The Daily Omnivore

Quantum entanglement is a property of physics where two particles will act together and become a system. They behave like one object, but remain two separate objects. It is as if they now sit on the same teeter-totter seesaw. No matter how long the seesaw is, even if it is one million miles long, if one end is down the other end must be up, and this happens instantly. Even though each particle can tell what the other is doing, they do not send messages back and forth. There are no messages between the particles saying, ‘I’m going down, therefore, you must go up’ and waiting for the particle to receive the message. Yet, the particles are always connected and can behave as one.

Quantum Entanglement is one of the concepts that led Albert Einstein to dislike the theory of Quantum Mechanics. Along with his colleagues, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, Einstein used entanglement to try to disprove quantum mechanics. Einstein called entanglement ‘spooky action at a distance.’ Years later, however, John Bell proved with his theorem that entanglement is real and actually happens to tiny particles. Bell’s theorem was experimentally verified for the first time in 1980 by the French physicist Alain Aspect. Although one can probe a nearby particle to instantly affect its partner particle, it is impossible to control how they end up. In other words, probing the particle will influence its partner particle, but it is impossible to choose how to influence them. Therefore it is impossible to use quantum entanglement to send messages.

Fulgurites [fuhl-gyuh-rahyts] (from the Latin fulgur meaning thunderbolt) are natural hollow glass tubes formed in quartzose sand, or silica, or soil by lightning strikes. They are formed when lightning with a temperature of at least 3,270 °F instantaneously melts silica on a conductive surface and fuses grains together; the fulgurite tube is the cooled product. This process occurs over a period of around one second, and leaves evidence of the lightning path and its dispersion over the surface. Fulgurites can also be produced when a high voltage electrical lines break and fall onto a conductive surface with sand beneath. The glass formed is called lechatelierite which may also be formed by meteorite impact and volcanic explosions.

The tubes can be up to several centimeters in diameter, and meters long. Their color varies depending on the composition of the sand they formed in, ranging from black or tan to green or a translucent white. The interior is normally very smooth or lined with fine bubbles; the exterior is generally coated with rough sand particles and is porous.

The Cambrian [kam-bree-uhn] explosion or Cambrian radiation was the relatively rapid appearance, over a period of many million years, of most major groups of complex animals around 530 million years ago, as found in the fossil record. Before about 580 million years ago, most organisms were simple, composed of individual cells occasionally organized into colonies. Over the following 70 or 80 million years the rate of evolution accelerated by an order of magnitude (as defined in terms of the extinction and origination rate of species) and the diversity of life began to resemble today’s.

The long-running puzzlement about the appearance of the Cambrian fauna, seemingly abruptly and from nowhere, centers on three key points: whether there really was a mass diversification of complex organisms over a relatively short period of time during the early Cambrian; what might have caused such rapid change; and what it would imply about the origin and evolution of animals. Interpretation is difficult due to a limited supply of evidence, based mainly on an incomplete fossil record and chemical signatures left in Cambrian rocks.