Albert Einstein reportedly was wrong about the existence of "spooky action at a distance," a phenomenon in which linked particles appear to communicate faster than the speed of light.
Einstein disavowed the phenomenon, but 12 teams of physicists, 100,000 volunteer gamers and 97 million data units randomly generated by hand came together to prove Einstein wrong, the website Live Science reported.
The results contradicted Einstein's description of a state he called "local realism," study co-author Morgan Mitchell, a professor of quantum optics at the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, Spain, told Live Science.
Details of the study were published online Wednesday in the science journal Nature.
"We showed that Einstein's world-view of local realism, in which things have properties whether or not you observe them, and no influence travels faster than light, cannot be true — at least one of those things must be false," Mitchell said, per Live Science.
Mitchell told the website that means that either our observations of the world actually change it, or particles are communicating with each other in some manner that we can't see or influence – "or possibly both."
The Institute of Photonic Sciences said researchers put Einstein's theory of local realism to the test on Nov. 30, 2016, when more than 100,000 gamers contributed to the BIG Bell Test by contributing unpredictable bits of data – some 97 million bits worth – using their smartphones and other Internet-enabled devices.
The contribution determined how entangled atoms, photons, and superconducting devices were measured in 12 laboratories around the world. The test closed the so-called "freedom-of-choice loophole" in tests of Einstein's principle of local realism and the results were analyzed, the institute said.
Scientists found the generated entangled state and the optimal measurements to contradict local realism as more than eight standard deviations were achieved in the weeks following the Big Bell Test day performed with stored human random numbers, the institute said.
"What is most amazing for me is that the argument between Einstein and (Nobel Prize-winning physicist) Niels Bohr, after more than 90 years of effort to make it rigorous and experimentally testable, still retains a human and philosophical element," Mitchell said.
"We know that the Higgs boson and gravitational waves exist thanks to amazing machines, physical systems built to test the laws of physics. But local realism is a question we can't fully answer with a machine. It seems we ourselves must be part of the experiment, to keep the universe honest," he added.
Mitchell told Live Science the experiments also demonstrated the similarity between humans and quantum particles related to randomness and free will.
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