Entanglement, Information, Uncertainty, and Poker
This is a guest camp blog from my MenTern Grady at Mezzacello Urban farm. Grady was in Charge of this creative way of teaching quantum entanglement and uncertainty to camp kids using a modified poker game. It was a lot of fun and a surprising way to model superposition for kids to understand.
Today in Atomic Farming at Mezzacello Urban Farm, my MenTern, Grady co-taught a section on Quantum Entanglement through a card game called, “Indian Poker”. In this game, each player “wears” a card on their forehead. The goal is to guess what their card on their head is. In the quantum world this is called superposition and entanglement and the act of discovering the value is called decoherence.
When you know one piece of data, you can INSTANTLY collapse all fields and know everything about all of those entangled particles. This is how human consciousness, chicken eyes, and quantum computers work.
Career Exploration and Gamification
Grady was shy at first because this idea of collapsing a wave and knowing data seemed very foreign to him. But once we got into the weeds with this and we talked about a few important concepts:
All information is physical
Catalysts and enzymes, nerve responses and ions move incredibly fast
Quantum computers take advantage of this weird effect in the quantum world
A career in quantum biology or quantum computing could be VERY lucrative
So we hashed out a way to play this game and get replicable results. Then he showed the kids in the camp to play blackjack. Not to gamble but to explore the relationship of uncertainty and waveform collapse as well.
If the play gets 21 they can see everything in the fifth dimension as they become light and time and space cease to exist — so both position and velocity are knowable.
If the house gets 21 then the house determines what the player gets to know: position or velocity depending on their ante - heads or tales.
All bets were done with pennies, so heads is position and tails was velocity. You only get one piece of information…
Unless, you are light, but then you can’t share that data anyway.
It was a fun game. We never got to discuss Schrodinger’s Cat and the superposition conundrum. The kids were getting hungry.
