Does quantum entanglement explain prescience?

[earthman]

The well publicized experiment the other day that involved the "teleportation" of a data-encoded laser beam seems to provide further evidence of links between particles that are unaffected by time and distance. Is this the long awaited explanation for phenomena such as prescience, deja vu, spectral visitations, etc? Or just another excuse to persevere with superstition?

more info here link (warning: dense)

and here link

 

[element]

I dunno about those "phenomena" you speak of or what the explanations are but I have a question on a related matter.

2 years ago an experiment at Princeton was done in which light travels faster than the normal speed of light in a vacuum.

link to the experiment at Princeton

Yet they said no information could be sent into the past. I have a problem with this. Information can be sent in light can it not? I mean what do we do with fiber optics other than send info using light?

And in a most basic form of communication you can send morse code by flashing the light on and off. So if photons do not travel through time at all at the speed of light, and exceeding the speed of light causes light to travel back in time, then why can info not be sent faster than the speed of light and back in time?

 

[Shalmanese]

There is a perfectly valid reason why realtivity is not borken but I would not have a clue what it is. I havent been following that particular experiment particularly closely. As for the whole quantum entanglement thing, no Information is ever sent with the beam. Again, there is a good explaination for it but I wouldnt be able to explain it all that well. Scientific American did an article maybe 1 - 2 years back explaining it all which I suggest you read. Only the quantum states are shared between the two photons, to read the data, you still have to collapse the waveform with all the quantum mumbo jumbo that entails.

 

[earthman]

I was under the distinct impression that the photon pairs were utterly identical in property, and that the state of one was identical to the other irrespective of distance. That being the case, if they can be created at varying frequencies, you could encode data with this process, and I believe that is what was just done.
As to the other question, it is not neccesary to exceed C to "go back" in time, some particles seem to do this randomly in a process known as quantum tunneling, where they seem to take a path through a higher order dimension not apparent to us and emerge at a different time and place. My understanding is that this is a rare and random event. As for exceeding the speed of light, I don't know...if something was exceeding the speed of light, how would you see it to know?

 

[element]

...if something was exceeding the speed of light, how would you see it to know?

You would see it appear at the exit before it finished entering the entrance into the device. We as humans can see at the speed of light so we know when it is exceeded. Read the link I posted.

You could do that with sound, just listen for which sound is heard first, without cheating using sight (a faster signal).

Basically the cesium atoms had enough information at the leading edge of the wave that entered the chamber to reproduce a likeness of the photons at the exit. Note this is not the same light, it differs slightly, it is essentially created by the cesium atoms. Again all this is explained in the article.

 

[glugglug]

Why can't you do this?:

1) Build cesium vapor based laser pulse accelerator as described in the Princeton experiment cited above(http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/space/07/20/speed.of.light.ap/)

2) Determine exactly how much earlier a message/pulse is received than it is sent through the cesium.

3) Set up a buffer for storing messages received from the future (by sending contents of the buffer through the cesium at that future time).

4) Schedule dates for playback/reception start of messages from the future.

5) Start receiving the message. If the time it goes back (due to limited size of the vapor chamber) is only say a microsecond, that means that at least once a microsecond we play the message back (to ensure the reception which already occured).


Example:

Time offset | Action
0.0000000 | Receive "blah" from transmission E
0.0000007 | Receive "blah" from transmission D
0.0000010 | Send "blah" (transmission E)
0.0000014 | Receive "blah" from transmission C
0.0000017 | Send "blah" (transmission D)
0.0000021 | Receive "blah" from transmission B
0.0000024 | Send "blah" (transmission C)
0.0000028 | Receive "blah" from transmission A
0.0000031 | Send "blah" (transmission B)
0.0000038 | Send "blah" (transmission A)

Obviously for practical applications since we're talking about moving data back only a small fraction of a second each iteration, there would be many more than 5 resends, but this is just to illustrate the idea. (with infinite speed if the cesium chamber was a meter across that would be only 3.33ns the message gets sent back through time each iteration)

There's clearly an issue of not being able to send a whole lot of data if it has to be repeated every few ns at best (meaning the transmission must fit in a few ns), but I don't see why it can't be used to transmit data in priniciple.

 

[element]

The problem is Special Relativity states that no information can ever be sent back in time. And SR has yet to be broken or ratified. Also the article states that no information can be sent using this method.

My question is why not? Why can't info be sent in the form of light pulses?

