[mman]

I don't know much about entanglement, but does this now explain why it happens? If we think of the universe eventually returning to some kind of steady state (i'm not sure precisely what i mean by steady state), and if there are certain limited ways for two 'entangled' particles to 'reunify' (again, i don't know much but i'm assuming in some final state everything would cancel out), then wouldn't it make sense that we can only see these particles in specific restricted states?

[eigenket]

This has nothing whatsoever to do with entanglement.

[mman]

Ah, Hm. So you did get what i was suggesting, though? The idea was that maybe you could think of particles exactly the same way as you do orbiting planets that eventually return to an original configuration. I am saying you could (possibly) think of entangled particles as kind of like billiard balls. You wouldn't think about bouncing balls, though, you would think about particles and the guaranteed force between them. The thought is that if the universe is just a wave system, then if you take all nondeterminism out of it, it's just gonna loop forever right? I mean if we think about gravity and basic bodies, like a universe of just two bodies, it's just gonna loop i think. The particles will eventually end up where they started, just like a pool table.

So maybe if two particles are entangled, they phased together in some way at one time and must phase together in that way until the end of time, unless you bump it wrong again.

I dunno.

[eigenket]

Yeah I'm pretty sure I understand what you're talking about and as far as I can tell it doesn't really have anything to do with quantum mechanics at all.

Entanglement is "just" the result of the fact that the space of possible states of a combined quantum system isn't the Cartesian product of the state-spaces of the subsystems that make it up.

If I have two classical systems, one of which has state-space {A, B} (i.e. the first system is either in state A or state B) and the other has state-space {0,1,2} (i.e. the second system is either in state 0, 1 or 2) then the system I get from combining them has 6 possible states {(A,0), (A,1), (A,2),(B,0), (B,1), (B,2)}.

Thats not how quantum state-spaces combine, they combine with the tensor product, rather than the Cartesian product, so the state-space of the combined system is much richer than what you'd get if you try to use the classical "Cartesian product" rule to combine them.