With my absolutely vast knowledge of quantum physics (i.e. almost none), I believe that using quantum entanglement to argue for paranormal abilities isn't really applicable...the effects of the entanglement are only applicable at the quantum level. A comment by "Pat" in the article argued it fairly well; there's no information travelling "faster than light" in the classic sense, it's the act of observation that forces the particles to make entangled "choices". Anyway, even typing out that sentence made my head hurt. Interesting stuff isn't it? Didn't Greg Bear use quantum entanglement for Moving Mars? (transforming atoms at a distance through altering their informational properties...I can't remember, it's ages since I've read it).

*Edit* oh, and I just found this phrase in wikipedia.

"But quantum entanglement does not enable the transmission of classical information faster than the speed of light in quantum mechanics..." I guess the experiment showed the practical application of the theory of quantum entanglement rather than any example of "faster than light" travel.

Cheers,

Nick

I don't puport to be an expert in physics by any means - I never even took physics in school. However, I have read several physics books (Hawkins, Einstein, etc.) and I've also stayed in a Holiday Inn Express. I'm pretty good on theory and absolutely suck at the math.

The way I understand it, matter at the atomic level (elements and objects made of formed and combined atoms) are bound by Einstein's General Relativity and restricted to the speed of light. However, subatomic particles abide by quatum theory (string theory being the most popular application) and are not necessarily bound by this universal speed limit.

That said, even though I don't think this gives cause to believe in psychic activity, it should be possible to use this quantum entanglement principle to create a binary code of reaction and nonreaction between multiple quantum particles and create a faster than light communication system. It would be very expensive, but what does NASA do that isn't?

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(I had to look it up - haven't used it since Boyscouts)

So when are we going to build “Earth’s first starship?

I will do it but I need about 400 billion USD to do it.

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Don't ask me to explain it, but apparently there's a quantum mechanism at the most microscopical level where if you make changes to one quark, its "twin" light-years away will be affected seemingly simultaneously, implying a link between them that, obviously, moves faster than light.

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The issue here is a little strange, so let me throw out a new explanation I've just dreamed up and hope to be corrected by people who know better.

Think of a married couple. Their names are Chris and Pat, and the fact that they're married means that they're entangled in a particular way: I'm Catholic, so it means they're one man and one woman (for life!). You may know things about them -- hair color, for instance -- but you deliberately don't figure out which one is female and which one is male.

Earth puts Pat on a starship and shoots him/her far across the galaxy. Earth still doesn't know anything about Chris's gender. These are the particles in the experiment. (Now I've got "Particle Man" by They Might Be Giants running through my head...)

When Pat gets to the galactic outpost he/she scoots as quickly as possible to the Women's room, so the outpost detects that Pat is a woman. That means that the outpost also knows that Chris is a man. They don't have to send any signals back to Earth to know that, and Chris is a man whether Earth knows it or not. If they send a message back to Earth saying, "Guess what? Chris is a man!" and then the Earthlings check, then they'll say "You're right!" But nobody caused Pat to be a woman, and there's been no faster-than-light travel or signaling involved.

Now let's back up for a moment and instead say that the Earthlings and the Outposters arranged to check both people's genders at a predetermined time. It doesn't really matter what time, as long as Earth couldn't receive a radio message with the results of the Outpost's measurements before they checked Chris's gender (and vice versa, of course). They measure Chris's gender and find out she's a woman. (This time, anyway.) Naturally, when they later get the radio signal (traveling at the speed of light) from the Outpost, it will turn out that Pat is a man -- not because there's been some mysterious faster-than-light signal that "flipped" him to be a man, but because those are the properties of the people involved: if one is a man, the other is a woman. So again, nothing shocking.

Even though these are ordinary-seeming results, they lead to extraordinary questions. This experiment leads me to wonder about whether the randomness we see in quantum mechanics is epistemic or ontological. (Epistemology has to do with what we know and how we know it. Ontology has to do with what exists, regardless of whether we know it or not.)

