Posted on 01/06/2014 5:00:37 AM PST by SunkenCiv
Explanation: Cubes are orbiting the Earth. Measuring ten-centimeters on a side, CubeSats -- each roughly the size of a large coffee mug -- are designed to be inexpensive both to build and to launch. Pictured above, three CubeSats were released from the International Space Station (ISS) last November by the arm of the Japanese Kibo Laboratory module. CubeSats are frequently created by students as part of university science or engineering projects and include missions such as collecting wide angle imagery of the Earth, testing orbital radio communications, monitoring the Earth's magnetic field, and exploring the Earth's surrounding radiations. Depending on the exact height of their release, CubeSats will re-enter the Earth's atmosphere on the time scale of months to years.
(Excerpt) Read more at 129.164.179.22 ...
Thanks, it hasn’t warmed much, but I’m getting used to it. The drive in this morning, uh, it kinda sucked. I wound up ditching the highway route and taking the normal roads, and oddly enough got to work on time. All this is supposed to be over with by Thursday.
More than a thousand words
Neils Bohr: “Einstein, stop telling God what to do!”
And it turned out of course that Einstein was wrong in this case.
Anyone familiar with the EPR experiment? “Spooky Action At A Distance”. Belle’s Theorem.
Yep. I’m not a physicist but it strikes me as very peculiar indeed. It appears to be repeatable but not entirely explicable.
It is without a doubt very peculiar.
“Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs (or groups) of particles are generated or interact in ways such that the quantum state of each member must subsequently be described relative to the other.
Quantum entanglement is a product of quantum superposition. However, the state of each member is indefinite in terms of physical properties such as position,[1] momentum, spin, polarization, etc. in a manner distinct from the intrinsic uncertainty of quantum superposition. When a measurement is made on one member of an entangled pair and the outcome is thus known (e.g., clockwise spin), the other member of the pair is at any subsequent time[2] always found (when measured) to have taken the appropriately correlated value (e.g., counterclockwise spin).
There is thus a correlation between the results of measurements performed on entangled pairs, and this correlation is observed even though the entangled pair may be separated by arbitrarily large distances.[3]
Repeated experiments have verified that this works even when the measurements are performed more quickly than light could travel between the sites of measurement: there is no lightspeed or slower influence that can pass between the entangled particles.[4]
Recent experiments have measured entangled particles within less than one part in 10,000 of the light travel time between them;[5] according to the formalism of quantum theory, the effect of measurement happens instantly.[6][7]
This behavior is consistent with quantum theory, and has been demonstrated experimentally with photons, electrons, molecules the size of buckyballs,[8][9] and even small diamonds.[10][11] It is an area of extremely active research by the physics community. However, there is some heated debate[12] about whether a possible classical underlying mechanism could explain entanglement. The difference in opinion derives from espousal of various interpretations of quantum mechanics.
Research into quantum entanglement was initiated by a 1935 paper by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen describing the EPR paradox[13] and several papers by Erwin Schrödinger shortly thereafter.[14][15] Although these first studies focused on the counterintuitive properties of entanglement, with the aim of criticizing quantum mechanics, eventually entanglement was verified experimentally,[16] and recognized as a valid, fundamental feature of quantum mechanics. The focus of the research has now changed to its utilization as a resource for communication and computation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement
EPR paradox
The EPR paradox is an early and influential critique leveled against quantum mechanics. Albert Einstein and his colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen (known collectively as EPR) designed a thought experiment intended to reveal what they believed to be inadequacies of quantum mechanics. To that end, they hypothesized a consequence of quantum mechanics that its supporters had not noticed but looked unreasonable at the time.
According to quantum mechanics, under some conditions, a pair of quantum systems may be described by a single wave function, which encodes the probabilities of the outcomes of experiments that may be performed on the two systems, whether jointly or individually. At the time the EPR article discussed below was written, it was known from experiments that the outcome of an experiment sometimes cannot be uniquely predicted. An example of such indeterminacy can be seen when a beam of light is incident on a half-silvered mirror. One half of the beam will reflect, the other will pass. If the intensity of the beam is reduced to so that only one photon is in transit at any time, whether that photon will reflect or transmit cannot be predicted quantum mechanically.
The routine explanation of this effect was, at that time, provided by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Physical quantities come in pairs which are called conjugate quantities. Examples of such conjugate pairs are position and momentum of a particle and components of spin measured around different axes. When one quantity was measured, and became determined, the conjugated quantity became indeterminate. Heisenberg explained this as a disturbance caused by measurement.
The EPR paper, written in 1935, was intended to illustrate that this explanation is inadequate. It considered two entangled particles, referred to as A and B, and pointed out that measuring a quantity of a particle A will cause the conjugated quantity of particle B to become undetermined, even if there was no contact, no classical disturbance. The basic idea behind was that the quantum states of two particles in a system cannot always be decomposed from the joint state of the two. An example is: |\Phi^+\rangle=\frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}\left(|00\rangle+|11\rangle\right)
Heisenberg’s principle was an attempt to provide a classical explanation of a quantum effect sometimes called non-locality. According to EPR there were two possible explanations. Either there was some interaction between the particles, even though they were separated, or the information about the outcome of all possible measurements was already present in both particles.
The EPR authors preferred the second explanation according to which that information was encoded in some ‘hidden parameters’. The first explanation, that an effect propagated instantly, across a distance, is in conflict with the theory of relativity. They then concluded that quantum mechanics was incomplete since, in its formalism, there was no room for such hidden parameters.
Violations of the conclusions of Bell’s theorem are generally understood to have demonstrated that hypotheses of Bell’s theorem, also assumed by Einstein Poldolsky and Rosen, do not apply in our world. Most physicists who have examined the matter concur that experiments, such as those of Alain Aspect and his group, have confirmed that physical probabilities, as predicted by quantum theory, do show the phenomena of Bell-inequality violations that are considered to invalidate EPR’s preferred “local hidden-variables” type of explanation for the correlations to which EPR first drew attention.[1][2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox
“There are some things so serious you have to laugh at them.” - Niels Bohr
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.