Quantam weirdness?

http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=quantum-weirdnes-wins-again-entangl-2008-08-13&sc=rss

No matter how many times researchers try, there's just no getting around the weirdness of quantum mechanics.

In the latest attempt, researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland tried to determine whether entanglement—the fact that measuring a property of one particle instantly determines the property of another—is actually transmitted by some wave-like signal that's fast but not infinitely fast.

Their test involved a series of measurements on pairs of entangled photons (particles of light) that were generated in Geneva (satellite view at left) and then split apart by optical fiber to two villages 18 kilometers (11 miles) apart where the team had set up photon detectors. (In 2007, researchers transmitted entangled light 144 kilometers between two of the Canary Islands.)

The idea in the new experiment is that the photons in each entangled pair are hitting the distant detectors simultaneously, so there's no time for them to exchange a signal. By comparing results from the two detectors, the researchers determined whether the photons were entangled or not, using a test known as Bell's inequalities.

The photons were indeed entangled, the group reports in "Nature". But in reality, no experiment is perfect, so what they end up with is a lower limit on how fast the entanglement could be traveling: 10,000 times the speed of light.

To appreciate the weirdness of entanglement, consider that the outcome of a single quantum measurement is random. By all tests, a photon *has* no definite polarization until it hits a detector capable of measuring it. So it's like the entangled particles share one big quantum state.

I don't believe that quantum entanglement will turn out to be accurate. I haven't seen a description of an experiment that convinces me that it shows it. Being a liberal, I'm open to the idea that I could be wrong.

If they want to convince me, they could do something like bounce one of the photons off an object, changing it's polarization or transforming it into heat or something, and prove that it affects the other photon that is supposedly entangled. If a big change in one photon doesn't affect the other one, why would I believe a tiny change would?

It sounds to me more like evidence that the photons do have a definite state to start out with. If two photons start out sharing the same state, measuring one would then "determine" the state of the other, not because it changes that other state, but because it discovers it. But that is not such a fun idea.