Entanglement is the strange and beautiful property of certain quantum particles to become so deeply linked that they share the same existence. According to quantum theory, that link should be maintained whatever the distance between the particles, whether the width of an atom or the diameter of the universe.
This led Einstein to claim that the instantaneous effects of entanglement would lead to “spooky action-at-a-distance” in violation of special relativity which prevents faster-than-light signals.
Nobody knows how the different predictions of relativity and quantum mechanics can be resolved. However, entanglement has been measured in numerous experiments over relatively short distances on Earth. The tests involve two entangled particles, photons say, being sent to distant experimenters who then perform measurements on them.
In every one of these tests, the results agree entirely with the predictions of quantum mechanics. And yet naysayers continue to unearth loopholes that allow them to claim that there is a way in which the results are fixed, perhaps because quantum mechanics works only only over the short distances that can be exploited on Earth or by the existence some kind of hidden variable that determines in advance how the particles will behave when they are separated.
There is one way to settle the matter for sure: send entangled photons to two orbiting astronauts on board different spacecraft with large relative velocities. That leaves no room for hidden variable theories or any other fix because the peculiarities of special relativity allow both astronauts to claim the measurement on their photon was performed before the other.
Today Anton Zeilinger from the University of Vienna in Austria, says he wants to try just such an experiment and has put together an impressive international team to design and promote idea. The team has submitted its proposal, called Space-QUEST, to the European Space Agency in the hope that one end of the experiment could hosted on the Columbus module, Europe’s orbiting laboratory attached to the International Space Station.
The other observer need only be on the ground since Zeilinger has already proven that single photons can be bounced off orbiting satellites and detected on the ground.
That should please mission planners for the International Space Station which has yet to host a single significant experiment in space. Zeilinger’s Space-QUEST experiment looks like a genuine attempt to push the envelope of physics. The quicker they get it into orbit, the better.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0806.0945: Space-QUEST: Experiments with Quantum Entanglement in Space
Current experiments of the violation of Bell’s-inequality already employ advanced techniques such as randomly changing the orientation of the photon-polarisers during the flight of a single particle of light. With all errors considered very carefully, many experiments still find the violation of the inequality by over 5 standard deviations.
Despite all this evidence, there are still some that suggest a random event that occured several thousands of years in the past & hundreds of light years away has already pre-determined the outcome of the experiments.
One can never put to rest such irrational non-scientific arguments. Even if the experiment proposed in this article successfully shows that entanglement can occur over 1000km apart, the arguments will just make the event that predetermined the experiment now millions of years in the past & thousands of light years away. (does this not start sounding like creationist/intelligent design to you?)
Although the proposed experiment would be very nice, it is no justification of the existence of the ISS. This “space station” is costing billions every year and has yet produced zero scientific value. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) which searches for dark matter from the cosmos is the only “good” experiment that could exist on the ISS. It was proposed before its construction as the scientific reason for the station. But now they have decided there is no space left on future shuttle missions to send it up. We will soon have a very well constructed piece of space junk which cost billions of dollars. It will probably cost a billion more to bring it crashing down into the Pacific.
There is no action-at-a-distance. That is purely a result of throughly misunderstanding qm and EPR. See the book
Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Field Theory
geometry, language, logic
(Huntington, NY: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2001; republished by Backinprint.com)
Properties of (badly, misleadingly, named) quantum mechanics are required (by what?). Language, names, are dangerous. Waves, particles are meaningless. Weirdness comes only from incompetence and dishonesty. Properties of quantum mechanics and their reasons are necessary and clear.
for full discussion including the essentially identical classical case.
“There is no action-at-a-distance. That is purely a result of throughly misunderstanding qm and EPR. See the book
Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Field Theory
geometry, language, logic
(Huntington, NY: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2001; republished by Backinprint.com)
Properties of (badly, misleadingly, named) quantum mechanics are required (by what?). Language, names, are dangerous. Waves, particles are meaningless. Weirdness comes only from incompetence and dishonesty. Properties of quantum mechanics and their reasons are necessary and clear.
for full discussion including the essentially identical classical case.”
Shutup.
