"Spooky action at a distance" What did he mean?

I've noticed that, and I know Little Bang has too. I introduced him to some of the folks here. QQ is the go-to guy for philosophy of science here, Little Bang.

It's always going to be that way, I'm afraid. Mainstream cosmology, as far as I'm concerned, has contracted some sort of disease or brain rot that makes it behave more like a religion than a science.

As we discussed at some length, even someone like Newton had rivalries and detractors like Hooke, whom today we would call a troll. Despite that, we really need the science both of them brought to bear; Newton for celestial mechanics; Hooke for springs and everything that stores mechanical energy in some fashion.
 
Quantum Quack said:
hee hee... so tickling a photon today would modulate a photon 13.8 billion years ago which in turn modulates the photon witnessed today.... eh? :) Tricky no doubt about it...!
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A stream of entangled photons sent in opposite directions and maintained for all those years would enable instant communication for the entire time span (not 13.8 billion years ago), between any two points along their paths. After the photons all pass or the beam is turned off, communication stops as soon as the last photon leaves the area at the speed of light. But while the beam is still on, those two spots intercepting the beams can communicate between each other with entanglement. Not very practical, really, but in principle, it works.
 
You don't know what you're talking about. There is no possibility of instantaneously communicating information as we know it. The two spots you talk about are actually the things that will do any communicating, and that's with each other.
 
arfa brane said:
You don't know what you're talking about. There is no possibility of instantaneously communicating information as we know it. The two spots you talk about are actually the things that will do any communicating, and that's with each other.
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It works that way precisely because from the point of view of those entangled photons, neither time nor space separates them. This works only in the present, from our perspective, and only with the pairs of photons that have actually been entangled simultaneously, in the same time, same space.
 
Which prompts another thought. The Higgs mechanism works with bosons too. What would be the effect if EVERY Higgs boson in the known universe were entangled with every other Higgs boson (and not just one, or even one pair of entanglements)? Like photons, the Higgs has integer spin, and unlike photons, they all occupy exactly the same energy state AND spin values. This would have some rather interesting consequences, quantum mechanically.

In fact, this might even explain part of Dirac's confusion about electrons, already discussed in an earlier post. The electrons may not be all identical in terms of half-integer spin, relative motion, energy states, but they all get their inertia from the same mechanism. It would also go a long way toward explaining bound energy states wherever they appear in atomic structure or in nature.

Time travel, EPR wormholes and multiverses would be prohibited in such a universe, of course. The present would be eternal, and even something like a Big Bang would be optional. Inflation would have a much different (but related) cause to the one Alan Guth came up with. Entanglement of the Higgs would be omnipresent and everywhere, all at once.

What do you all think? Don't be bashful; we're discussing this in pseudoscience, in which discussions like these are probably more appropriate anyway.
 
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This Higgs entanglement would be a good actual REASON for the concept of quantum identity. Electrons are all identical because all of the bosons that impart inertia to them are entangled. The process that accomplishes this is the only thing I can think of that would need to operate FTL in order to do what it does. Energy may not be bound as it is in particles of matter unless by some mechanism that can propagate much faster than either energy or matter, and keep it from dissipating the way unbound energy does. If this is true, the ratio of the speed of light to that of the Higgs field would determine a great many physical constants. Even entanglement has a delay, but you just won't be able to measure it with any instrument constructed of material to which this mechanism imparts inertia. Finally, something that is not possible for science ever to be able to measure (directly), and for the best reasons I can think of.

So, this is as good a reason as I can think of for only one boson in this universe to be able to effect entanglement of all sorts of other particles. You can't do more than "tickle" particles to see if they are entangled, because you are actually checking entanglement of the Higgs that imparts inertia to the particle, and you may do this only indirectly.

Is there a flaw in this idea? Wouldn't want to wind up sounding as crazy as someone like Dirac seemed to be.

Would there be any benefit to positing a supersymmetric counterpart to Higgs in this model?

That should be enough for our many pseudoscientists here for work on and reflect about for a while. Have fun.

Note to myself: you can't come up with ideas this original without actually thinking about them. Many thanks, QQ and Little Bang, oh, and arfa brane too.
 
