Tobes' "Spooky action at a distance quantum weirdness headbands" got me thinking. Some of you guys seem (I say seem) to know something about this.
Maybe you can help me.
As I understand it "action at a distance" is a phenomenon predicted by quantum mechanics and verified by experiment. It involves a pair of particles (say photons) produced by the same event (say a proton clobbers a neutron) and fly apart at light speed. They are said to be "entangled particles". If one of the photons is interacted with its "probability wave collapses" and it declares itself as a particle with a few fundamental properties any one of which (and only one) can be measured. At the same instant it's entangled pair particle will experience a similar "probability wave collapse" and declare itself in a complementary condition to its pair. The spooky thing about it (Albert Einstein's word) is that there is no way for one particle to communicate with the other. Relativity says instantaneous communication over any distance is impossible.
However Relativity also tells us that as anything approaches the speed of light it's time slows and at the speed of light time stands still. A implication of this is that photons do not experience the passage of time. if you hold your hand out and catch a photon from the sun every geek knows that that photon has taken eight and a quarter minutes to get here so the photon is eight and a quarter minutes old. To the photon however no time has passed. It experiences its whole life path as an instant. Its beginning is the same moment as its end. If you could ask a photon what it is it would not say it was a point it would say it was a line, or rather in fact I think it would experience space as two dimensional and it would say it was a point in a two dimensional picture that includes all space. The point is that the photon IS a point smeared along its life path.
So those two entangled particles in their (equally valid) view of the situation are in fact still touching when their probability wave collapses so communication IS possible.
What's wrong with that notion? Don't all speak at once.
Rabbits, cows and horses all eat grass but they have different poop. So if you can't tell me why that is so, you don't know poop and I am not going to be bothered discussing quantum physics with you.
So how does a photon view life if it's going through a prism as part of its journey?
That would make it slow down slightly wouldn't it?
And if it has slowed down then time would start to flow?
It's all to hard for me, quantum stuff just makes me think that the physics department might have raided the chemistry department's 'top shelf'.
We need a geek subforum - reading this stuff makes my (admittedly small) brain hurt! [}:)]
Are you referring to the infamous double slit experiment?
Here is a video which describes it beautifully.
No its not the famous double slit weirdness but that is a truly excellent illustration of it.
There seems to be a bunch of vids on you tube on the topic of quantum mechanics. I just watched an interesting snippet about quantum entanglement where the bloke proposed a theory that was not unlike what I was thinking. This arvo it occured to me that adding another dimension may explain it. As I proposed before, if the 2 entangled particles are really the same particle in their inertial frame but seen as 2 in my inertial frame then you need another dimension to account for the difference.
We have 3 dimensions of space and one of time and an additional dimension that qualifies the difference between all different inertial frames to eliminate paradoxes. I guess Lorentz transforms might usefully quantify it but I dont know.
The bloke on the vid proposed a similar thing but coming from another way. He proposed that the 2 entangled particles were really one hyper particle that manifests as 2 in 3 dimensional space. That's pretty much the same thing. It implies of course that everything is comprised of 3d manifestations of hyper particles. In other words another dimension is required to describe it.... curious. I wont let the fact that he goes on to implicate his theory with reincarnation put me off.
There might be some physicists who would like to know the answer too.
I think the famous phrase "If you think you understand quantum physics, then you don't understand quantum physics" applies, because it's all very unintuitive and weird.
Lawrence Krauss has given some accessible and interesting talks on cosmology which includes some quantum weirdness, my favourite is here
Ah poetry. That's so romantic. Better than Joni Mitchell.
That was entertaining. What a great talker. I'll have to watch that again. Then I'll have to dig up some more Lawrence Krauss.
Thanks Trant. You made my day.
Relativity doesn't apply to quantum mechanics. I guess the easiest way for you to understand quantum entanglement is that it is basically the same object viewed from different locations.
There are scientist developing quantum communication devices... this would allow real time communication with our robotic explorers.
I suggest you consult Wikipedia.
then there's the whole time speeding up thing that the fringe quantum is talking about, as we move into a space which might be classed or seen as somewhat more enegetic A.T.M, but i guess for all youse with such a great handle on all things set in mainstream concrete, it would just be laughed off as conspiracy.
What are the possible explanations for the instantaneous communication?
1) Something is travelling faster than light.
2) Space-time is warped ...for the two particles.
3) Extra dimensions (string theory)
4) ???
I'm always amazed that the objects being studied are being studied by something made up of the objects, i.e. us. That is spooky.
The whole speed of light/time thing I thought I got, but the explanation I had was the "spaceship accelerating, message from front of ship to back at one second interval but taking less than a second between intervals therefore time is faster on sending clock because can't travel faster than light" analogy...
... but i hijack your thread. Another time.
