Speed of light - at least 100,000 times faster

www.physorg.com reports something interesting.

After performing multiple tests on two entangled photons, physicists have yet again found that the photons seem to be communicating faster than the speed of light - at least 100,000 times faster. The researchers hope that their results might encourage theorists to come up with new explanations for the strange quantum mechanical effect.

Here's a link to physorg

It's not the speed of light that's being talked about, but the speed of transfer of information. Light still runs at the same speed it always used to run at, according to the article.

Quantum enganglement does involve, however, things happening simultaneously.

A particle can go any speed with the right potential.

Well bucking its progress is air for big things and ether gas
or whatever for small things.

Photon to photon or proton to proton might carry very high
energies and thus high speed.


A 3 million volt per meter, or 30kv/cm, spark may have 12Mev
waves due to O2 and N interaction from the generated UV or more
than the gamma ray of Radium. Under AW 19 elements are highly
reactive to UV radiation.

If you assume radio and light waves need a medium like sound,
you take the ratio of the velocities and take the square and you
have the ratio of the air to ether medium densities.

Its 8 x 10 to the eleventh power, coming the square of 900,000 the
ratio of the velocities.

Velocities are proportional to the square root of the densities.

reply to post by Byrd


That's kind of a funny statement because I'm sure you knew that before this NOTHING exceeded the speed of light be it a speeding body or "information". Now you're brushing it off as if the speed of light was just indeed the speed of light and not THE universal speed limit. This reminds me of times when mankind thought the speed of sound was the universal limit.

If all photons are entangled with each other, then perhaps it's time to take a re-look at the speed of light. Remember light has two natures, particle and wave. I'm of the opinion that the particle nature of light creates the wave via spin, and that all photons are basically instances of the same single photon. Therefore it's the wave nature which has a speed, not the particle nature. This isn't a paradox either when you consider that moving through space also moves you through time, so you don't have to worry about arriving at a destination before the light gets there, even if you travel instantaneously.

The photon is 2D after all. No mass = no friction. If anything, it's lack of depth means that the photon's perception of time is infinite in at least one direction/dimension relative to a 3 dimensional universe.

they communicate through sympathetic vibratory resonance..
or Quantum string (for lack of a better term)
this process is NON-LINEAR regardless of perceived distance.
this is done by the use of dimensions/octaves

here are some links that although are not directly related,
still show some pieces to the whole picture.

www.nonduality.com...

www.sciencedaily.com...

dsc.discovery.com...

Google Video Link

the crazy thing is ...its all based on ancient knowledge.

Originally posted by broli
reply to post by Byrd

 

That's kind of a funny statement because I'm sure you knew that before this NOTHING exceeded the speed of light be it a speeding body or "information". Now you're brushing it off as if the speed of light was just indeed the speed of light and not THE universal speed limit. This reminds me of times when mankind thought the speed of sound was the universal limit.

?? But no particle is exceeding the speed of light that we can see, just the information traveling from one entangled photon to another. The information in this case is the angular momentum(spin?). This is what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance" that he so famously rejected. Perhaps entanglement creates a new particle that zips FTL to the entangled photon to copy the angular momentum of the other photon. Perhaps they are linked in a higher dimension in a physical sense and no distance in our sphere of perception effects this connections in that dimension(s). Who knows.

[edit on 15-8-2008 by sardion2000]

I think this is the start of the next major change in physics since relativity.

No information is transmitted in this entanglement measurement, as stated in the article itself.

Say you take a piece of wood and divide it into 12 different sections with a marker on its top face. You turn your back, have someone chop the wood, and then they hand you one of the pieces. The split of the wood is completely random, too. You can't tell the wood which way to split, and you can never be 100% certain where your axe will land. By looking at the piece of wood you have, you instantly know what parts you have, and what parts remain on that other piece of wood. There is no information transfered in this process because we already know the outcome. The other person knows what you have, you know what they have. If the person handing me the piece of wood uses whiteout while he transports the piece to me to change how it looks, the two pieces obviously no longer match and nothing at all is accomplished. Essentially, they become uncorrelated, or "untangled".

Here is an interesting thread on the whole subject on a very strict forum about physics: Link

There's also a much larger thread that deals with Entanglement in genereal. Link.

These threads may help some people understand the phenomenon known as Quantum Entanglement a little better, and how it's easy to misunderstand a news article. I will definitely be digesting them over the next little bit to help myself understand things more clearly.

It's obvious that we don't have all the answers in physics, that's impossible. But the likelihood that actual information is being transferred at FTL is low, for now.

[edit on 15-8-2008 by OnionCloud]

I wonder if it would be possible to send information faster than light, thus allowing us to build a machine which would get all that informatio nsent and then build whatever object based on information sent. Its an old idea from sci-fi books, a. c. clarke or asimov invented it, I believe. It would still not allow faster than light travel, and it would take a minimum of 100 000 light years to implement if one would like to travel such a distance. Reason for that is obvious enough to be frustrating. We would have to build that machine in there first, and that would take a lot of time since, as stated, we couldn't travel faster than light to build it there.

It does not really matter if there is no speed at all, information could still be received.

Umm.. Perhaps such a device is impossible to build anyway. As I understand it all information sent would change at the moment we observe it. That would mean that if we send instructions (information) about a human being which we want to "send" far, far away, we would actually end up with an apple instead.

Just some semirandom mumblings.

There's also the fact that once the information is received, it has to be observed classically, meaning by a computer or something. Computers don't transmit information FTL, so you'd end up having a huge backlog of info which could take a long time to get through. You'd need to build a computer that can compute at FTL speeds too, perhaps a more difficult task.