The International Space Station is one of the most complex engineering acomplishments to date. Complaining that the ISS has “produced zero scientific value,” is a simple statement of ignorance. Please reference the following link for a summary of ISS research through expedition 10.
http://ston.jsc.nasa.gov/collections/TRS/_techrep/TP-2006-213146.pdf
Kent: Cynical much?
Mirman: Do you think your opinion matters much considering how incompetently you expressed it?
To claim that it’s well understood simply because we predict the outcome of an experiment and then it happens is dishonest.
The smartest people in this business know this remains a very confusing aspect of quantum mechanics even if it isn’t controversial.
@R.Mirman:
The primary purpose for Education is not Subject
matter, but subservience to accept any crap taught
without opposing thought, destroying opposite brain
to be submissive android. You’re taught to be stupid.
George Bush lives in the quantum universe; the one with his head up his ass! He thinks the ISS is held up by balloons.
Reply to myself!!! …Must be some kind of quantum thingy.
George Bush requires a better understanding of physics.
e.g….Milk of Magnesia.
George Bush thinks the (LHC) Large Hadron Collider (CERN particle accelerator) was a destruction derby event with a bunch of cheap eastern European cars (1985 Yugo’s) that took place on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva.
He thinks the LHC search for the Higgs Boson is a search and rescue mission looking for a missing sailor, but doesn’t understand why it cost so much.
It must be wonderful to have the ability to see into the mind of another person and know what they think. However, that has always been something that any ignorant person can do.
Dear Kentucky,
I really love your posts; but the comments are usually content-less and pretty bad. Have you ever considered moderating? I have a feeling some pretty good comments are being drowned or repelled by the noise.
@Arby: Not enough. 🙂
@scott gray: your argument about QM falsifies itself since it applies to Special Relativity equally. The whole “discomfort” with QM is that it violates the casuality postulate of SR (i.e. information can not travel faster than the speed of light). We only believe in SR because it has predicted, to a very high precision, many phenomena before they have been observed and measured. This is EXACTLY what QM has done (but arguably with MORE experimental verification). To put one theory on a higher footing than the other would be ignorant. In fact, I often wonder if Einstein would have abandoned SR if QM had been discovered 100 years earlier.
Josh: Citing a paper by the ISS to demonstrate how “good” the science being done is is like believing McDonalds when they tell you that their food is healthy. If one searches in scientific peer-reviewed journals (the best measuring stick we have), then articles on the AMS are the most abundant and most cited. And yet they have no space for it. What do they have space for then?
I agree with you that the ISS is a technological marvel. But using science to justify its construction is rubbish. It’s like saying we should start more wars because we know that wars increase technological development.
My real issue with the whole thing is that FermiLab, the leading particle physics research facility in the US, had to be saved by a private $1million donation due to funding cuts. There has also been funding cuts to ITER (an international FUSION research reactor – hello! all our dreams come true) & ILC (next generation particle accelerator more power than LHC that can possibly start probing String Theory). Also NASA has already built satellites which will give the highest precision in global warming data sitting in a container because there is “not enough money” to fly them up.
Can anyone see a reoccurring theme? It appears somebody in the US government does not want anything that might make the shares of fossil fuels go down… I wonder who it is?
Until someone manages to produce a spontaneously-observable effect (i.e. to send a signal) by the simple act of observing one member of a pair of entangled particles, all experiments of this sort, however ingenious, remain nothing more than observations of correlation: “We looked at this one; we looked at that one; the results matched”. They can dispose of individual alternative hypotheses, but they can do nothing (in anything but the weakest, non-negative sense) to prove the prevailing wisdom correct.
Personally, it bothers me a lot that we demand unbreakable conservation laws for key aspects of physics, yet as a fundamental tenet of QM we equally demand that whole swathes of reality must be not merely allowed but positively required to simply vanish. Throwing state away, or ignoring “meaningless” solutions, has historically almost always proved a mistake in the long run, and the fact that we so blythely do so in QM suggests to me that we’re probably not looking at things in the right way. (As a simplistic alternative, for example, if the observers at each end were, in some local sense, to become entangled with the observed particles, seeing not one but both states, it would be unsurprising in the extreme that their results should tally, irrespective of any experimental detail – other conservation laws would seem to demand it.)
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On an intellegent blog such as this, why does it attract such dumb comments from jerks that want to relate the subject to politics. Negative remarks about Bush should be happy hour comments.
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