Scientists have peered inside protons and discovered that quarks and gluons, their fundamental building blocks, experience quantum entanglement.
Entangled particles are connected to each other, so that a change to one instantaneously causes a change to the other, even if they are separated by vast distances. Albert Einstein famously dismissed the idea as “spooky action at a distance,” but later experiments proved that the bizarre, locality-breaking effect is real.
Physicists have observed entanglement between quarks before but had never found evidence that they exist in a quantumly connected state inside protons.
Now, a team of researchers has discovered entanglement between quarks and gluons inside protons over a distance of one quadrillionth of a meter — allowing the…