For Alan Barr, it began throughout the covid-19 lockdowns. “I had a bit extra time. I might sit and assume,” he says.

He had loved being a part of the success at CERN’s Massive Hadron Collider (LHC) close to Geneva, Switzerland — the particle collider that found the Higgs boson. However now, he questioned, have been they lacking a trick? “I had spent lengthy hours screwing bits of it collectively. And I believed, ‘Nicely, we’ve constructed this lovely piece of equipment, however perhaps we might be doing extra with it,’ ” he says.

The LHC is usually seen as a machine for locating new particles. However now Barr and a slew of different physicists are asking if it may also be used to probe the underlying which means of quantum principle and why it paints actuality as being so deeply bizarre.

That’s precisely what Barr and his colleagues are actually investigating in earnest. Final yr, they printed the outcomes of an experiment during which they confirmed that pairs of elementary particles known as high quarks might be put into the quantum state often known as entanglement.

This was simply the primary of many entanglement experiments at particle colliders that would open up a complete new method of learning the character of the universe. We will now ask why actuality in quantum mechanics is so exhausting to pin down and what this has to do with experimenters — and even particles — having free will. Doing so might reveal whether or not space-time is key or maybe unveil a deeper actuality that’s even stranger than quantum mechanics. “We will do actually various things with this collider,” says Barr.

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