Physics Discussion Forum

This idea of instantaneous communication via the tranmission of information via "vestigial dimensions" is intriging for another reason. Imagine an experiment where the state of a system is described by a wave function with a number of different outcomes, the probability of each outcome occuring being described by a number between 0 and 1. This is the situation Einstein found so distasteful as it implies that God is playing dice with the Universe, i.e. the outcome of an experiment is a crapshoot, with causality now a probabilistic rather than a deterministic relationship. So my question is, would strict determinism be restored if the observer knew what connections existed between the wave function of the system being observed and the rest of the universe via these "vestigial dimensions"?

Hi Bill,

This idea of instantaneous communication via the tranmission of information via "vestigial dimensions" is intriging for another reason. Imagine an experiment where the state of a system is described by a wave function with a number of different outcomes, the probability of each outcome occuring being described by a number between 0 and 1. This is the situation Einstein found so distasteful as it implies that God is playing dice with the Universe, i.e. the outcome of an experiment is a crapshoot, with causality now a probabilistic rather than a deterministic relationship. So my question is, would strict determinism be restored if the observer knew what connections existed between the wave function of the system being observed and the rest of the universe via these "vestigial dimensions"?

It is still a "crapshoot" however as with crapshooting in real life you can load the dice. The particles... light or other particles can't pass through the small dimensions (both the photon and atomic particles have a relatively large wavelength)... at least for the moment there is no way to move energy faster than the speed of light through the shrunken dimension. I assume that the "vestigial dimension" allows the source and sink to "co-resonate" in the "near field" by way of "virtual photons" only. I know that is simply a guess... forgive me for "guessing" here. However the configuration of the state might then be read off at the remotely entangled particle. If you forcibly entangle a source and a sink then cause the source to emit a photon... that emitted photon will go to the "established" sink. It is currently possible using our present technology to "send" entanglement to a target. Of course that propagation of a photon takes time... sometimes a lot of time.
Quantum Teleportation Between Distant Matter Qubits: First Between Atoms 1 Meter Apart

Remote Entanglement between a Single Atom and a Bose-Einstein Condensate - M. Lettner, M. Mücke, S. Riedl, C. Vo, C. Hahn, S. Baur, J. Bochmann, S. Ritter, S. Dürr, G. Rempe
(Submitted on 21 Feb 2011 (v1), last revised 31 May 2011 (this version, v2))

Entanglement between stationary systems at remote locations is a key resource for quantum networks. We report on the experimental generation of remote entanglement between a single atom inside an optical cavity and a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). To produce this, a single photon is created in the atom-cavity system, thereby generating atom-photon entanglement. The photon is transported to the BEC and converted into a collective excitation in the BEC, thus establishing matter-matter entanglement. After a variable delay, this entanglement is converted into photon-photon entanglement. The matter-matter entanglement lifetime of 100 $\mu$s exceeds the photon duration by two orders of magnitude. The total fidelity of all concatenated operations is 95%. This hybrid system opens up promising perspectives in the field of quantum information.

Entanglement has recently been demonstrated between an entangled photon and a small crystal.... this may be used as a practical "entanglement buffer".

Heralded quantum entanglement between two crystals -N Gisin et al

Quantum networks require the crucial ability to entangle quantum nodes. A prominent example is the quantum repeater which allows overcoming the distance barrier of direct transmission of single photons, provided remote quantum memories can be entangled in a heralded fashion. Here we report the observation of heralded entanglement between two ensembles of rare-earth-ions doped into separate crystals. A heralded single photon is sent through a 50/50 beamsplitter, creating a single-photon entangled state delocalized between two spatial modes. The quantum state of each mode is subsequently mapped onto a crystal, leading to an entangled state consisting of a single collective excitation delocalized between two crystals. This entanglement is revealed by mapping it back to optical modes and by estimating the concurrence of the retrieved light state. Our results highlight the potential of rare-earth-ions doped crystals for entangled quantum nodes and bring quantum networks based on solid-state resources one step closer

An idea still under refinement as you can see by the date.

