If you’re a Network Data Professional and you walk into the server room to find this, you know it will not be a good day.  It’s as though the word “entangle” (verb – “to twist together or entwine into a confusing mass”) was coined just for this.  Another word commonly used for this situation cannot be printed here (hint:  rhymes with bluster-duck).  There are all sorts of entanglements in our lives, and very few of them are good. 

Psychologists talk about entanglement in the context of relationships, highlighting it as a wellness threat that needs to be treated.  Entanglement often masquerades as a healthy connection, but it is far from it.  Human entanglements exhibit communications breakdowns, a prevailing sense of unsafety, frequent conflict and power struggles.  Relationships feature good communication along with predominantly positive rather than negative feelings.  The similarities to networks are hard to miss. 

Physicists are also entwined with entanglement.  Keep in mind that this is the same group that routinely works with charm, strangeness and flavor, which should tell you something about how they name things.  For these folks, entanglement is just, to quote Albert Einstein, “spooky action at a distance.”  Like anything that involves quantum physics, a little explanation is in order. <continue>