A New Study May Have Confirmed Quantum Entanglement By Using Light From Quasars That Are Billions Of Years Old

In February, MIT physicists analyzed 600-year-old starlight to determine if there was indeed some unknown classical mechanism at play with quantum entanglement and discovered that if this was the case, then it was something which would have had to have begun 600 years ago, long before the experiment had even been conjured up and, of course, before the star first emitted light.

The new study on quantum entanglement has gone even further than the previous one in February, and this time physicists looked at entangled photons in relation to two different quasars, one whose light has finally reached us after 7.8 billion years with the second one even more ancient at 12.2 billion years.

After observing the quantum entanglement of 30,000 pairs of photons, MIT co-author Alan Guth noted that if classical physics were to account for this phenomenon, then it was something which would have had to start 7.8 billion years ago, which seems very unlikely.

"If some conspiracy is happening to simulate quantum mechanics by a mechanism that is actually classical, that mechanism would have had to begin its operations — somehow knowing exactly when, where, and how this experiment was going to be done — at least 7.8 billion years ago. That seems incredibly implausible, so we have very strong evidence that quantum mechanics is the right explanation."

MIT's David Kaiser stated that considering the fact that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, it seems quite unlikely that there could be another explanation for this quantum entanglement in relation to quasars outside of quantum mechanics.

"The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, so any alternative mechanism — different from quantum mechanics — that might have produced our results by exploiting this loophole would've had to be in place long before even there was a planet Earth, let alone an MIT. So we've pushed any alternative explanations back to very early in cosmic history."