Thursday, August 14, 2008

Quantum entanglement results in faster than light information transfer

This experiment separated two entangled photons by 18 (!) kilometers, then observed the effect of perturbing of one photon's state in the other - instantly!

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080813/full/news.2008.1038.html?s=news_rss

If the results can be independently verified, it would have the significance of Michelson-Morley experiment that gave birth to special theory of relativity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson-Morley_experiment.

This is a BIG deal!

5 comments:

rgrig said...

Perhaps I'm missing something, but the result of the experiment seems entirely predictable. If I remember correctly it's one of the basic "thought experiments" appearing at least in the standard textbook of Feynman written about forty years ago.

On the other hand the results of the MM experiment were *not* expected and hence required new explanations.

Or is it a big deal because it got into news?

Unknown said...

As far as I understand, you can't transfer any amount of information with this. The photons have the same properties, but you can't change one and observe the change in the other.

It's like two coins that always do random flip with the same result, no matter where they are. You can't use that to transfer information, and that always was the theoretical explanation why it doesn't contradict relativity.

Sergey Solyanik said...

Rgrig,
The MM exeriment was predictable in the same way, because it confirmed the curious results of Maxwell's equations - that the speed of light is constant.

Simon, this is the information transfer, you can observe the change in the other photon.

DzembuGaijin said...

As we all know ... "There is no spoon" :-) ( space,time,mater ... e.t.c.) It is all just an Illusion that Matrix is pulling before our eyes. As for Q-physic :-) I think it was predicted a long time ago and I was wondering all these years why on Earth nobody tested this: after all it has a practical applications: instant messaging :-) Q-IM ! I am not sure how to "entangle" all these photons and staff, but it will surely be faster than even iPhone 3G , yo! :-)

rgrig said...

If you can transfer information faster than the speed of light then THAT would be BIG news. But no, you can't. A does a measurement, B does a measurement, and then they communicate thru a classical channel to tell each-other what hey measured. That's the experiment.