• A container of liquid helium in a superfluid state. I do not know how many atoms are in the container depicted here, but it is many orders of magnitude greater than a thousand.
  1. It’s rare to observe quantum effects in everyday macroscopic objects. This is because their atoms are not coherent, leading to the averaging out of any quantum effects when we measure them.
  • However, observing other examples of quantum effects on a macroscopic scale, such as those in laser beams and superconductors, is genuinely fascinating.
  • This is most likely because you have a common but completely wrong idea of what “entanglement” is and how it works.
  • You probably think that if I have an entangled particle and you have one, I can flip my particle, and yours will flip. So if you are watching your particle and it suddenly starts going flip-flip-flip for no reason, you say, “Hey! Franklin must be flipping.” Entanglement does not mean what you think it means.
  • Many think “entanglement” means “if you do something to this particle over here, then the same thing happens to that particle over there.” Nope. Nope, nope, nope. Nyet. Nein. That does not happen. Imagine that you have two Ping-Pong balls. You paint one red and one blue. Then you mix them up, put them in two boxes, pick one box randomly, and put it in a spaceship to Mars. When it reaches Mars, you open the box on Earth. You see a blue ball. Instantly, you know the ball of
  • This is a container of liquid helium in a superfluid state. I do not know how many atoms are in the container depicted here, but it is many orders of magnitude greater than a thousand. Observable quantum effects rarely occur in everyday macroscopic objects because their atoms are not in a coherent state. Therefore, any quantum effects are averaged out when we measure the macroscopic object. However, other examples of quantum effects on a macroscopic scale include laser beams and superconductors.