On Fri, Dec 06 2013, brian carroll wrote:
"Spooky action" entanglement has been measured to operate at a velocity of at least 10,000 'c', where 'c' is the speed of light in a vacuum. (signals transmitted on optical fibers about 20 kilometers apart.) Unfortunately, there does not appear to be any way to employ this to transmit information. Jim Bell
so would this not break the physics model already, of faster than light info, such that the cosmos may operate on principles beyond those employed.
the comments on the article seemingly indicative of this same scenario, as if a realm of political science, gerrymandering of physics seemingly.
if a spin could be remotely connected to another, as mentioned in the article comments, and activated at a distance, could this not function as a basic switch, perhaps making a relay or gate or some kind or the ability to send/receive coded messages via morse code (as mentioned).
say, a sequence of spins encoding the alphabet or whatever, perhaps controlled by a normal computer process yet transmitted/received via this quantum connectivity (seemingly out of this world then back into it via vibration, rather than a line of sight acoustic signal, if understanding)
i thought that was the idea underneath the potential for other, hidden technology embedded in existing systems, that remote relationship via quantum properties that operate in other dimensionality/structures, if not beyond lightspeed properties or conceptions, and that it may not be recognizable in the existing approach or computational paradigm. such that fiber may not be necessary, the approach to key exchange or processing may occur in other parameters or functional structures.
(Take everything I say here with a grain of salt; I'm not a quantum physicist, nor have I ever even taken a quantum physics class. I just read a lot about this stuff and think about it a lot.) Quantum entanglement is inherently difficult to explain because it's a consequence of the prevailing interpretation (the Copenhagen interpretation) of quantum mechanics, that the spin axis isn't actually "chosen" until you measure it. Unfortunately, the information that's supposedly "transmitted" instantaneously doesn't originate from outside the system, so it can't be used to send anything useful to human beings. There's an explanation that's slightly less awkward in my view: that the information about what axis you're measuring the spin on actually gets transmitted backward in time along the particle's path to the point at which the particles became entangled. It's less awkward because it doesn't require anything to happen faster than light, and it doesn't allow paradoxes because you can't actually get anything useful back out. This interpretation is known as "time symmetric quantum mechanics," but unfortunately there aren't a whole lot of papers on it because the Copenhagen interpretation is quite dominant. Special Relativity itself actually doesn't forbid traveling or sending information faster than light; it just forbids accelerating a massive object to or through the speed of light. There has been talk of "tachyons," particles "born" traveling faster than light and possessing imaginary mass, since the earliest days of SR. Since they would allow the creation of paradoxes and have other strange properties such as accelerating as they lose energy, most physicists assume they do not exist. They've even created a principle, the "Causality Principle," that forbids them. The Causality Principle simply says that all observers must observe two events that are causally connected (i.e. exchange any information between them) occurring in the same order. This property can only be true if information is transmitted at or below the speed of light. The Causality Principle is the weakest principle that prevents paradoxes within Special Relativity, but it turns out a minor tweak to SR enables a weaker principle to prevent paradoxes: the addition of a "privileged" refernce frame. In particular, the reference frame in which quantum entanglement is assumed to operate, which may also be the reference frame of the cosmic microwave background. The revised, weaker Causality Principle says that any two causally-connected events must be observed to occur in the same order *to an observer in the privileged reference frame.* That gets rid of the speed of light limit entirely, as long as you don't travel back in time in this one particular reference frame. It would probably also make the Copenhagen interpretation of QM preferable to the time-symmetric interpretation, but I haven't thought that one through yet (in fact, I don't understand how they measure the speed of the quantum connection yet either). That means quantum entanglement *could* actually carry useful information, and we could (in theory, anyway) construct an Ansible. Before you go off saying "but SR says there's no privileged reference frame!" it actually doesn't. It says you don't *need* one. Lorentz constructed the geometry Einstein borrowed for Special Relativity specifically to explain why the Earth's motion relative to the luminiferous ether could not be detected. Einstein's major contribution (for SR, aside from E=mc^2) was the realization that Lorentz's geometry obviated the need for a luminiferous ether entirely. But perhaps quantum entanglement can give the luminiferous ether a new life. -- Sean Richard Lynch <seanl@literati.org> http://www.literati.org/~seanl/