Flight

Quantum physics

Tracy R Reed  | 

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.