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To: vannrox
They don't really say in the article, but are they claiming that they have transferred information at a speed greater than the speed of light?

The "spooky entanglement" idea would seem to imply that it might be possible to do so, which brings up a lot of other weird problems.

4 posted on 06/16/2004 1:58:43 PM PDT by B Knotts
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To: B Knotts

Just heard of this yesterday. If it is like quantum entanglement as it applies to photons, it is instantaneous at any distance.


8 posted on 06/16/2004 2:00:15 PM PDT by RightWhale (Destroy the dark; restore the light)
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To: B Knotts
They don't really say in the article, but are they claiming that they have transferred information at a speed greater than the speed of light?

Yes, see my post #5. As I understood the previous experiments, when they split atoms, the resulting particles had the same spin. If they reversed the spin of one particle then the other particle's spin instantly reversed with no time delay due to distance. By using that method, you could communicate instantly with binary code, or if you design a mechanism to respond to the atom's spin, then you could hypothetically control things by remote over any distance.

The particles appear to have some inexplicable communion with one another that operates outside our current conception of the physical universe.

15 posted on 06/16/2004 2:04:11 PM PDT by AntiGuv (When the countdown hits zero - something's gonna happen..)
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To: B Knotts

This is something I've been interested in for a number of years. The "Entanglement" is somewhat explained in the partial post below. I copied from "American Physics news, still dont know how to post links properly, but copy and paste should work.

http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/1997/split/pnu350-1.htm

Story #1), December 10, 1997 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein

QUANTUM TELEPORTATION has been experimentally demonstrated by physicists at the University of Innsbruck (Anton Zeilinger, 011-43-676-305-8608, anton.zeilinger@ uibk.ac.at; Dik Bouwmeester, Dik.Bouwmeester@uibk.ac.at). First proposed in 1993 by Charles Bennett of IBM (914-945-3118) and his colleagues, quantum teleportation allows physicists to take a photon (or any other quantum-scale particle, such as an atom), and transfer its properties (such as its polarization) to another photon--even if the two photons are on opposite sides of the galaxy. Note that this scheme transports the particle's properties to the remote location and not the particle itself.

And as with Star Trek's Captain Kirk, whose body is destroyed at the teleporter and reconstructed at his destination, the state of the original photon must be destroyed to create an exact reconstruction at the other end. In the Innsbruck experiment, the researchers create a pair of photons A and B that are quantum mechanically "entangled": the polarization of each photon is in a fuzzy, undetermined state, yet the two photons have a precisely defined interrelationship. If one photon is later measured to have, say, a horizontal polarization, then the other photon must "collapse" into the complementary state of vertical polarization. In the experiment, one of the entangled photons A arrives at an optical device at the exact time as a "message" photon M whose polarization state is to be teleported. These two photons enter a device where they become indistinguishable, thus effacing our knowledge of M's polarization (the equivalent of destroying Kirk).What the researchers have verified is that by ensuring that M's polarization is complementary to A's, then B's polarization would now have to assume the same value as M's. In other words, although M and B have never been in contact, B has been imprinted with M's polarization value, across the whole galaxy, instantaneously. This does not mean that faster-than-light information transfer has occurred. The people at the sending station must still convey the fact that teleportation had been successful by making a phone call or using some other light-speed or sub-light-speed means of communication. While physicists don't foresee the possibility of teleporting large-scale objects like humans, this scheme will have uses in quantum computing and cryptography. (D. Bouwmeester et al., Nature, 11 Dec 1997; see also image at Physics News Graphics)


57 posted on 06/16/2004 2:30:58 PM PDT by Iron Matron (Those who serve two masters also have two faces)
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To: B Knotts

Yes...
and on pbs last year,
I saw a scientific program where a signal was accelorated from one state of existence to another, and actually arrived there microseconds before it was actually sent...
they used gravity or a super collidor to accelorate the data to a speed in excess of light.

I saw it on TWICE. It was hard to understand, as quantum theory escapes my ability to logically accept. Matter existing at a sub atomic level in more than two places at once.

technically speaking they say anything is possible in the (scary) world of quantum physics... which is where we ar headed... string theory seems to be confirmed by these little experiments.

the recording they tranferred WAS distorted, but was a musical passage recognizable in comparison to the original.. sort of like Bell's voice to his dog... on the first record.


83 posted on 06/16/2004 2:55:52 PM PDT by Robert_Paulson2 (the madridification of our election is now officially underway.)
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