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i remember reading somewhere that you can separate electrons from an atom, or something, and move it away, and they continue to spin at the same rate and direction.
if this is true, couldn't it be used for communication over very long distances? perhaps interstellar?
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Originally Posted by crystalblue
I think this is QM
i remember reading somewhere that you can separate electrons from an atom, or something, and move it away, and they continue to spin at the same rate and direction.
if this is true, couldn't it be used for communication over very long distances? perhaps interstellar?
^^ interesting read. I dread to conjure up my courses in PChem ha I would think that there would still be an issue of "stabilizing" but who knows this was amost 4 years ago-no telling how far they have come with this
Errrr.... I don't want to assert this as the ultimate truth but merely as how I understand it. If someone finds an error please correct me as I am certainly not claiming to be an expert on this. I've read a few books and read some of the papers but other than that I'm more or less a novice.
The way I understand it is this:
If I roll a bowling ball down an alley headed towards a bunch of pins I can calculate based on the spin, speed, and position of the bowling ball where it should end up. The forces of Newtonian mechanics and other mathematical formulas provide for this. Similarly, if I am on Lane 1 of the bowling alley rolling the ball and another guy is on Lane 32 of the bowling alley simultaneously rolling a similar ball down a similar alley we can also calculate where the bowling ball will end up. But here's what makes quantum physics so mind boggling.
Let's take our example of the bowling ball and minimize it down to the atomic level. Imagine that I take two electrons and I fire them down opposite lanes (no matter what distance they are from one another) and they are to each pass through a detector. To quantify this scale, think of the pins that a bowling ball strikes as a detector. It's the point at which we would observe an action. Now, in the article you presented they talked about the "spin". When we have two entangled particles (two electrons from the same atom - usually ceasium if I'm not mistaken) they each have their own spin characteristics such as "spin up" and "spin down". If we were to split the electrons from an atom, fire them down a tube and regardless of the distance, the second that we observe one electron, the other electron seems to take on opposite "spin" characteristics as well. So, if we go to Lane 1 and observe a "spin up" electron, the electron on the other Lane would go to "spin down" simultaneously. In other words, what we do over here affects the outcome of over there!!
Let's expand that back to our bowling ball correlation again. Imagine that I roll that ball down Lane 1 and you roll that ball down Lane 32 in the same fashion. Now, if we are to examine the ball on Lane 1 as it passes through our detector, the ball on Lane 32 will automatically take on a different spin characteristic and that's REGARDLESS of distance.
If you would like to read more I suggest Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos and this Wikipedia article does a fairly good job as well.
Again, if someone finds an error in what I wrote I would like to ask that you please correct me as I do not want to be a source of disinformation. This is merely the "nutshell" theory that I understand it as and I'd be welcome to any other insight as well.
The real fun will come when scientists are able to definitively determine if the entangled bits react immediately over distance, or have the standard light-speed delay. If there is a delay, then the entangling factor is most likely a force. Ho-hum.
If, however, there is NO delay or decay over extreme distance, then the entangling factor likely involves a force in different dimension than the four commonly recognized ones. That could lead to a lot of new technology, such as real-time remote robotic exploration of space, the elimination of communications satellites, telescopes with unheard of resolution, and a host of other devices.
The real fun will come when scientists are able to definitively determine if the entangled bits react immediately over distance, or have the standard light-speed delay. If there is a delay, then the entangling factor is most likely a force. Ho-hum.
If, however, there is NO delay or decay over extreme distance, then the entangling factor likely involves a force in different dimension than the four commonly recognized ones. That could lead to a lot of new technology, such as real-time remote robotic exploration of space, the elimination of communications satellites, telescopes with unheard of resolution, and a host of other devices.
thats kinda the impression i got, which is what got me to wondering...
The real fun will come when scientists are able to definitively determine if the entangled bits react immediately over distance, or have the standard light-speed delay.
I thought the whole conundrum was due to the fact that there is by definition no delay, it is "spooky instantaneous action at a distance" a la Bell's Theorem.
If we are in a 4-dimensional spacetime embedded in a higher-dimensional reality, it would neatly explain it, as you said. I read a book (I forget which one) that gave a nice analogy: Two video cameras are pointed from different angles at a fish in a tank, and you, the observer in the next room, cannot see the actual fish, you can see only the real-time videos on two different monitors. Whenever the fish does something one one screen, the "other fish" instantaneously does a correlated action. But since you only have access to the separated camera views, you can't see that it's the same blasted fish!
So..if we could just fly out of our spacetime a la "Flatland" into the next higher dimension, we could see all those entanglements right in front of us.
I thought the whole conundrum was due to the fact that there is by definition no delay, it is "spooky instantaneous action at a distance" a la Bell's Theorem.
If we are in a 4-dimensional spacetime embedded in a higher-dimensional reality, it would neatly explain it, as you said. I read a book (I forget which one) that gave a nice analogy: Two video cameras are pointed from different angles at a fish in a tank, and you, the observer in the next room, cannot see the actual fish, you can see only the real-time videos on two different monitors. Whenever the fish does something one one screen, the "other fish" instantaneously does a correlated action. But since you only have access to the separated camera views, you can't see that it's the same blasted fish!
So..if we could just fly out of our spacetime a la "Flatland" into the next higher dimension, we could see all those entanglements right in front of us.
This is a great analogy. That's a wonderful way of putting it. I do know that Einstein seemed to be avidly against this. He, along with Polosky (and Rosenthal??) did not agree that there was an instantaneous interaction/reaction involved but all experimental evidence seems to point to the fact that the EPR papers were incorrect.
For me, this is becoming one of the most exciting realms of science I have ever explored and I hope to learn more about it. There are certainly parts of it that I have not quite grasped yet but overall it just seems to hold the potential for so much.
This is a great analogy. That's a wonderful way of putting it. I do know that Einstein seemed to be avidly against this. He, along with Polosky (and Rosenthal??) did not agree that there was an instantaneous interaction/reaction involved but all experimental evidence seems to point to the fact that the EPR papers were incorrect.
For me, this is becoming one of the most exciting realms of science I have ever explored and I hope to learn more about it. There are certainly parts of it that I have not quite grasped yet but overall it just seems to hold the potential for so much.
I'll see if I can locate the book where I read that analogy. And we shouldn't feel bad for not quite grasping quantum theory, because if Feynman said nobody understood it, what, us worry?
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