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danshawen said:
It works that way precisely because from the point of view of those entangled photons, neither time nor space separates them. This works only in the present, from our perspective, and only with the pairs of photons that have actually been entangled simultaneously, in the same time, same space.
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What works?
In order to use entangled photons to communicate (let's say in a secure manner), the photons have to be sent and received over that space and in that time. Photons don't communicate, humans do.
 
arfa brane said:
What works?
In order to use entangled photons to communicate (let's say in a secure manner), the photons have to be sent and received over that space and in that time. Photons don't communicate, humans do.
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Photon entanglement was first confirmed in fiber optic links. Then there was this:

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...ntanglement-of-photons-through-space-and-time

and the Nobel Prize awarded in 2012 for entanglement measurement WITHOUT destroying the polarization state of one of the photons I referenced in my previous post:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2012/wineland-lecture.html

It does not work like a typical radio or other type of modulated broadcast. To be entangled, the photons must be produced by a process that entangles them and sends them off in different (in the Nobel winning experiment) OPPOSITE directions. One photon is left hand circularly polarized. The other photon is right hand circularly polarized. When one of the entangled pair is received and its polarization state is detected without changing the state of polarization, this also disturbs the entangled photon, no matter what distance it might be from its entangled counterpart being "tickled". Whatever entangled photon is tickled or modulated at one location affects what is happening to the other. You could easily send morse code or a binary data stream with entangled photon modulation from one entangled photon to the other this way, instantly.

So it's been done both in fiber optic cable and in free space, and now it's been done without destroying the polarization state of either entangled photon.
 
danshawen said:
To be entangled, the photons must be produced by a process that entangles them and sends them off in different (in the Nobel winning experiment) OPPOSITE directions. One photon is left hand circularly polarized. The other photon is right hand circularly polarized. When one of the entangled pair is received and its polarization state is detected without changing the state of polarization, this also disturbs the entangled photon, no matter what distance it might be from its entangled counterpart being "tickled". Whatever entangled photon is tickled or modulated at one location affects what is happening to the other.
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How is a photon detected without changing its state of polarization, or without destroying the photon?
How do the remote receivers know anything about the states of the entangled photons? How does either receiver know when to measure their photon?

And can you point to the relevant part of your link? It seems to be about research into trapped ions mostly.
 
I'm trying to find a better link (for my own benefit as well as yours). This is one of the most hotly researched area in physics right now, and I can certainly see why.

I find I am in disagreement with ideas about using entanglement to communicate with "the past", as though it were some sort of temporal radio. There isn't any "past". There is only the present, and we are in it. Communication is instantaneous, and that means exactly what you might think it would mean. Communications via entanglement are possible only between two points receiving entangled photons, EXACTLY EQUIDISTANT FROM WHERE THEY WERE ENTANGLED, and such communication is available ONLY in a frame that is simultaneously at rest with respect to both photons being monitored, and the communication, if it happens at all, happens RIGHT NOW. Not in the past. Not in the future. NOW.
 
danshawen said:
Communication is instantaneous, and that means exactly what you might think it would mean. Communications via entanglement are possible only between two points receiving entangled photons, EXACTLY EQUIDISTANT FROM WHERE THEY WERE ENTANGLED
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I think you have a fundamental misconception of what entanglement is. If there are two receivers equidistant from the point of entanglement, both photons will take the same 'classical' time to reach the receivers (let us assume the distance is also classical). Where is the instantaneous communication?
 
There is a difference that I think must be understood between the "instant communication" apparently exhibited by the entangled photons - such as the measurement of one appears to cause the other to react in the same way - and the ability to actually communicate information via this means.

If the method of transmission is via sending entangled photons from sender to receiver then this is really no different to optical fibres at the moment, and I can't really see a need to send entangled particles, other than perhaps for cryptographic reasons? Certainly this communication is no faster than light-speed - the speed at which we can transmit the photons - and certainly not instantaneous.

The idea of using entangled particles for FTL communication is for the sender to somehow affect one of an entangled pair such that the receiver can interpret what their entangled partner is doing. The receiver and sender can each be any distance from the point of entanglement, no need for equidistance.
But the sending of useful information FTL is far from even theoretically possible, I believe.
Sure, the measuring of one of the pair seems to instantaneously result in the other being affected (although whether it is truly instantaneous or merely some high multiple of C - such as 2,000 C - i do not believe is yet clear), but there does not appear to be a proven way to transmit useful information this way, although experiments are ongoing in just this area.
 
