How entangled are you?

Blame it on the unfortunately limited capacity of these wonderful devices called our brains - we can't rationally grasp it. Nothing new about that though, after all there are plenty of things around us we all or most of us don't get, so, just one more item in a long list to shake your head about and wonder.

Can something be faster than the speed of light? Remember your basics of common sense. Remember your school physics.
Yes!
Right!!
Cannot be!!!
Correct answer.
Now back to reality: cannot be, but is anyway.

For all of you who are not entirely familiar with quantum physics, here's the idea: all material, i.e. the atoms we're made of, are composed of subatomic particles. These particles do not behave quite like the larger scale matter. One phenomenon of those very small particles that is not covered by our normal physics is "entanglement".

This means that two particles act as a unity even if they are far apart from each other. If the one's spin changes, the other one's spin changes as well. This happens across great distances, and so far it appeared to be very fast.

But how fast is very fast in the quantum world? Is this entanglement due to a physical causality connection, meaning one particle changes, and this change somehow results in the entangled partner's change? Or are they really acting as one & at once?

A study just came out, measuring exactly that: how fast do entangled particles ex/change with each other? The experiment comprised two villages in Switzerland (that's the country with the cheese fondue, right.), 18km apart from each other and separated by the lake of Geneve. That's the lake where you get thrown into when you lose your bread in the cheese fondue.

Two photons were entangled in the middle between the two villages and then sent via fiberoptics one to each village. There the photons pass through interferometers, and, because of the magic of quantum physics that is beyond my level of understanding, the interference between the possible routes each of the photons could have taken can be measured and, if correlated with each other, is indicative of quantum entanglement or of an interaction between the photons. The whole setup allows to measure the minimum speed of this hypothetical interaction. What they found was that this interaction was at least 10,000 times faster than the speed of light, and quite possibly even instantaneous.

So much for the Warp drive.

Now, this study has severe and really interesting implications for various aspects of life and the such, coming from a mind entirely outside of physics since quite a while.. (obviously):
- can we trash the idea of causality?
- is time a specialty-item in our tiny world, and instantaneous co-action the ruling force that we have overlooked so far?
- what does all that dark matter and dark energy got to do with this, and is there a medium along which entanglement happens, just in a higher dimension than ours?
- how can matter be stable? How can I sort of look the same everyday (except Sunday morning, I looked a little worn out then), if my particles are switching spins with their buddies all the time?
- how many of my particles are entangled and with whom??!!

I will not say anything about the majority of these points. That's up to you and the physicists around us. What I really want to know:

How many entangled particles do you have to share with another person to feel, at a distance, that moment when something special happens to him/her? And how many hours do you have to spend with someone til you're sufficiently entangled to feel really connected?
Or have you been quantum-physically intertwined with each other all your life, since the beginning of those particles coming into being, are you just like them different sides of the same coin, like a gemini looking for its lost twin you have been looking for that other side of you since the Big Bang?

Now that's definitely out of reach for my brain, but, I feel, right in touch with the intution of all those old souls among us...

Happy entangling to all of you!