

Up. Now let’s select a random detector for particle

B. We select 1 there too. This detector gives us a reading of Down. We can

actually map out all the possible outcomes
of this process of random selection in this graph. There are 9 possible
outcomes if you were

to only measure from two detectors at a given time: 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, 2-1, 2-2
and so on [2-3,

3-1, 3-2, and 3-3]. For each of these possible selections, we

have fixed hidden variable results that we know already, because we

hypothetically defined

them earlier. Let’s fill them in now. Of course, if you test particles using
the

same detector on both particles, you’ll get a contrasting result because

they’re

entangled, but we’re not interested in these results. Classical physics and
quantum physics both

agree on this. So, let’s remove them. What are the odds that two different
detectors

for Particle A and B will see the same result, and what are the odds they’ll
differ? Remember, quantum physics expected it to be

50:50. Particles are making up their values on the

spot, and so it’s perfectly random which they’ll choose, as they aren’t
confined

by the opposites rule. But in this table, classical physics says

that contrasting results only happen a third of the time. The other times,
they’re either both up,

or both down. If we do this many times, assigning different

directions each time, and ignore exceptions, for instance where the spins
of the particles

are all Up-Up-Up or Down-Down-Down - once you crunch the numbers, the
important thing

to take from all of this is that according to this maths, classical physics
predicts

a matching outcome 55% of the time, while quantum physics continues to

simply predict

50%, pretty table be damned. This percentage difference was key. By

quantumly entangling particles, and running
this test over and over again, you could now see which percentage was
correct. And it turned out the winner was quantum physics. Particles were
just apparently making up their

spin results on the spot. Which is spooky. Because not only does that call
into question

our perceptions of reality itself, but that also means that the moment one
particle decided

on its spin result, its quantum-entangled partner instantly knew that that
decision

had happened. You could test both particles at once, no

matter the distance, and this same result would come back. Somehow
information had travelled from the

one particle to the other in no time at all, far faster than light itself. So
already something strange was going on

here. This result disproved Einstein’s predictions,

and showed that some information does seem to go faster than light. But
we can take this one step further, and

have information going back in time. There is another experiment , our

last experiment,

known as the “delayed choice” test. Its primary purpose was to explore
the fundamental

nature of light – whether it was a wave, or a particle, and to figure out

when it decided

to be one or the other. Unlike the double slit experiment, though,

this test was more about that last part – trying to identify the moment the
waveform collapsed

down into something discrete. In the double slit experiment, light seemed

to choose a different path through space depending on whether it was

observed, or if it wasn’t. In 2006 a number of scientists asked an
interesting

question: what would happen if you tried to observe the light after it had
to pick a path? Consider the experiment:

A single photon is sent into a Beam Splitter, with a 50/50 chance of either
being allowed
to carry on its way along path 1, or getting reflected up along path 2.
Once on either path, the photon is bounced

off mirrors, with both paths reconverging here, where another beam
splitter is inserted. Once again, the photon has a 50/50 chance

to go either way, with an even chance of arriving at one of the two

detectors. If light were just a particle, sending a single

photon into this experiment would give you an even chance of it arriving
at one detector

or the other. You’d not be able to tell which way it went,

as the two beam splitters make that impossible to know, but you could
see where it ended

up. However, this does not occur. When the second beam splitter is
present,

the light produces an interference pattern, indicating that the single

photon went down

both paths, ultimately bumping into itself, before moving on to both

detectors. This seems like strong evidence that light

is a wave; it certainly behaves like one here. But what happens if you
remove the second

beam splitter? Suddenly you know which path the light travelled

down – if light arrives at the top detector, it must have arrived from path
1. If it arrives at the side detector, it must

have come along path two. And something about this knowledge spooks

the light. It stops going down both paths, and suddenly

each photon only arrives at one detector. Here’s the question – what
happens if

you insert the beam splitter after the photon has already started down
either one or both

routes? This is why the test is called “delayed

choice”. If you delay choosing how exactly you intend

to detect the photon, whether by knowing which path it came down or

making that ambiguous

to you, what happens to the light? What happens is a very strange thing.
When this experiment was performed, it was
done multiple times, with the beam splitter randomly being inserted or
not, but always

being inserted after the photon had entered one or both paths. And yet,
the results came back unequivocal. If the beam splitter was present, the
photon

suddenly, and seemingly retroactively, stopped picking a path. If the

beam splitter was removed, the photon

seemingly knew it would later be detected and picked a specific path to

accommodate. Somehow, the beam splitter being added or

removed in the future changed what the photon did in the past. So, what
is happening here? Is it really true that particles somehow saw

the future? Did the experiment cause information to be

sent back into the past? Or is there some other principle at play here

that explains this whole thing; that accounts for the instant transmission
of information

between quantum particles, and allows it to be perfectly rational that light

could travel

down one path or both at the same time. Personally, I’m inclined to think
that this

is more likely. We clearly don’t understand what is happening

here. But it must be admitted; if we don’t understand

what is happening, there’s nothing saying that causality isn’t being

ignored. In some way, maybe on the quantum level time

really is more fluid than it is up here in the larger universe. Maybe space
and time simply do not apply down

there. And maybe one day someone will be able to

come up with a theory that allows all these strange phenomena to make
finally make sense. Until then, we’ll just have to keep asking

the same question: Can information travel backwards in time? Until then,
we’ll just have to all agree

on one thing: quantum physics is strange.