Alan Stonebraker/American Physical Society Posted on 12/04/2013 8:21:43 AM PST by Red Badger
Quantum entanglement, a perplexing phenomenon of quantum mechanics that Albert Einstein once referred to as “spooky action at a distance,” could be even spookier than Einstein perceived.
Physicists at the University of Washington and Stony Brook University in New York believe the phenomenon might be intrinsically linked with wormholes, hypothetical features of space-time that in popular science fiction can provide a much-faster-than-light shortcut from one part of the universe to another.
But here’s the catch: One couldn’t actually travel, or even communicate, through these wormholes, said Andreas Karch, a UW physics professor.
Quantum entanglement occurs when a pair or a group of particles interact in ways that dictate that each particle’s behavior is relative to the behavior of the others. In a pair of entangled particles, if one particle is observed to have a specific spin, for example, the other particle observed at the same time will have the opposite spin.
The “spooky” part is that, as past research has confirmed, the relationship holds true no matter how far apart the particles are – across the room or across several galaxies. If the behavior of one particle changes, the behavior of both entangled particles changes simultaneously, no matter how far away they are.
Recent research indicated that the characteristics of a wormhole are the same as if two black holes were entangled, then pulled apart. Even if the black holes were on opposite sides of the universe, the wormhole would connect them.
Black holes, which can be as small as a single atom or many times larger than the sun, exist throughout the universe, but their gravitational pull is so strong that not even light can escape from them.
If two black holes were entangled, Karch said, a person outside the opening of one would not be able to see or communicate with someone just outside the opening of the other.
“The way you can communicate with each other is if you jump into your black hole, then the other person must jump into his black hole, and the interior world would be the same,” he said.
The work demonstrates an equivalence between quantum mechanics, which deals with physical phenomena at very tiny scales, and classical geometry – “two different mathematical machineries to go after the same physical process,” Karch said. The result is a tool scientists can use to develop broader understanding of entangled quantum systems.
“We’ve just followed well-established rules people have known for 15 years and asked ourselves, ‘What is the consequence of quantum entanglement?’”
Karch is a co-author of a paper describing the research, published in November in Physical Review Letters. Kristan Jensen of Stony Brook, a coauthor, did the work while at the University of Victoria, Canada. Funding came from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
For more information, contact Karch at 206-543-8591 or akarch@uw.edu
Alan Stonebraker/American Physical Society
This illustration demonstrates a wormhole connecting two black holes.
and vice versa..............
I’ve come at a similar idea for different reasons.
I’m thinking that there could be a different universe entangled with ours, and it is intimately involved with not only this sort of phenomenon, but with what we know as spiritual things.
Among other possibilities that fascinate me, it would make the literal 6-day biblical creation explainable in principle, while retaining the complete validity of observational science as we know it in this mortal coil. The $64,000 question is: what frame of reference? That of the universe we’re observing now, or the other universe?
Some people don’t care for the spiritual, which is acknowledged, but that doesn’t mean there is no spiritual. It just means it gets factored out of those people’s explicit thoughts. If our observational science can’t quantify it, it doesn’t matter, goes the reasoning.
Doesn’t work for communication. Information can’t be transmitted faster than the speed of light, even if you try to do it with entangled particles.
Obviously you are not married...............
Is that what the theoreticians have concluded? Or is the jury still out on it? If someone can entangle two particles then get them even on opposite sides of the globe, some experimentation would tell the story.
Tell-a-woman?
Yes, you are correct. Nothing is traveling FTL, and that includes the information you would like to transmit through the entangled particles. They have tried it, and it doesn’t work. You need to transmit additional bits of information through traditional methods in order to get any usable information out of the entangled particles. Thus, any message you transmit this way still travels at the speed of light.
I suspect the CERN large hydron collider is reponsible. They fooled with forces they didn't understand. Now we're all stuck in bizarro world.
Nonsense. The same would have been asserted regarding on-off binary messaging. When two entangled particles react, as in some change in one instantly changes the other, THAT IS COMMUNICATION.
They’ve already done experiments like that (though not that far apart). You just can’t get usable information out of such a system without transmitting additional information by traditional, slower than light methods. So, the whole message ends up traveling at subluminal speeds.
The problem is modifying the spin of one entangle particle breaks the entanglement (decoheres the system).
The only thing you can do is observe the one, then observe the other. The collapse of the wave-function under observation preserves the anti-correlation of spins (in the usual example of an entangled pair) so the two observers read opposite spins (up-down or down-up), a prior agreement as to how to interpret them (1st observer takes up to be 1, down to be 0, while the 2nd takes down to be 1 and up to be 0) gives them a common bit. Doing this repeatedly gives them a common random bit string which can be used as a one-time binary pad. That’s all it seems you can do with this, whether it’s implemented by Planck-scale wormholes or by real physics not being “physically realistic” (a notion that means looking like classical physics in certain ways).
I guess the explanation of why is beyond me... but it seems that saying all you need for instant water, is the water.
And her Facebook circle..................
The two will dance randomly in sync across the space, but one can’t be tweaked to get something to happen to the other one. OK. Still a challenge to conventional ideas.
Even if they can dance, if they could somehow be made to dance in a non random way, then breaking the dance of one particle would be immediately visible on the other end.
It would offer a way to communicate quickly with deep space craft, if you had enough such pairs between earth and the craft. You would sacrifice a pair for each signal.
No. If two entangled particles are observed, there is a correlation between the pure states observed, which will be random (in the odd sense of quantum randomness in which complex amplitudes behave like probabilities in terms of multiplying, but the likelihood of an event is the magnitude of the amplitude). The correlation between them is not preserved in interactions, since one is then considering a larger quantum system including the particles they are interacting with, and the states that are relevant are the states of the larger system, not just the entangle pair.
“That is a definite form of communication, 1/0. All you would have to do is ‘modulate’ the spin of one particle, then detect that opposite spin in the other particle.”
Here’s what you are missing. A particle is not a light bulb, you cannot just look at it and see if the spin is 1 or 0. Observing a particle changes its state, due to the observer effect. So if your communication depends on determining exactly what state a particle is in, but you cannot observe that particle and then be sure what state it was in before you observed it, you have a useless communication system. Without transmitting additional bits of information through traditional means, this problem cannot be overcome.
It’s not usable communication. You can’t transmit usable information through that means, so how is it communication?
It seems to me that the very act of ‘entanglement’ vs ‘non-entanglement’ would create a communications window. Any time you can have two separate states of something, be it a particle or an iceberg, you have a mode of communication..............
Think of it this way: you could transmit a message using the entangled particles, but it would essentially be “encrypted”, and you can’t transmit the key to decrypt it through the particles. You can only transmit the key to decode the message through traditional, slower than light methods. So, at the end of the day, you might as well just use the slower method for the whole message and save yourself some trouble.
Awesome!
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