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Re: General musings...
Posted By: Cannibal Harry (vidboi)Date: 11/9/01 7:49 p.m.

In Response To: Re: General musings... (Ben Potter)

: Here's something that's really weird: (from Science 294:1265, "Spooky
: Twins Survive Einsteinian Torture" by Charles Seife)

: It's a nagging truth that all physicists must face: Relativity and quantum
: mechanics don't mix, and when they square off, Einstein loses. Now Swiss
: physicists have brought the two great theories into the arena again. In an
: experiment that turns commonsense notions of causality on their head, the
: scientists showed that relativity's tools for dealing with the flow of
: time are irrelevant in the submicroscopic realm of quantum processes.

: The experiment, conducted at the University of Geneva, explored the
: properties of pairs of particles whose fates are linked through a
: mechanism called entanglement. As long as physicists don't examine them,
: such so-called Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) pairs enjoy a wishy-washy
: existence, not committing themselves to any particular states of
: properties such as polarization. But jolt one of the particles into
: choosing--say, by noting its existence with a detector--and the other
: instantly feels the tweak, even if it's millions of light-years away. If
: one particle is detected with horizontal polarity, for instance, the other
: might instantly assume vertical polarity.

: ...Lab experiments have repeatedly confirmed that this "spooky action at
: a distance" operates faster than light, although physicists have
: shown that it doesn't violate relativity because it can't be used to send
: faster-than-light messages....The results, Suarez says, leave the theory
: he and Scarani proposed no wiggle room. "The notion of time makes
: sense only in Einstein's world," he says. "It doesn't make sense
: in the [quantum world]. It cannot be described in terms of before and
: after." And for those who prefer to live in a world of cause and
: effect, spooky action at a distance just got even spookier.

: Pretty odd indeed,

: Cheers,
: Ben

I've actually read up a bit on this, one of the possible
practical applications is faster than light communication.

That is, of course, if they can get a handle on it.

CH (quantumboi)

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Pre-2004 Posts

Replies:

General musings...Cannibal Harry 11/9/01 8:26 a.m.
     Re: General musings...Arsonperbuilding 11/9/01 12:40 p.m.
     Re: General musings...Ben Potter 11/9/01 1:06 p.m.
           Re: General musings...Ben Potter 11/9/01 1:31 p.m.
                 Re: General musings...Cannibal Harry (vidboi) 11/9/01 7:49 p.m.
                       Re: General musings...Inverted Sock Puppet 11/9/01 10:25 p.m.
     Re: General musings...whocares 11/12/01 4:32 p.m.



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