So the answer must be to entangle a pair of photons at the outset and "send" ahead of time that anticipates a need. When one of the entangled photon pairs arrives at the sink the photon's entanglement is "stored" and back at the start of this experiment to "save" the other entangled state initially in an atomic or crystal state. It appears that the crystal state is easier to keep stable over time. Much later when the first entangled photon has arrived and been stored to transfer a "bit" of known information to that saved state (from a matched atom or crystal back at the source) forcing the remote state to change by way of "quantum teleportation". The remote entangled state will then reflect the bit of information "sent".

The information is passed via entanglement so we should be able to read it instantly at the remote state. A number of parallel buffers can send whole "words" of data at a time to a similar set of parallel buffers at the remote end. The buffers are "refreshed" after every read operation with photons from the source. A full sequential message may be sent that way. If the distance was sufficiently great this would be a useful "real time" means of communication as long as the "link" was set up long beforehand. So this is not Feynman's Quantum Electrodynamics... his Nobel Winning Theory did no include entanglement. Some quantum electrodynamic paths are blocked in the shrunken dimensions to the passage of particles but "something" still gets through into the near field of the entangled couplets.

Hi Little Bang,

Little Bang wrote:From a photon's own frame of reference it takes zero time for it to travel from it's source to it's destination, therefore. any entangled photon would receive information from it instantly.

It is possible that "that is where the photon is in the interim time" between when it is emitted and when it is absorbed in "limbo" facilitating this connection and building the appropriate wavefunction in superposition. Consider the photon that is emitted from a source and takes a thousand years to make the journey to a star. The entanglement between source and sink still exists even after the photon has long left and still exists in the sink that it will one day arrive at. What keeps this going?... it must be the photon. So in a real sense it still exists inside that vestigial dimension causing the continued excitation of the source and the sink for all those intervening centuries and blocking other photons from being absorbed... the particle goes "dark".... maybe unseen due to it's darkness yet still exhibiting mass?... I dunno though! It just takes centuries for the photon to get "through". Perhaps one would think of this state as being no longer dynamic and it just becomes "frozen light". Lets say if it were possible to intercept this photon half way out.... it would be dragged out of the "aether" intact right there to be absorbed and "un-freezing" it. This might enable a different interpretation for Einstein's Relativity being a rotation into an orthogonal unseen "shrunken" dimension. In our spatial and temporal dimensions the two highly separated and entangled particles would remain in each others "near field" to "co-resonate" through the medium of virtual particles while the "frozen photon" connects them together at the edge of their mutual "near field". That is just all speculation mind you and a load of baloney for just cogitating on over a chocolate bar.

Hi everyone,

My impression, and excuse it for being naive if it repeats something I haven't heard yet, is that there can be multiple gravitational paths between two points and that those gravitational paths change as the mass-topology between them moves. So a ship drifting on an intercept course with a photon aimed at something more distant could intercept that photon because it would suddenly be the nearest receiver on the photon's path. But the same could happen if another ship was on another possible gravitational path of the photon on the way to its targeted destination, because the photon is following the most direct gravitational path possible. As for the emission-source remaining in an excited state until an adequate sink is 'found,' couldn't that just be a byproduct of the relative energy-levels of the transfer points? I.e. a higher-energy source will always remain insulated in its vacuum until the vacuum can be bridged to a lower-energy sink that can absorb it. I.e. isn't this just the problem of vacuum-space being an insulator and not a conductor?

Hi Inertron,

As for the emission-source remaining in an excited state until an adequate sink is 'found,' couldn't that just be a byproduct of the relative energy-levels of the transfer points? I.e. a higher-energy source will always remain insulated in its vacuum until the vacuum can be bridged to a lower-energy sink that can absorb it. I.e. isn't this just the problem of vacuum-space being an insulator and not a conductor?

I wold not take anything in this theory as being etched in stone. I really do not know the answer to this problem.

