“It may be tempting to think that the particles are somehow communicating with each other across these great distances, but that is not the case,” says Thomas Vidick, a professor of computing and mathematical sciences at Caltech. “There can be correlation without communication.” Instead, he explains, entangled particles are so closely connected that there is no need for communication; they “can be thought of as one object.”

As baffling as the concept of two entangled particles may be, the situation becomes even more complex when more particles are involved. In natural settings such as the human body, for example, not two but hundreds of molecules or even more become entangled, as they also do in various metals and magnets, making up an interwoven community.