Dr. David Snoke, a local professor, will unpack the concept of "quantum entanglement." The concept is one of those things considered "spooky" about quantum mechanics. It leads to oddities, such as the famous thought experiment "Schrodinger's Cat," which is presumably in a state of being both dead and alive.

Dr. Snoke, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh, will describe quantum entanglement, using a minimum of math, and will discuss modern experiments which lead to macroscopic entanglement. He'll discuss what these concepts mean (and don't mean) for our view of reality.

Dr. David Snoke is the head of an experimental optics laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh, which studies basic effects of quantum mechanics in semiconductor structures, funded by the National Science Foundation. He has more than 120 publications in journals such as Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. He has published four scientific books, including two textbooks published by Pearson. In 2006, Dr. Snoke was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Prior to coming to the University of Pittsburgh in 1994, he worked in industry at the Aerospace Corporation in California and the Westinghouse labs in Pittsburgh, and he was an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, Germany. His Ph.D. in physics is from the University of Illinois, and his bachelor's degree, also in physics, is from Cornell University.

Recorded on Monday, April 13, 2015 at Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, PA.

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