If quantum randomness is epistemic, that means that things are how they are but we don't know how they are. Pat and Chris have their genders, and you just don't know what they are. That's the strong intuitive result I get from this experiment: quantum randomness is epistemic.

If it's ontological, that means that the randomness has nothing to do with what you know. It's built into the fabric of the universe. Chris and Pat are both literally and simultaneously half-female and half-male, and the each entangled photons has both spins, even though that's "impossible" -- until they're measured. The idea of ontological randomness is very weird, but there are strong arguments in its favor based on specific experiments.

People's belief that quantum randomness is ontological leads them to talk about faster-than-light signals. Since Pat only "becomes" fully male when you measure him/her, the other entangled person or particle must "become" fully female "at the same time." But what does "at the same time" mean? General Relativity says that the universe has no preferred frame of reference, so there is no "same time" that all measurements occur in. Then again, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are incompatible -- they both predict different ontologies (i.e., they have totally different models for what exists: space-time curvature explains gravity in GR, whereas gravitons do in QM, for instance), so maybe this experiment shows another break between the two. Maybe this experiment proves that Quantum Mechanics must have a preferred frame of reference.

Then again, I could be showing my utter ignorance merely by saying such a thing. I don't know, and it doesn't really matter. The interesting thing to note is that this topic reaches to the very intersection of science and philosophy. You can't do one without the other anyway, and nowhere is that clearer than here.

According to Bell's Theorem and its experimental application performed since the 80's, Einstein was wrong. There are no hidden variables.

From what I understand, the quantum waveform itself never exceeds the speed of light. Of course, I really don't know what I'm talking about...

Since Bell's Theorem is hard to understand, the central mystery can be summed up with the two-hole experiement. When both holes in the parition are opened, an interference pattern develops, showing that quanta can behave as waves. Electrons, protons atoms as well can develop the interference pattern.

What makes it spooky, is that this interference pattern develops even when quanta(say electrons) are released one by one over a period of time. If there's only one electron there at a time, what's it interfering with?

From a particle viewpoint, this makes no sense. But when one realizes these waveforms are waves of probablity, then one can see how the uncertainty principle comes into play, as well entanglement, and the EPR paradox of 'Chris and Pat'.

Thus, looking at the two-hole experiement, it's not that we don't have enough information, it's that on a quantum level, the nature of the universe is probabilistic, rather than the deterministic billard ball view of classical physics.

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If that were true it would be an incredible development

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Found an article related to what I was referring to. Apparently it's nothing new:

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/080813-spooky-limit.html

Of course, take the source into account here. I'll try to find a more reputable link.

EDIT: In any case, reading back on your comments, this thread just got way over my head.

This discussion has forced me to research this further.
BEWARE - I'm about to tread on dangerous ground:

The way I understand this is that oliverhouse is correct up to a certain point. It's more like we have two people of indeterminate gender who hang around each other for while. Later, one flys off to Mars and the other one stays on Earth. The one on Mars goes to a doctor and decides to get a CAT-scan to see what gender he/she really is. When the scan is done, it suddenly loses it female traits and it is determined that it is a he. At that same moment, the person on Earth loses its male features and suddenly realizes its a she. Maybe they had already become male and female respectively and didn't know it. Maybe one affected the other instantaneously 8 light-minutes away. No one is sure.

Curiously, a primitive version of what I suggested earlier already exists:

http://www.laserfocusworld.com/display_article/243219/12/ARCHI/none/Feat/Photonics-Frontiers:-Entangled-photons:-%E2%80%98spooky-action%E2%80%99-works-at-a-distanc

My husband and I were clicking through all of these sites, sponging up the coolness of it. I told him there was a guy on here who said that faster than light speed was possible, to which he said IMPOSSIBLE.

I have a new reply for those who do not like to see the inconstant side of the world. For people like my husband: "Don't be THAT guy. Don't be the one who said Bigfoot doesn't exist. Because, if it turns out you are wrong... look what they are gonna have working for them on their side when it all comes out in the wash."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

Notice the section "When observed emission by emission". You can't begin to wrap your head around the "FTL" entanglement issue, until you wrap your head around this.

