How Fast Is Quantum Entanglement? What Scientists Found in Attoseconds — and What Our Ancestors Already Knew

Long before Einstein coined the phrase “spooky action at a distance,” African cosmologies had already named what he refused to accept. Yoruba elders understood Àṣẹ — the divine force that flows between all things — as a current that operates beyond the limits of physical space. Akan philosophy held that the living, the ancestors, and the unborn exist in unbroken relation, their bond not dependent on proximity. In the Kemetic tradition, Heka — the sacred power of language and intention — was understood to act across distance, weaving the visible and invisible worlds into one.

Science is now catching up.

In 2025, researchers at TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology) made one of the most precise measurements in the history of quantum physics: they watched quantum entanglement form in real time, tracking how two electrons become irrevocably linked in just 232 attoseconds — roughly 232 quintillionths of a second. The experiment did not prove that entanglement is fast. It revealed something far more profound: that the bond between particles is not a given. It forms. It emerges. And in that emergence, modern physics glimpsed something ancestors across the African continent have long understood to be true.

What Scientists Actually Measured — and Why the Framing Matters

One thing to get right at the start: this study did not measure the “speed” of quantum entanglement the way popular headlines suggested. Entanglement’s non-local effect — the instantaneous correlation between two particles, regardless of the distance between them — does not travel. It has no speed. It simply is.

What the TU Wien team measured is more subtle, and arguably more extraordinary: how long it takes for entanglement to form. Using high-intensity attosecond laser pulses — an attosecond is 10⁻¹⁸ seconds, so small that there are more attoseconds in a single minute than there are minutes in the entire age of the universe — they fired light at helium atoms, causing one electron to be ejected. As that electron departed, it became entangled with the electron that remained.

Prof. Iva Březinová described what they observed: “The electron does not just jump out of the atom. It is a wave that spills out of the atom — and that takes a certain amount of time. It is precisely during this phase that the entanglement occurs, the effect of which can then be precisely measured later by observing the two electrons.”

By tracking the timing of each electron’s departure and correlating it with the remaining electron’s energy state, the team mapped the precise window — 232 attoseconds — during which two particles become bound to each other in a way that no distance can break.

The “Spooky” Truth Einstein Couldn’t Accept

Albert Einstein rejected the implications of quantum entanglement. He called the non-local correlation between entangled particles “spooky action at a distance” — a phrase he meant as a dismissal. For Einstein, physics had to have local, mechanical explanations. If measuring one particle instantly told you something about another particle light-years away, there had to be a hidden variable we had not found yet.

Bell’s Theorem — proven experimentally in the 1980s and confirmed with increasing precision ever since — settled the question: Einstein was wrong. There are no hidden variables. The particles are genuinely, irreducibly connected. Measuring one does not send information to the other; the two are so fundamentally entangled that they constitute a single system, no matter how far apart they become.

This is not metaphor. This is physics. And it is the very foundation of research into quantum teleportation and the future of the internet — where entangled particles may one day power communication networks that are fundamentally secure and instantaneous.

And for those of us who come from traditions that have always understood reality as fundamentally relational — where the individual self is constituted by relationship, not prior to it — this is not surprising. It is confirmation.

The universe does not recognize the separateness we were taught to assume. From the sub-atomic to the ancestral, reality is constituted in relation. Connection is not what happens between things — it is the condition by which things exist at all.

Ubuntu, Àṣẹ, and the Physics of Belonging

Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. In Zulu: a person is a person through other persons.

The Ubuntu philosophy at the heart of our organization’s name holds that personhood is not an individual achievement — it is a relational emergence. You do not exist in isolation, then enter into relationship. You come into being through relationship. Connection is not something that happens to a self. Connection is what a self is.

Quantum entanglement, understood correctly, points to something structurally similar at the sub-atomic level. Two particles do not form, then become entangled. They emerge into an entangled state — their shared quantum nature is constituted in relation — and that bond becomes non-separable, non-local, and permanent until disrupted by external observation. The particle’s quantum state is only fully defined in relationship to its entangled partner.