There may be a "universal frame of reference", as Einstein defined, which connects things that exist "now". Clocks can be synchronized in theory resulting in relatively moving points having a single "now". This means that a photon being launched from a star 13 Billion Light Years away and 13 Billion years ago in time is still connected with the photographic plate in a telescope in Hawaii today when it is absorbed "now". The same "now" clock 13 BLY distant may be scattered into the firmament "now" but still is out there somewhere entangling with the photographic plate's single atom. For that to happen time would indeed need to be laid out and all of this is "fixed". As far as I know that entanglement would only exist for inertial frames of reference since Einstein could not create a single "now" frame for non-inertial platforms under gravitational or otherwise acceleration. One could speculate on "piecemeal" frames of reference instantaneously at rest... however a full history would be required to integrate all the contributions. Such full histories are not known in general except in a lab. If one or other of a pair of entangled particles were to be accelerated it may be that the entanglement cannot practically persist beyond a certain limit. In which case the "frozen photon" will look for a nearby renegotiated target and drop out of "quantum limbo" (which is the quantum state).... but please --- this is entirely speculation!! There are no current experiments other than S. Afshar's Experiments see Afshar experiment that comes close to finding out yet.

Wikipedia wrote:Afshar claims that his experiment invalidates the complementarity principle and has far-reaching implications for the understanding of quantum mechanics, challenging the Copenhagen interpretation. According to John G. Cramer, Afshar's results support Cramer's own transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics and challenge the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.[15] This claim has not been published in a peer reviewed journal.

... boom... boom!! Maybe? This is tentative 'good news" for the Absorber Theory (Cramer's Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Theory). Unfortunately there are challenges to this POV taken by RE Kastner, the foremost proponent of Cramer's Transactional Interpretation. Not all is what it seems. I really can't say authoritatively. You need to read all this for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Ouch... my aching head.

Hi Good Elf,

Good Elf wrote:There may be a "universal frame of reference", as Einstein defined, which connects things that exist "now". Clocks can be synchronized in theory resulting in relatively moving points having a single "now". This means that a photon being launched from a star 13 Billion Light Years away and 13 Billion years ago in time is still connected with the photographic plate in a telescope in Hawaii today when it is absorbed "now". The same "now" clock 13 BLY distant may be scattered into the firmament "now" but still is out there somewhere entangling with the photographic plate's single atom. For that to happen time would indeed need to be laid out and all of this is "fixed". As far as I know that entanglement would only exist for inertial frames of reference since Einstein could not create a single "now" frame for non-inertial platforms under gravitational or otherwise acceleration. One could speculate on "piecemeal" frames of reference instantaneously at rest... however a full history would be required to integrate all the contributions.

The way I see it is that electrons are required to receive photons, and electrons are organized by charge-force and gravity, which is also how space curves in the presence of matter. So the extent to which radiation can be detected from a source has to do with the gravitational topology of the space connecting the source and receiver. If light could take any path it wanted from a star to the observer, we would observe multiple images of stars in various directions and intensities as a rule instead of as a special effect of gravitational lensing, right? If a gravitational lens moves into the path of a star's light to the Earth, we see an apparent shift in the position of the star, so the light that was underway had to shift its path en route, correct? Likewise, if you are receiving light at one frequency and accelerate toward the source, the light blueshifts for you, presumably without having to check with the source beforehand. So if the reception of light is conditioned by the state of the receiving electron(s), then wouldn't it follow that an excited electron poised to emit would only do so to the extent that it was allowable in the direction of photons it was currently receiving? E.g. electrons on planet Mercury's surface are not going to fall to their ground state because the solar radiation they're receiving is keeping them in the excited state. Likewise, excited hydrogen is not going to emit its red band toward another hydrogen atom at the same energy-level because there is no entropy-potential. If, on the other hand, an electron receives light at a frequency it can't absorb, it reflects it, right? So these photons are clearly arriving at their targets whether or not those targets receive them. I think it all just depends on the state of the electron in the direction of emission according to what radiation it's receiving from sources in that direction. Is that oversimplifying things, do you think? It can emit into a vacuum with no material target in its sights, but I would think it would then ultimately curve around to some receiver, if only because we don't observe light coming from every part of the sky. So light emitted in our direction from all those dark parts of the sky must be curving around to other sinks, no?