This is the heart of the mystery: wave/particle duality. Before attempting to understand entanglement and the EPR paradox or the Uncertainy principle, this provides the foundation for those understandings.

This is one of the universe's central mysteries. This phenomena exists, but no human can claim to understand it. The Copenhagen crew settled on exploring the What Is, but not the Why or How.

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BTW, it's obvious that Bigfoot stuff is a hoax...I'm not sure how that qualifies as news.

I think the most science can say about FTL is that, if it's possible, we don't know how to do it.

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[quote] is opening tag and the closing tag is [/quote] All typing between the opening tag and the ending tag will be set off as quoted matter.

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I should note that just typing the brackets around the quote will automatically format the block quote upon posting. In order to display the actual tags syntax the character entities must be typed. In the case of square brackets the entity codes are, for the left bracket [ and ] for the right bracket. The entity code for those ampersands had to be typed to keep the syntax from converting to brackets, which is &

Wolfe_boy's comment that my explanation sounds a lot like Schrodinger's cat is spot on -- but I'm dealing with a different instantiation of the same phenomenon.

Philocinemas's comment is also correct, but it leads to the question of what it means for two events to occur "at the same time". Since Einstein's time, the answer's simply not clear, if there's an answer at all. That's because General Relativity showed that there are no preferred four-dimensional frames of reference, and therefore no universal timeframe of reference. If there's no master clock, whose clock determines what happens "at the same time"?

Extrinsic showed how to use character references to, say, insert [square quotes] around blocks of text. It's also worth noting that most of the time you can just click the "edit" button (with the pencil and paper) on a post to see what bbcode is used to format a particular post. Ironically, of course, this does *not* preserve the entities that Extrinsic used.

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think Chris Owens is correct. Bell's Theorem is one of the things that "proves" that quantum randomness is ontological (things are random by nature) rather than epistemic (there are hidden variables).

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What is random really? I think we poory substitute it for unpredictability. ie: a coin toss is "Random" because we can't predict if it will be heads or tails, but the reason for that is it is impossible to collect all the information about it and do a kinematic equation (or something) fast enough to predict it. It is therefore "random" because it has a tendency to flip each way roughly an equal amount of time.

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What is random really? I think we poory substitute it for unpredictability. ie: a coin toss is "Random" because we can't predict if it will be heads or tails, but the reason for that is it is impossible to collect all the information about it and do a kinematic equation (or something) fast enough to predict it. It is therefore "random" because it has a tendency to flip each way roughly an equal amount of time.

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But what is actual randomness? Behavior that behaves any number of ways without reason or cause of any kind? Nonsense behavior?

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Note that there's no reason you can't have both, and we're pretty sure that the universe does have both. The randomness of roulette is epistemic; the randomness of Johnson noise, because it's based on the movement of thermally excited electrons, is probably ontological.

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Random would imply that change can occur with no cause at all. And that reeks of nonsense.

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You're in good company, too, since much of Enlightenment thought all the way through Einstein believed that the universe was deterministic in its entirety (hence Einstein's comment that "God does not play dice with the universe"). But if you think about it, that's just a prejudice that we have, and the prejudice may well be wrong. Why "must" the universe behave deterministically? Isn't the existence of the universe a big and strange enough thing that we shouldn't expect it to bow to the rules imposed by some meat-based logic processors of its own making?

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What about the whole principle that change occurs only when an opposing force is applied? Something to cause the change.

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Of course, the shadow arrives at the object after the expected delay, but the shadow's movement across the distant object is FTL. Unfortunately, the shadow can not carry information.

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Of course, the shadow arrives at the object after the expected delay, but the shadow's movement across the distant object is FTL. Unfortunately, the shadow can not carry information.

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EDIT: I should really read whole posts before I hit REPLY.