 

[earthman]

Having read this article again I don't see how relativity is broken or any proof the the speed of light was exceeded. Whether the pulse left the chamber before it finished entering is entirely dependent on the length of the pulse and the size of the chamber, so that part of it is meaningless. As was pointed out, there is no way to prove its the same light leaving, especially since there is an intensity change. I think this apparent "acceleration" is a quantum artifact: the entering pulse triggers a wavefront that leaps across a quantum barrier to a point where duplicate photons emerge and give the illusion of great speed. This is a similar effect to what I mentioned earlier, but it doesn't prove that the speed of light is not absolute in normal space, since the photons are not traveling in normal space to produce this effect...they would be tunneling through a higher order dimension, an effect induced by the special properties of the cesium gas and the power and frequency of the laser. Whatever the result, time relativity is not broken either, since the arrow of time is not reversed. For that to happen, the pulse would have to appear before it was created, and that is not happening.

 

[Sohcan]

My question is why not? Why can't info be sent in the form of light pulses?

Despite the popular press' overzealousness with the superluminal light experiments, the results weren't exactly surprising. Superluminal light propogation has been known to exist for quite some time; it was first demonstrated in 1904 by W. Wood, who used sodium vapor chamber. Anamolous dispersion leading to indices of refraction lower than 1 and superluminal light propogation is a regular part of the course material in an optics class. The deal is, though, that anamolous dispersion primarily affects the phase velocity of the light pulse; the group velocity will always be less than c in normally dispersive media. The phase velocity measures the velocity of the individual waveforms, while the group velocity measures the velocity of the wave envelope packet. It is the amplitude modulation of the group wave on which signals are encoded. In some situations of anamolous dispersion, like that of the Princeton experiment, the group velocity may be greater than c, but in that case, the signal propogates at a signal velocity which corresponds to the velocity of the energy transfer and cannot exceed c.

As for the minute differences between group velocity and signal velocity and why information is confined to the signal velocity, you'll have to ask an an EE with experience in EM fields or a physicist with a higher degree...I only have a BS in physics. 🙂 I imagine that the information propogation may be inherintly tied to the Poynting vector, which is proportional to the vector cross-product of the electric and magnetic fields...it describes the power "flow" of the electromagnetic energy, and, IIRC, unaffected by anamolous dispersion.

 

[amok]

GRRR. I spent about 20 minutes typing a long response only to have IE crash on me while I was finishing. So, I'll rehash the basics of the post.

1) Sohcan is right concerning his basic explanation of anamolous dispersion, which is the event behind the "superluminal" crap that the media latched onto regarding that experiment. I contributed to a lengthy post about it at the time in OT. However, he was wrong that a physics PhD would be able to give a better explanation. I'm not THAT kind of physicist 😉. My only EM courses were as an undergrad back in the day 😛.

2) earthman's definition of quantum tunneling is wrong. Quantum tunneling is a generic reference to transmission through a potential barrier where E < U. The much more specific definition of quantum tunneling was in the killed post, and its 4am and I don't feel like writing it all out again.

3) To answer the original question, I don't believe in prescience outside of the limits defined by the UP, deja vu is just a brain hiccup, and I won't discount "spectral beings" for the simple reason that I think it would be cool 😉. Yes, these were more lengthy too, but as I said, its 4am...

 

[PowerMacG5]

Okay, here it goes. A few years ago, they had a thing on TV that showed the successful transportation of a photon from one point to another. According to the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle, you cannot know the exact properties of a particle and its location at the same time. So you ask, "If the Heisenburg Encertainty Principle doesn't allow me to know the properties and the location of something at the same time, how do I transport something?" Well, what you do is create a quantum duplicate of the item you want transported, and then these multiple particles would be quantumly entangled. Now what this means is that whatever is done to one of the particles, happens to the others. This allows us to record the properties of one of them, while getting the location of the other. With both of these items cheched off on our check list, we can proceed to transport. What we do is create a digital representation of the data we collected, destroy all of the original particles, including the quantum duplicates, and then recreate the original particle somewhere else. Simple, isn't it?

And in a most basic form of communication you can send morse code by flashing the light on and off. So if photons do not travel through time at all at the speed of light, and exceeding the speed of light causes light to travel back in time, then why can info not be sent faster than the speed of light and back in time?

element, as you accelerate towards, and move faster than light (in the case of tachyons), you do not move backwards in time. The fundamental idea in the theory of relativity is that space and time are relative. As you move faster and faster, accelerating towards the speed of light, your perception of time slows down. The time outside of, say the ship, is moving faster and faster. You do not move backwards in time, you just move forward in time at an extremely slow rate. The only idea that I've heard, or read, that provides a somewhat possible way of traveling back in time is to use an Einstein-Rosen bridge (wormhole) where the entrance point is stationary, but the exit point is moving at or faster than light. This seems to work because the time on the side of the wormhole that is moving is moving slower than the entrance time. This allows for the time to become distorted, and have it "whip" back on itself.