And now we come back to Klaus Schulten’s fast triplet reaction. You may recall that electronic bonds between atoms are often formed by the sharing of a pair of electrons. This electron pair is always entangled and almost always in a singlet spin state: that is, the electrons have opposite spin. However, remarkably, the two electrons can remain entangled even after the bond between the atoms is broken. The separated atoms, which are now called free radicals, can drift apart, and it becomes possible for the spin of one of the electrons to flip over so that the entangled electrons—now on
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