Here is a novel new idea from MIT that is ripe for exploitation for two way entanglement telecommunications:

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2008/mar/24/entangled-photons-could-sharpen-your-view

Lossless reflection does not destroy entanglement, but it does something else that I doubt anyone else suspects. If you 1) entangle two photons and send them off in opposite directions, and 2) one of the entangled photons is REFLECTED by means of a lossless mirror so that its path is reversed, and its polarization flips state, then the path of it's entangled photon will instantly reverse both direction of propagation and polarization state WITHOUT EVER HAVING BEEN REFLECTED BY SECOND MIRROR!! This is how energy gets bound into matter in the first place, and by a mechanism that is entirely new to physics. It makes sense precisely because there really isn't anything in the universe but time and energy. Space is emergent.

This is a ready means to detect an entangled photon that has been entangled without 1) worrying about what its state of polarization actually is, and 2) to do so in a manner that allows both intensity and frequency modulation (AM AND FM!). It might not be possible to detect polarization without absorbing all of the energy of the photon, leaving no energy to be detected in a receiver, but changing the direction of propagation is just as good, with the right setup. All one would need to do would be to detect those photons that are backscattered without striking a surface that backscattered it. The only really tricky part is the lossless mirror that modulates the entangled photon beam. A pilot beam of unentangled photons (like those emitted by a laser) could be used to locate the entangled beam in space running parallel to the unentangled beam at a distance so that the entangled photons do not interfere with unentangled ones (which might ruin the whole setup for communication at cosmological distances).

I don't know why I never realized it before. The entanglement of Higgs bosons with each other, coupled with its inertia imparting mechanism, actually lends the physical geometric characteristics, that is to say, an EQUIDISTANT (spherical) shape to each and every particle it imparts inertia to. It is the entanglement of Higgs with each other that gives each particle it interacts with the omnipresent characteristic spherical shape (including that of atomic structure itself!), in the same way the gravity imparts large masses a generally spherical shape. This interaction, along with energy and other characteristics of particle being given mass determines the particles size and ability / characteristics when interacting with other particles. Forget about Einstein. Peter Higgs and his God Particle really rule!

I suppose God really does enjoy geometry, at least as much as he enjoys playing dice.
 
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It shouldn't have taken me as long as it did to find out that vacuum entanglement was a mainstream physics concept (from a website like sciforums or anywhere else).

I can only conclude that whomever understands this concept either thinks that it is some sort of closely guarded secret (is this classified information or something?), or else does not view it as something without which a more complete understanding of this universe is simply not possible. The latter is my view.

Like an understanding of the atomic nature of matter, Pauli's exclusion principle and other key scientific learning about physical reality, this idea is, at least in my philosophy, is something that is worthy of sharing because without it our collective scientific understanding of nature makes no real sense at all. It is not something that should be reserved to the privileged few who have had a lot of largely irrelevant math beaten into their brains by smarmy folk who condescend to impart or dispense such fundamental science knowledge only when something almost as irritating as they are tickles their collective academic fancies in just the right spot.

Knowing something like this would probably have made a big difference had I been told anything about it the last time I posted a question someplace like the physicsstackexchange. Although too many people and especially moderators there do a great impression of Sheldon Cooper to those hapless souls who wander in without an inkling of anything about science much less physics, you'd think at least a few of them would be able to recognize those who do and who seek a greater understanding of nature. They don't. I hope that everyone's experience here has been somewhat better, and that I have helped nudge along the idea that it is everyone's entitlement to be informed if it is their desire to be so.

So, now you know. In QFT, the vacuum itself is theoretically entangled everywhere. This is not psseudoscience despite QQ's determination to talk about it here. How is it entangled? One possible way would be for the Higgs boson to be entangled. Why is this a powerful idea? Because it has been known for some time that particularly electrons but also other particles are identical in the quantum mechanical sense, and the way they get their shape has everything to do with how energy becomes bound to form matter in the first place. As Paul Harvey famously would have quipped: Now you also know the REST of the story.

