Entanglement could also improve the world’s best clocks, which keep time via the vibrations of atoms. Linking thousands of atoms at the quantum level so they vibrate together could lead to new clocks that lose less than one second in 15 billion years, the current record. This helps not just the punctiliously punctual, but could also improve the precision of GPS systems synchronized using such clocks.
Technological improvements have led to simple quantum computers that could, if scaled up, do certain things better than today’s computers, such as searching through unsorted lists and factoring big numbers. At a more fundamental level, playing with the building blocks of those devices has opened the door to understanding why the quantum world is so different from our own. Defining that boundary of the quantum world is one of many open questions that remain for entanglement. The most grand of theories, bound to leave you scratching your head, even allow for the possibility that,
to some degree, everything in the universe is entangled.
This article originally appeared in the July/August 2016 issue of Discover Magazine.