Beam me up!

Maybe telepathy exists after all...

As a physics major, my professors spoke to me about "Photon/Quantum entanglement" and they said you wont be able to actually send "information" this way as you have no control in what you are sending, all you will be able to tell is the state the other particle/photon was in but you cant tell it what state to be in. Now unless two of my physics professors were mistaken, this article is very misleading when they talk about sending information.

[Edit] One very interesting aspect of quantum entanglement is quantum encryption in which its suppose to provide an unbreakable means of secure communication between two devices, in which if anyone tries to listen in the communication automatically becomes distorted and unreadable for the "hacker", I dont quite understand the logistics behind it 100% but It sounded interesting when I read about it.

Quote:

Original post by The_Neverending_Loop As a physics major, my professors spoke to me about "Photon/Quantum entanglement" and they said you wont be able to actually send "information" this way as you have no control in what you are sending, all you will be able to tell is the state the other particle/photon was in but you cant tell it what state to be in. Now unless two of my physics professors were mistaken, this article is very misleading when they talk about sending information.

Yeah that was my understanding after listening to a presentation on it. This leads me to the idea of "what is the big deal then if it can't be used for anything?". I'd need to see someone break it down in much more detail on why this 10 mile thing is important.

I've been slacking. Spooky Vision (4/27/2009) Can you see without looking? ... "more photons in some places than there should have been and fewer in others." In some places the number of photons was actually less than zero. A stunning result using weak measurement. Demonstrates that nature is indeed real when unobserved. Confirms metaphysical realism. Metaphysical realism is the hypothesis that the universe is presumed real independently of human observers.

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Success teleporting information between photons over a free space distance of nearly ten miles ~ 15 km - "entanglement ensures that changing the state of one causes the other to change as well, allowing the teleportation of quantum information" ... "They found that the distant photon was still able to respond to changes in state of the photon they held onto even at this unprecedented distance." ... "able to maintain the fidelity of the long-distance teleportation at 89 percent" that is "decent enough for information" but not for matter.

[Edited by - LessBread on January 7, 2011 2:53:28 AM]

As far as I remember Brian Greene showed in his book The Frabric Of The Cosmos that it's possible to deduce the original spin of a particle after setting it (it is possible to qualitatively set it on the sending end). This means sending information should be possible. Of course, the chapters on quantum entanglement and wavefunction persistence (the beam splitter experiement - see below), which I found quite possibly the most shocking of all the information that he throws at you, were not the easiest read out there. See here here for a discussion on beam-split quantum entangement and here for a discussion of the beam splitter experiment itself.

In short, the beam-splitter experiment verifies that if you modify a photon with property X to have property Y at spacetime A and fire it off, unhindered, over an undetermined amount of time (could be billions of years), and then measure it at spacetime B, it will yield property Y (as implied, the measuring bit is indirect due to the the quantum measurement problem), UNLESS... unless you remove the mechanism using which you modified its original state at A, in which case the photon will revert to its original state when measured at B. This wavefunction response is immediate through time and space, meaning that if the photon was en route in its modified state Y for a billion years and you were to remove the mechanism with which you changed its original properties to Y just a fraction of a second before it was measured at B, the photon would be "aware" of the change and revert to its original state X when actually measured at B.

Read the book - among other things, it actually made me think of the last episode of Star Trek TNG (involving "anti-time") as more than just a silly (yet well-told!) thought experiment.

I am literally blown away.