Q: If all matter originated from a single point, does that mean all matter is entangled?

The original question was: All matter originated from a single point, does that mean all matter is entangled? If it is why do you need to create new entangled practices when doing experiments? Are there different types or degree’s of entanglement?

Physicist: There are absolutely different degrees of entanglement!

The degree you usually hear about are “maximally entangled states”, but basically everything is a little entangled. Not because of the big bang, but because every-day interactions generate and break a little entanglement all the time. Entanglement has a lot in common with correlation: if you know something about one thing, you’ll know something about the things it’s correlated with.

Correlations crop up all the time when things interact. For example, if you leave your car in a parking lot and come back to find a dent with a little red paint in it, then you know that somewhere nearby is a red car with another dent.  The random things about your dent (the height above the ground, the severity, etc.) will be similar to those properties of the corresponding dent on the other car.  You and a damnable ne’er-do-well have correlated cars because looking at the dent on one tells you something about the dent on the other; not because they have a spooky cosmic connection, but because they physically ran into each other. Entanglement is a little more subtle (what with all the quantum mechanics), but not a hell of a lot more subtle. Nothing fancy.

Just to be over-precise, when we say that things are entangled what we really mean is that some of their properties are entangled.  For example, the polarization of two photons might be entangled while their positions are not, or vice versa.

The homogeneity of the universe (the “more-or-less-the-same-everywhere-ness” of the universe) is often cited as evidence that all the matter in the very early universe briefly had a chance to mix around, but that doesn’t have too much of an impact on entanglement. There’s something called “monogamy of entanglement” that says that maximally entangled qubits only appear in pairs, and maximally entangled states are the ones that really do interesting things. This can be generalized a bit to say “the more entangled two things are, the less they’re entangled with anything else”. Unfortunately, in order for such a pair to persist until today it would need to be left almost entirely unharrassed by everything else for billions of years. However, if the universe is anything, it’s old and messy.  The entanglement we (people) create on purpose requires careful isolation and control of the stuff in question.

Even worse, if you have access to only one entangled particle, there’s no way to tell that it’s entangled. All of the fancy effects you hear about entanglement always require both, or at least most, of the entangled particles.

So you (every bit of you) can be entangled with other stuff in the universe (you kinda have to be). Entanglement is generated and broken by interactions, so you’re more entangled with stuff that’s nearby (in an astronomical sense). But most importantly, it doesn’t matter; random atomic-scale correlations are a lot like random atomic-scale noise.

Even less exciting, if you (personally) are the thing that’s entangled, your experience is entirely ordinary; the thing you’re entangled with will always be in a single state (from your point of view). All of the fancy experiments we do with entangled particle always involve particles being entangled with each other, because when they become entangled with the person doing the experiment it looks like “wave function collapse” (suddenly it appears to be in only one state) and that’s boring. Similarly, if you and a distant alien are entangled it does not mean you have a spooky connection (groovy, spiritual, or otherwise), it means that they will already be in a single state (from you mutual points of view) before you ever meet each other.

Which is exactly the sort of thing you’d never notice.