Hypothesis about entanglement
I’m 15 years old and currently in my first year of high school. I’m definitely not advanced enough in math or physics to properly formalize this idea, so I’m sure there are probably some big gaps in my reasoning, and maybe even some fundamental mistakes.
I came up with this while thinking about quantum entanglement. I’m posting it here mostly because I want people to point out what’s wrong with it. If the idea doesn’t work, I’d actually like to know exactly where it breaks. So feel free to “destroy” it.
I’m not claiming that this is a new theory or that I’ve discovered anything. It’s just an idea I had and I’m trying to understand whether there’s anything interesting in it or if I’m completely misunderstanding something.
My idea
When two electrons are entangled, their spins can be measured with opposite results, even if the particles are very far apart.
I started wondering if this could be explained by imagining that the two particles are somehow two sides or manifestations of a single physical entity.
Instead of thinking of them as two completely separate objects that somehow have a connection between them, maybe they could still be connected at a more fundamental level, even when they are very far apart from our point of view.
I was thinking about something vaguely similar to spacetime curvature, but obviously much more extreme. The idea would be that the two particles could be separated in the three dimensions we experience, while somehow being connected or even coincident in a deeper structure of spacetime.
This made me think about an additional spatial dimension.
Normally, we describe space using:
(x, y, z)
But what if there were another spatial dimension, so that space was:
(w, x, y, z)
with time being another coordinate:
t
In this picture, two particles could have the same or a very similar w coordinate while being extremely far apart in x, y and z.
From our three-dimensional perspective, they would look like two separate particles very far from each other. But in the full four-dimensional spatial structure, they might be much closer together, or somehow connected.
If something like this were possible, the particles wouldn’t actually need to send information to each other faster than light. The apparent non-locality of entanglement could instead come from the fact that we are only seeing three of the spatial dimensions.
Problems I already see
There are obviously a lot of things I don’t know how to explain:
Elementary particles probably wouldn’t produce anywhere near enough gravity to create the kind of extreme spacetime curvature I’m imagining.
I don’t know why this kind of connection would appear specifically when particles become entangled.
I have no idea how two particles would actually create or interact with a fourth spatial dimension.
I don’t have the mathematical background to describe this properly yet.
I have no idea whether this kind of geometry could actually reproduce the correlations predicted by quantum mechanics.
Most importantly, I don’t know whether this idea would actually be compatible with Bell’s theorem and the no-signalling principle.
So, basically, this is just a thought I had, not a finished theory.
If there’s an obvious reason why this can’t work, I’d genuinely like to know. And if there’s already a known theory or interpretation of quantum mechanics that is similar to what I’m describing, I’d also be interested in hearing about it.