We were discussing this article at work, particularly the quote:
“Finally, we can understand why a cup of coffee equilibrates in a room,” said Tony Short, a quantum physicist at Bristol. “Entanglement builds up between the state of the coffee cup and the state of the room.” The tendency of coffee — and everything else — to reach equilibrium is “very intuitive,” said Nicolas Brunner, a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva. “But when it comes to explaining why it happens, this is the first time it has been derived on firm grounds by considering a microscopic theory.”
And there was an inconsistency between our understandings that led to the question, "Can two independent particles become entangled, or can they only be entangled at the time of their creation?" The article certainly assumes the first. Is that the current understanding of entanglement?
