If you want to play in the quantum sandbox, you have to accept some bizarre rules. You have to accept that a single thing can exist in two states at once—alive and dead, black and white—until it’s observed or measured in some way, at which point it instantly takes on one quality or the other. You have to accept that two particles at opposite ends of the universe can be entangled in such a way that anything you do to one instantly affects the other. And you have to accept that the strictest, no-exceptions rule in all of physics—that nothing can move faster than the speed of light—may have some exceptions after all.

Einstein hated the quantum sandbox, especially the part about entanglement. It’s not at all hard to believe that two particles separated by great distances can indeed influence one another via some field or wave, but that information can travel no faster than light speed. If the particles are one billion light years apart, it should take one billion years for something you do to one to have an impact on the other. The idea that that could happen with no time lag at all was something Einsten dismissed as “spooky action at a distance”—and he wanted no part of it.

But now, an experiment at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands suggests that the great man’s objections notwithstanding, spooky action at a distance is real. And with that, the entire field of quantum physics gets a big boost.

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