entanglement

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   the state or process of becoming twisted together, trapped, or caught

   The turtle was injured by entanglement in a discarded fishing net.

2. 2
   noun

   a complicated involvement, relationship, or set of circumstances that is difficult to escape

   She wanted to avoid any further entanglement in the dispute.

3. 3
   noun

   in quantum physics, a connection in which particles share a state so that their measured properties remain correlated

   The experiment preserved quantum entanglement between the two photons.

From entangle + -ment. The physical sense of threads or objects caught together produced the figurative sense of a difficult involvement. Quantum physics adopted the term for correlated systems whose states cannot be described independently.

Topics