9:45 AM, August 5, 2016, Zenaan Harkness <zen@freedbms.net>:
On Fri, Aug 05, 2016 at 07:19:19AM +0200, Bastiani Fortress wrote:
As i can remember, the point was when two particles are entangled, they bear the same quantum state, and they simultaneously shift their states önce either of them is "observed".
And if you 'observe' at the other side, you can determine that the first side was already observed. Apparently. Which is 1 bit (perhaps 1/2 a bit) of data transfer. If this is not the case, then the descriptions on this list so far are ambiguous to the point of not being interpretable... which would be unfortunate. I think someone's gonna have to try explaining again..
On Fri, Aug 05, 2016 at 09:55:16AM +0200, Bastiani Fortress wrote:
A reminder: this is based on what i've read years ago, with the brains of a high schooler... You don't know the initial state. When you make an observation at the two sides, you *magically* see that two particles are at the same state.
A qwantoom of information, shall we call that? Point is, one of the purported benefits to crypto is that if one side snoops (makes that all important 'observation') - or in fact any untoward interloper goes on a 'snooping' spree (i.e. snoops at least once), then the other side can determine that the entangled quantum state(s) has/have been snooped, as distinct from 'having not been snooped/ observed'. This sounds suspiciously, distinctly, kinda may be just like a sorta you know should probably be, "bit" of information (since the first side created the entangled photon(s), and when that first side later does his own observation, he can determine if the remote side has had an observation "done" on it or not. (Given we now speak Kib, Gib, KiB, GiB etc, should we also speak of "bib"s instead of "bit"s? You know, "a bib is either 0 or 1, but in base 2 instead of in base 10. That would make a world of difference......) By simple logic, we have transmission of some information. Now I say, just like the speed of sound used to be considered "the absolute upper physical limit of the speed of travel", I suspect that soon the God almighty "physics" is going to be speaking more commonly ("tis broadly accepted that...") of some sub space, hyper space, super mega space or twisted entagled N-dimensional space, through which this "information" travels, and that "of course" and "we really should have known all along" and all the rest of the "I'm so firetrucking brilliant [[in hindsight]]" bullshit artist crowd... In the meantime, either one side (does not have to be "either side") is either able to determine that the other side made an observation of the entangled photon, or not. Let's not keep going around in circles, and await someone who has devoted some recent brain photonic activity to the problem, to such an extent that they be able to explain to us mere mortals WTF we are "missing", if indeed we are - I'm hopeful yet that we're not, and a whole bunch of 'very intellineffectuals' start spouting on about "how great FTL communication is and how obvious it was in hindsight to array a series of entangled photons to be the entanglede photonic baseband inteestellar FTL comms platform, like duh!" Alas, I am confident I am nowhere near as brainy as some other not so dumn trucks.
Quantum stuff don't come in absolutes, you're thinking in terms of classical mechanics. You don't know if the cat is dead unless you open the box and "observe". Unless you do it, you assume a collection of possibility of states.