Tangled up in blue
6 May, 2011 | Richard P. Grant |
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Two people I don’t know got married last Friday, and his grandmother graciously gave the country the day off. Whatever you think about the monarchy or, indeed, the institution of marriage, it was a lovely day off and on the whole, even apparent republicons appeared to enjoy it.
Nonetheless, marriage is a tricky affair and takes a lot of hard work. Sometimes even that isn’t enough, and marriages end. Jonathon Keats, experimental philosopher, artist and writer has a solution to the impermanence of marriage: quantum entanglement. Keats is already known for the world’s first photosynthetic restaurant for plants, so it’s probably not so strange he should come up with such an idea:
The technology is straightforward: Exposed to solar radiation, a nonlinear crystal entangles photons. Pairs of entangled photons are divided by prisms. The photoelectric effect translates their entangled state to the bodies of a couple who wish to be united, entangling them in a quantum wedding.
There are no restrictions on who may be entangled to whom. The process is unsupervised. No records are kept. Even those who get entangled will have to take their entanglement on faith, as any attempt to measure a quantum system disentangles it: A quantum marriage will literally be broken up by skepticism about it.
–from the AC Institute website.
If you’re in New York, you can get entangled with a partner of your choice at Keat’s exhibition, opening next Thursday at 6 PM.
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