It is very easy to send information faster than light, you can do it right now if you want. Wrap two different coloured items identically and then get a friend to shuffle them without out you knowing and give you one whilst he keeps the other. Then separate yourself by 5 * 2.998*10^8 metres and open yours, you will instantly know which item he has, you brain will process this information in around 2.5 seconds beating light by 2.5 seconds. This kind of information transfer can occur from any distance, most physicists think information can travel faster than light anyway.

Originally posted by -Klaus-
It is very easy to send information faster than light, you can do it right now if you want. Wrap two different coloured items identically and then get a friend to shuffle them without out you knowing and give you one whilst he keeps the other. Then separate yourself by 5 * 2.998*10^8 metres and open yours, you will instantly know which item he has, you brain will process this information in around 2.5 seconds beating light by 2.5 seconds. This kind of information transfer can occur from any distance, most physicists think information can travel faster than light anyway.

:-)

Well, yes, but there is nothing transferred. This also does not work if somebody who opens it is stupid enough.

This isn't a transfer of information, it's exactly the same as the example I provided to show how it doesn't work. No unknown is solved, nothing is changed in the system. You have all the information in one spot, split it up, and then open the box up at the other end. You had all the information in one spot at one point in time, so you already know that someone is going to have a certain part when it's all said and done, and it doesn't do anything for you.

Information as a property in physics

Information itself cannot travel faster than light even if the information is transmitted indirectly. This could lead to the fact that all attempts at physically observing a particle with an "entangled" relationship to another are slowed down, even though the particles are not connected in any other way other than by the information they carry.

Physical Information

Originally posted by OnionCloud
This isn't a transfer of information, it's exactly the same as the example I provided to show how it doesn't work. No unknown is solved, nothing is changed in the system. You have all the information in one spot, split it up, and then open the box up at the other end. You had all the information in one spot at one point in time, so you already know that someone is going to have a certain part when it's all said and done, and it doesn't do anything for you.

I'm not sure if I get it or not, so please be patient with my questions. So, does their experiment merely show (or prove) that it is possible to deduce properties of another photon by deducing from the state of the first one (being observed)? Somehow this doesn't sound very big. As I understand it, state of that second photon somehow changes although without any transfer of information. Is this just something in where our common logic fails, although we can observe this happening?

For some reason I get the feeling that physicists often give an impression about this as if it is actually nothing special, but in their private conversations it is something quite big. I don't mind if this is just another one of those experiments that are quite impossible to explain by words alone, though..

Why should we keep at demanding that our logic must work in quantum world, when clearly it soundly doesn't. Time and transfer are irrelevant, and all those laws that prevent FTL would still apply to macrophysics anyway. We couldn't do it with atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons or with anything else but fotons, right?

I'll try and explain it a little better using this quote from the Wikipedia article on Quantum Entanglement:

However, if this experiment is done with entangled particles the results are quite different. When two members of an entangled pair are measured, one will always be spin-up and the other will be spin-down.

So, no matter what, when two photons are entangled one will always spin up and one will always spin down. This means if you assign spin up to be Qbit 1, when the other person receives the down spinning photon they know you sent Qbit 1. However, a constant string of 1's is no information. You need 1's and 0's to actually convey something, just like inside a computer. This means we'd need to be able to have photons collapse in very specific ways when they've been entangled. However, by trying to force a photon to collapse in a specific way you break it's entanglement and they no longer correlate to each other.

The original article posted is very vague in its description of what happened to the photons.

When the researchers measured several properties of each photon at its destination, they found that the particles could instantly sense the other´s behavior without any known communication. Although this correlation obeys the laws of quantum mechanics, it seems to defy the nature of space and time, at least from humans´ everyday perspectives.

What does this mean, exactly? Does this mean that they could change properties after they've received them and have them correlate? Were they able to force a specific property to happen when they sent them out after entanglement? Not enough information is given in the article to surmise anything (pun? heh), and it leads me to believe that they haven't accomplished anything new.

I am certainly no particle physicist and don't claim to be one, so I have no idea if what they did actually worked. However, my research, and the vagueness of the article, leads me to conclude that it isn't anything new. I hope I'm wrong, though. It would be stupid of me to not want a new technology that is faster than light to not be used and manufactured.

What if we could only "send" photons that spin into a certain direction? If we want 1 to be received, we "send" a photon that spins into another direction. If we could measure this and decide or produce photons that are suited in certainty of direction of spin, we could propably send informatio nthis way.

Sending however, is apparently a wrong word for this but I know of nothing better. Even with 1/10000 odds we should be receiving speeds 100 000/10 000 faster than light, which would be thousandfold increase. This however is just my intuition saying this.

Is it possible to construct lasers that produce photons that spin into a certain direction? Even if we just know that more than, say, 50.01% spin in certain direction? That would give us such 1/10000 chance, and with error checking implemented as it is now, we could proapbly do it.

As far as my limited knowledge is concerned, when you try to tell a photon how to decay or spin when they are entangled, it "detangles", as said in my original post. This means that they are no longer linked, and (I assume) that means they no longer correlate to each other. That article is a little vague, so it's hard to say if they actually figured something new out, or just rediscovered something old they didn't know about.

But yeah, you'd need to be able to change the properties from one state to another to be able to make a data stream, but when you try the quantum entanglement is no longer there. I don't really know anything about how lasers can be used in this scenario, so I can't really speculate on that.

I'll say it again, my knowledge on the topic is limited, and I am approaching this with skepticism, and I think everything a person hears should be. We often hear of breakthroughs in the media, but they put their own little spin on it to make it sound different and perhaps more appealing to the public, but not 100% false.

I honestly do hope they figure something out. Perhaps the reason that things happen the way they do when they're entangled is because of "subspace", or different dimensions predicted by string theory. I have a feeling this quantum mystery won't be solved for a little while, but the sooner the better.

[edit on 17-8-2008 by OnionCloud]