In Yoruba cosmology, Àṣẹ is the divine energy and creative power that flows through all things. It is not a metaphor for connection — it is the connective force itself. Practitioners understand Àṣẹ as the current that runs between the Orisha, between the living and the ancestors, between word and manifest outcome. It is the reason an elder’s blessing can reach a child across the ocean, that ancestor prayers are not lost in space, that the call of a community echoes forward into futures not yet born.

Scientists at TU Wien have now measured something that rhymes deeply with this understanding. During the 232 attoseconds it takes for entanglement to form, there is a liminal phase — the electron is neither fully free nor yet entangled. It exists in superposition, becoming. That threshold state is precisely where Yoruba practitioners locate the action of Àṣẹ: the charged, potent instant before a bond crystallizes into being.

Kemetic Heka, Akan Wisdom, and Connection Across Time

In Kemetic (ancient Egyptian) philosophy, Heka was the primordial power of the universe — the magic of creation itself, the force by which language, intention, and consciousness act upon reality. Heka was not understood as something humans use; it was understood as the substrate of all existence. The word spoken in one world resonates in another. The intention held in ceremony manifests in material reality. For the Kemetic tradition, this is not superstition. It is the structure of existence.

Quantum entanglement offers a striking parallel: once two particles share a quantum state, there is no meaningful “between” them. They are not connected across distance. They are, in the language of physicists, non-separable — they constitute a single quantum system regardless of spatial separation. An action on one is instantaneously reflected in the other. There is no signal, no delay, no medium through which information travels. The bond is foundational.

Akan philosophy encodes this truth in its cosmology of unbroken relationship between the living, the ancestors, and the unborn. The Adinkra symbol Sankofa — depicted as a bird reaching back to retrieve an egg while moving forward — holds that the past and future are not sequential locations on a timeline but coexistent realities in relation. You are not separated from your ancestors by time. You are entangled with them.

Physicists measuring entanglement are, in some sense, confirming this with laboratory equipment. Once entanglement forms — in 232 attoseconds — that bond requires no maintenance. It does not weaken over distance. It endures.

What This Means for How We Understand Community

Ubuntu Village has always worked from the premise that community is not a service delivery mechanism — it is a living system, a relational field with its own intelligence, memory, and capacity to heal. Our work in East Harlem, Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria is grounded in the understanding that the boundaries we draw between communities are administrative, not cosmological. The bond between a grandmother in Lagos and a grandchild in the South Bronx is not metaphorical. It is real.

The attosecond measurement of entanglement’s formation gives us new language for something communities of African descent have always known: that becoming connected is an event with a time signature. It takes a moment — a threshold — and then it is permanent. Ceremony, rites of passage, naming rituals, healing circles — these are not cultural decoration. They are technologies for forming bonds that become non-separable. Bonds that hold regardless of physical distance. Bonds that, like entangled particles, define both parties through the relationship itself.

What the TU Wien experiment showed us is that science is now sophisticated enough to watch this process at the sub-atomic level. The mystery is not dispelled by this. It deepens.

We are children of entanglement. At the quantum level, the ancestral level, the community level — connection is not optional. It is the architecture of reality.

References

• ✦How Fast Is Quantum Entanglement? — TU Wien
• ✦Scientists Crack the Hidden Code of Quantum Entanglement — SciTechDaily
• ✦Groundbreaking Observation of Quantum Entanglement in Top Quark Pairs — CERN

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Michele Mitchell is the Founder, President & CEO of Ubuntu Village Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. A writer, advocate, and community strategist working at the intersection of ancestral wisdom, public health, and community power, Michele leads Ubuntu Village’s work to center communities as the protagonists of their own healing. She writes from the conviction that science and spirit are complementary, that healing is relational, and that community is the medicine. Read more about Michele, or connect with her on LinkedIn.