Entanglement is the best evidence yet that space isn't what you think it is. Two entangled photons sent in opposite directions at the time of the BB, and encountering nothing to disentangle them in 13.8 billion years, are separated by less than nothing from the point of view of the photons themselves. Time may separate them (and from the photon FoR, it doesn't either), but if they do not decay, intervening space is no issue to behaving as if they were entangled indefinitely, just as they would be if bound in a chunk of local matter. Flipping the spin state of one will instantaneously flip the spin state of the other, and it should come as no surprise that this is possible in a universe where all vacuum energy is in fact entangled everywhere. This universe is comprised only of the fundamental components known as time and energy. Instantaneous entanglement makes the creation of matter from bound states of energy possible and allows it to persist without dissipating. The speed of light is intimately related to time and limits the speed with which anything made of energy or matter can propagate. Apparently, this is not a limit to how quickly entangled information may "propagate", although it is entanglement of the vacuum that actually gets the work done.
 
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'Spooky Action at a Distance' redefined

Another interesting, more recent link related to entanglement:

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/oct/25/physicists-entangle-100000-photons

I think it's probably safe a safe bet to ignore anything and everything written about vacuum entanglement between the date of Pauli's Exclusion Principle, and July 4, 2012.

All those brave souls who believed in vacuum entanglement before the discovery of the Higgs boson were (or should have been) viewed as if they were physicists worshiping the occult, and all of the spooky things that go along with that idea. Other than virtual photons buried in the quantum foam and teased from it only with greatest technical difficulty, nothing before the discovery of the Higgs gave any hint that there was anything other than photons that were even capable of being entangled in the vacuum.

I've no idea when, why, or how 'spooky action at a distance' somehow ceased to be the parlance of the still invisible sources of electric, magnetic, electroweak, strong, or gravitational fields, and became exclusively associated with the mechanism of quantum entanglement, but somehow I doubt this had very much to do with more exotic ideas like either EPR wormholes or the Casimir effect.

If you could extract quantum foam energy using something like the Casimir effect, which is doubtful in the extreme, you would be doing so in violation of a great deal of established physics. It's the "action" part of 'action at a distance' that doesn't fit the model termed by part of the title of this thread. Any vacuum energy that derived of being tapped from the quantum foam could be used to produce an action at one end of the same 'entangled' wormhole without a corresponding action happening in the opposite direction on the other end of the same wormhole. Even if it were not a fact that at the atomic level, there isn't any such thing as a perfectly smooth, flat, and planar conductive material suitable for maintaining Casimir separations without vacuum welding the material it was made of, such fantasies by folks like Kip Thorne really are deserving of rather a lot more skepticism than they have received for a very long time. The people putting out papers about wormhole physics and the Casimir effect are, like the fabulous Bogdan brothers, frauds. There isn't a gentler way to put it.

At the quantum level of scale, there likewise isn't anything like a plane mirror that can reflect photons at very precise angles, yet even on our scale of things, the angle of incidence is somehow equal to the angle of reflection from any plane mirror, even the somewhat imperfect ones we can easily make. Direction seems to matter a great deal to an outer valence electron of a chunk of metal on the surface of a planar sheet of them. Be that behavior as it may, how is it that energy of any kind gets bound into particles of matter or in atoms? There aren't any mirrors other than electrons themselves on that scale. What is it that binds energy INSIDE of the electrons that absorb and emit photons with such incredible precision noticeable even far above quantum scales? It would need to be a mechanism that actually is faster than the light the electron absorbs and re-emits, wouldn't it?

That would be the role of vacuum entanglement. Electrons are perfectly round:

http://io9.com/yes-electrons-are-perfectly-round-and-thats-a-prob-1487211887

And like the article says, that's a problem the Standard Model doesn't even scratch the surface of. Why do you suppose that is? Why doesn't it notice the precision with which photons are reflected or absorbed from metallic or even nonmetallic things like glass? Would that be possible if electrons weren't perfectly round? There's a good reason for that.

And so you thought giant tortoises weren't spooky enough?
 
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danshawen said:
'Spooky Action at a Distance' redefined

Another interesting, more recent link related to entanglement:

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/oct/25/physicists-entangle-100000-photons

I think it's probably safe a safe bet to ignore anything and everything written about vacuum entanglement between the date of Pauli's Exclusion Principle, and July 4, 2012.

All those brave souls who believed in vacuum entanglement before the discovery of the Higgs boson were (or should have been) viewed as if they were physicists worshiping the occult, and all of the spooky things that go along with that idea. Other than virtual photons buried in the quantum foam and teased from it only with greatest technical difficulty, nothing before the discovery of the Higgs gave any hint that there was anything other than photons that were even capable of being entangled in the vacuum.

