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I am an information infrastructure architect, Linux enthusiast, a pilot, and a traveller. I work for Copilot Consulting where we make companies more competitive by increasing the performance and reliability of their computer infrastructure. I am interested in all aspects of computing and technology in general, especially Linux. As an avid pilot I can be found somewhere over the skies of the southwestern US most weekends. As a traveller I have been to many interesting places. Check out my photo gallery. Want to get me something cool? Check out my Amazon.com wishlist!
 

Quantum physics

You can't communicate information faster than the speed of light, right?
Someone on slashdot wrote a reply to this article to which I replied which I also post here:
2. Quantum instantaneousness. Two particles can be put into a quantum entanglement, such that their states depend on one another, even though they have not 'picked' a particular state yet. You can separate the two particles (even by a huge distance), collapse one particle into a state and the other particle collapses instantaneously into the corresponding state.

Your explanation is as I have read many times and seems to be good physics to my untrained thinking. If you have a particle and I have the corresponding tangled particle and we are separated by a great distance and you collapse yours mine will collapse also. I don't know what state yours collapsed to and cannot tell anything from what state mine collapsed to. But I *do* know that you collapsed yours. Isn't that information? What if you and I each have a vast number of entangled particles ordered in a line. You start collapsing your particles with a certain timing. Say, for example, morse code. Particle collapses 1 second apart are dits and 2 seconds apart are dahs. Now don't we have a means of transmitting information faster than light? Surely this is not possible, right? But I don't understand why not.

Update: The flaw in the above is that there is no way to tell if my particle has collapsed to any particular state or not because when I measure my particle it will cause it to collapse causing my partners entangled particle to collapse to some state also making it useless for communication. Heisenberg was a real bastard.

Posted by treed on 2007-08-17 09:00

Bell-telephone

Posted by Anonymous User at 2007-10-03 05:04
What you described is called a Bell-telephone. Even it is patented it is proved to be impossible to build.
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