Science
In reply to the discussion: Quantum Entanglement, Dark Counts, Coincidence Detection [View all]mindwalker_i
(4,407 posts)Why do you think it won't work? Note that I'm not being defensive, I want to understand what you are thinking.
There are two possibilities that I can come up with: if it's possible to use entanglement for communication, it opens up time travel due to relativity - In some frame of reference, effect will precede cause. More directly, delaying the choice to measure momentum affects events in the past. That's crazy! It open up the possibility of paradoxes and all manner of unpleasantness. The second possibility is to find flaws in my logic or assumptions. I can't think of any, but that doesn't mean there aren't flaws.
In the first case, this is crazy. Blame Dr. Cramer, he thought it up. I'm just the idiot following him I don't necessarily think that, because this would allow paradoxes and other stuff, it's necessarilty wrong. If the universe allows this to happen, has it already? Have paradoxes been created? Possibly, but if so, the effects haven't been to severe. Also, it seems like it would be very unlikely for this to occur naturally, and it would be even more unlikely if it did happen, for a paradox created in this way to control something macroscopic. Detecting whether sets of particles or photons are in superposition doesn't happen often by chance. Having that make a noticable change to the universe at large isn't that likel either.
As for my logic, there's a lot of room for error there. My understanding of QM and entanglement is mostly qualitative, but fortunately Cramer is a real phycists with real credentials (one of my majors was physics, the other two were computer engineering and electrical engineering, which is what I make a living in), so I can kind of trust him. Assuming that the logic is correct given what we know about QM and entanglement, if this experiment doesn't work, it will show us where our understanding is wrong. In itself, that would be very helpful!