I've no idea when, why, or how 'spooky action at a distance' somehow ceased to be the parlance of the still invisible sources of electric, magnetic, electroweak, strong, or gravitational fields, and became exclusively associated with the mechanism of quantum entanglement, but somehow I doubt this had very much to do with more exotic ideas like either EPR wormholes or the Casimir effect.

If you could extract quantum foam energy using something like the Casimir effect, which is doubtful in the extreme, you would be doing so in violation of a great deal of established physics. It's the "action" part of 'action at a distance' that doesn't fit the model termed by part of the title of this thread. Any vacuum energy that derived of being tapped from the quantum foam could be used to produce an action at one end of the same 'entangled' wormhole without a corresponding action happening in the opposite direction on the other end of the same wormhole. Even if it were not a fact that at the atomic level, there isn't any such thing as a perfectly smooth, flat, and planar conductive material suitable for maintaining Casimir separations without vacuum welding the material it was made of, such fantasies by folks like Kip Thorne really are deserving of rather a lot more skepticism than they have received for a very long time. The people putting out papers about wormhole physics and the Casimir effect are, like the fabulous Bogdan brothers, frauds. There isn't a gentler way to put it.

At the quantum level of scale, there likewise isn't anything like a plane mirror that can reflect photons at very precise angles, yet even on our scale of things, the angle of incidence is somehow equal to the angle of reflection from any plane mirror, even the somewhat imperfect ones we can easily make. Direction seems to matter a great deal to an outer valence electron of a chunk of metal on the surface of a planar sheet of them. Be that behavior as it may, how is it that energy of any kind gets bound into particles of matter or in atoms? There aren't any mirrors other than electrons themselves on that scale. What is it that binds energy INSIDE of the electrons that absorb and emit photons with such incredible precision noticeable even far above quantum scales? It would need to be a mechanism that actually is faster than the light the electron absorbs and re-emits, wouldn't it?

That would be the role of vacuum entanglement. Electrons are perfectly round:

http://io9.com/yes-electrons-are-perfectly-round-and-thats-a-prob-1487211887

And like the article says, that's a problem the Standard Model doesn't even scratch the surface of. Why do you suppose that is? Why doesn't it notice the precision with which photons are reflected or absorbed from metallic or even nonmetallic things like glass? Would that be possible if electrons weren't perfectly round? There's a good reason for that.

And so you thought giant tortoises weren't spooky enough?
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Aren't you just pointing out how our models do not necessarily "reflect " the reality of our observations?

So a test show an electron to be perfectly spherical yet "What is an electron?" has yet to be answered fully so it seems.
Even our humble photon is lacking in proper and consistent definitions.

Scenario:

Confirmed Observation:
Energy is extracted from the vacuum.

Interpretation: Possibly defies laws of thermodynamics.

Response: Nothing can defy the laws of thermodynamics...

then:
[maintain absolute adherence to the laws of thermodynamics.]
Re-assessed interpretation: Energy derived from vacuum can not and does not defy the laws of thermodynamics but defies our capacity to adequately model or understand. (no such thing as free energy)

Question:
What is vacuum-ous space?


and so on...

Test statement:
"A zero point particle is by virtue of being in 3 dimensional space perfectly spherical" which indicates the existence of a paradox of fundamental importance. (both exists and non-exists simultaneously)
Or to put it in other words:
"Space only exists by virtue of having objects of matter with in it. No matter, = no space"
or
Take all the matter and energy out of the universe and what do you have left?

Just thoughts...
 
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The question that I believe needs to be addressed is
"How can we extract energy from a vacuum and yet maintain the laws of thermodynamics?"

I believe there is a solution and I have mentioned it here at sciforums a few times.. The same solution also relates to the "spooky action at a distance" issue of QM.
 
Quantum Quack said:
The question that I believe needs to be addressed is
"How can we extract energy from a vacuum and yet maintain the laws of thermodynamics?"

I believe there is a solution and I have mentioned it here at sciforums a few times.. The same solution also relates to the "spooky action at a distance" issue of QM.
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It isn't thermodynamics that would be violated by extracting vacuum energy in the manner of the Casimer effect. It is a violation of simple dynamics.

Entanglement may be used to extract only energy or information that is coupled in timespace. You don't get it for free. That would even violate Newton's third, which requires restatemement in terms of entanglement.
 
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