Quantum entangled-photon Chinese satellite.

[jim bell]

 From: juan <juan.g71 at gmail.com>

On Thu, 4 Aug 2016 21:58:11 +0000 (UTC)
jim bell <jdb10987 at yahoo.com> wrote:

>  From: juan <juan.g71 at gmail.com>

> >> Apparently, that is true.   The tantalizing thing is that SOMETHING
> >> APPEARS   (information, of some nature) to be transferred between
> >> one particle and another, distant one, and yet there seems to be
> >> no way to use that transfer to actually transmit useful FTL 
> 
>  >  Which sounds rather absurd no?
> Certainly that sounds absurd!   It IS absurd! 


>   Oh, OK. So I don't need to bother with patently false theories.
>   Because that's what 'absurd' implies. 
No, you obviously don't understand.  Something can be "absurd" and yetquite real.  "Absurd" merely explains how we react to something we do notunderstand.Simple example of thing that appears "absurd":  To somebody in 6th grademath, the question "what is the square root of negative 1" looks absurd.But it isn't absurd to a 12th grader taking calculus.


>> Which explains a lot
>> of the fascinationhas for entangled photons and related phenomena.

>    I don't follow. I don't think absurd ideas are 'fascinating'.
At one point, the idea that Earth is flat was the received wisdom, and anallergation that Earth is round was "absurd".  Einstein's theory ofrelativity was "absurd" to people who grew up on Newtonian theory.  The idea that nuclei in atoms would  decay, emitting hugeamounts of energy, was "absurd" in 1900.  By 1946, nuclear bombshad killed well over 100,000 people.

 >   And at any rate it should be obvious that absurd ideas have no
  >  place in rational discourse, or 'science'.
Until they do.  


>  Einstein never liked the quantum-mechanics idea, famously declaring
> "God does not play dice with theuniverse".    

>   A sensible remark, if you take out the god bullshit. And as I
>    think you know, there are many so called 'interpretations' of
  >  QM and not all of them are absurd (i.e. patently false).
Einstein was wrong, and ultimately other scientists were right.  And theyconfirmed that, with experiments and further theory.


>> Unfortunately for  Einstein, dice are actually played. 
>    So says one faction of the 'scientific' establishment. Just like
>    statists say that the state is legitimate. 

Scientific dispute exists.  It's normal.Curiously, in the 1920's, a Russian scientist named Lysenko believedthat characteristics could be acquired by an organism far more quicklythan genetics would otherwise allow.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko    Soon enough, he was considered a fraud, a joke.  And he was, but eventually the phenomonof methylation of the DNA strand ('epigenetics') was discovered.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics 

In 1978, I visited the Smithsonian Institution for the first (and so far last) time.  Oneof the exhibits was a display of "quack" medical equipment, including gas-dischargetubes that were activated with high-voltage and were said to control pain.  Quackmedical treatment.  By 1996, I was working at a company which designed and built TENSunits (Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulator) which reduce paid by using small electrical currents.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcutaneous_electrical_nerve_stimulation   
What did you say, above?    "So says one faction of the 'scientific' establishment."
>  >Either this is ordinary EM
>  > phenomena that propagate at the so called speed of light, or
>  > it is something else which could propagate at 'faster than
>  > light' speed. 

>> It's at least 10,000 times 'c' the speed of light in a vacuum,
>> according toexperiments involving fiber optics.  It might be
>> essentially infinite.

>  It can't be infinite
Why not?  Have you ever heard the term, "phase velocity"?   

>, but it certainly can be faster than
>    light.
Prior to relatively recently, people generally thought nothing could travelfaster than 'c'.  They thought that travel faster than 'c' was "absurd".  
> So somebody actually did the measurements?
Yes.  They determined that the 'speed' of whatever was going on had to be at least10,000 times 'c', but they couldn't determine an upper limit to that value.




> > >  If 'something' is moving at faster than light speed, then some
> > > information must be being transmitted. If no information is
> > >  being transmitted, then by definition, there's no way to measure
> >  >  speed and the claim makes no sense.

>> Well, that's the problem. 
>> Knowing that SOMETHING is being
>> transmitted, and actually USING that method to transmit useful
>> information, are (quite strangely) two different things. 

 >   If you know that 'something' was transmitted, then al least one
 >   bit of information was transmitted, no? 
Like I said, there's a difference between knowing something is happening,and being able to actually employ that for useful purposes.If I see a horse running in the prairie, and yet I cannot capture him, Icannot use him to travel at horse-speed rather than man-speed.
Even in the 1s00s, people knew that light traveled at a finite(non-infinite) velocity.  Hint:  It involved Jupiter's moons.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light
But until the invention of the Fleming valve (old name for an 'electrontube') and then radio, people didn't know how to transmit information from Europe to America in a few milliseconds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleming_valve
Curiously, Thomas Edison really screwed up by not recognizing the value ofthe "Edison Effect" (which he wasn't actually the first to recognize)
 >   Again, either information is being transmitted at FTL speed or
  >  not. So, what is being claimed here?
We simply don't know how to use entangled photons to transmit informationat greater than 'c'.  And there is no guarantee we will ever know how to doso.
And if you believe that something must definitely be one thing, or another, I will have to introduce you to Schrodinger's Cat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat

 ...which has the weird property of being able to be alive and dead at the same time.

                         Jim Bell
  
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