Marriage is by and large a crock, of course. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone I know — and think are awesome together — who are are married, but the idea of both a church and state government needing to gives a thumbs up to two people in love is rather too much like saying you think that both the church and the state government are totally awesome. But that’s just me.But here’s this: the AC Institute, a NYC experimental art space, is offering quantum marriage. That is, you and your beau walk down the aisle and get bombed with entangled photons for a minute. "They’ll stand for approximately a minute, allowing countless entangled photons to bombard their skin, gently entangling their flesh by the photoelectric effect," Jonathan Keats, the dude behind the project, tells Nature."Conventional weddings must meet church or state standards for couples to be married," he adds, "the nuptial entanglement process is totally open, as nondenominational and nonpartisan as the laws of physics."That’s not really how entanglement goes, but that’s also not the point, which would be metaphor or, at the very least, fun. Naturally, you can quantum marry any person, as many people or non-people as you’d like.I like this, from the Institute’s website:There are no restrictions on who may be entangled to whom. The process is unsupervised. No records are kept. Even those who get entangled will have to take their entanglement on faith, as any attempt to measure a quantum system disentangles it: A quantum marriage will literally be broken up by skepticism about it.
The potential of quantum marriage will be fulfilled by those who choose to engage it. After five thousand years of manmade laws, often exclusionary or punitive, science promises to liberate marriage through technology freely offering entanglement to everybody.So far, the only customers have been Keats and his quantum wife.Connections:
Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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