Skip to main content

Quantum Entanglement and Communication

Image result for quantum entanglement


There has been a fair amount of speculation about how the phenomenon of quantum entanglement could produce faster-than-light communication. This means, within the context of the physics of relativity, that a message recipient an appropriate distance away (say, on earth's moon base) could learn of events on earth before they happen.

One common example of quantum entanglement involves socks. A physicist named Reinhold Bertlmann (who retired in 2010) was notorious among his colleagues at the University of Vienna for always wearing different colored socks. So if you observed only his left ankle, you could say something with certainty about the sock on the right ankle. If the left sock was pink, the right sock was NOT pink.

In 1981, J.S. Bell actually wrote an article for a serious peer-reviewed journal of physics with that phenomenon in the title, "Bertlmann's Socks and the Nature of Reality."

If we imagine that the pair of socks becomes separated, and the right sock ends up at the moon base, then a moon base occupant will be able to observe that the right sock is pink, and conclude that the left sock (still on earth) is NOT pink.

What is spooky is that for the entangled particles, we're told that this relationship can hold for a NOW (a present moment) that both particles share. So if we can imagine the pink sock changing color, the not-pink sock turns pink. If our moon based observer can change the color of the sock that has reached his base, an observer back on earth can see the corresponding change in the stay-at-home entangled sock. The two people might have decided that the change means something -- "We found that golf ball!" or whatever. Since the change of an entangled particle can be taken as a signal, the phenomenon makes possible faster-than-light communication. QED. Right?

Well ... not so fast. Three years ago a physicist writing for Forbes expressed skepticism. Chad Orzel, associate professor in the physics department at Union College, Schenectady, New York, has this to say:

How it would (or wouldn't) work:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2016/05/04/the-real-reasons-quantum-entanglement-doesnt-allow-faster-than-light-communication/#fc465613a1eb
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more