Furthermore, I may be mis-equating particle-kinetics with radiation-energy but there seems to me to be a logical connection between the role of vacuum in each. Vacuum insulates particles from transferring their momentum/vibrations to other particles when separated from them by enough vacuum space. All that really means is that the force pulling them away from the direction of motion is greater than their momentum to persist in that direction. Otherwise their momentum would propel them to conduct their energy to the other side of the vacuum. Light-emission allows those particles constrained by gravity to nevertheless send their energy beyond the limits of their electrons, but the photons also seem to have their limitations albeit much more subtly in the form of gravitational/space curvature. So in the same sense that gravity and positive charge holds the electron from carrying its kinetic energy further, gravity also ultimately does the same thing for the photon but more weakly. So couldn't you say that there is 'electron vacuum space' and 'photon vacuum space' to the extent that each is obstructed due to force in its linear progress? Universal expansion may be a form or by-product of such force, as are all the other paths that light can go without appearing to emerge from there. I.e. presumably light is crossing paths with other light everywhere we see darkness in the sky, so couldn't you say that in a sense all that light is being forced along the path it's taking to end up in whatever sink it reaches? If it was all just dissipating into empty space, something would have to happen to that space, no? Is universal expansion a form of very diffuse system-excitation?

edit: I am tempted to start a whole new thread on this topic, because it's quite a speculative tangent, but since it's directly related to this post, I'll just add it here. If electrons recoil a bit with they receive or emit a photon, wouldn't that mean that bright interfaces between bodies would always be pushing away from each other to some degree? I.e. the bright side of a planet would be getting pushed by sunlight and the sun would be recoiling away from the planets to the extent that they are hotter sinks demanding higher levels of energy output to reach entropy threshold of energy-transfer. If that is the case, then wouldn't planets gradually be getting pushed farther away in their orbit the way an electron gets excited to a higher orbital in an atom? I know this is sounding Bohrish but bear with me. So if a planet is exciting higher in its solar orbit, but the path it is deviating from is an established geodesic path around the sun that keeps it 'gravitationally smooth,' then wouldn't the 'excited orbit' at some moment give way to a path-correction that would cause the planet to oscillate in a sine-wave type pattern back toward and away from the sun? I.e. it would 'bounce' in its orbit instead of 'floating.' This seems imo to be a way that photon energy could end up being stored up and then emitted as gravity waves insofar as the oscillating compression and expansion of the mass-density of the system consisting of the star and bouncing-planet would be changing relative to other planets and objects. I.e. the 'dent in spacetime' would be bouncing a bit, like a trampoline.

That is a very imaginative theory, inertron. I've read that the outer rings of Saturn are significantly influenced by solar radiation pressure, and also that the variability in solar radiation pressure constitutes the single largest source of error in modelling the orbital dynamics of GPS satellites. But a planet is so much more massive than either the particles in Saturn's rings or the mass of a GPS satellite that other factors probably perturb a planet's orbit more, such as the gravitational attraction of another planet. For example is the orbit of Mercury perturbed more by solar radiation pressure or by the gravitational attraction of Venus when it passes near Mercury?

Bill Angel wrote:That is a very imaginative theory, inertron. I've read that the outer rings of Saturn are significantly influenced by solar radiation pressure, and also that the variability in solar radiation pressure constitutes the single largest source of error in modelling the orbital dynamics of GPS satellites. But a planet is so much more massive than either the particles in Saturn's rings or the mass of a GPS satellite that other factors probably perturb a planet's orbit more, such as the gravitational attraction of another planet. For example is the orbit of Mercury perturbed more by solar radiation pressure or by the gravitational attraction of Venus when it passes near Mercury?

I've never heard that about Saturn's rings or GPS satellites. I thought about the ionosphere but that wouldn't cause any gravitational shift any more than would atmospheric pressure changes due to daytime heating. It's a good question/point about venus-mercury perturbation. It seems like the issue with planets is that they've had plenty of time to work out any imbalances that would cause oscillations in their orbits, no? Would it be presumptive to think that all oscillating variations of mass-distribution within a gravity well would result in gravity waves? If not, I would expect the planets to have emitted their gravitational imbalances as gravity waves in the past. What you're saying about the ratio of solar radiation to planetary mass being negligibly small is valid, I think, only because it is an aspect of the system that is constantly changing, it leaves the possibility that the imbalance hasn't already been worked out. Mainly the issue came up in my mind because I was thinking that the solar energy has to go somewhere. We tend to assume (implicitly?) that radiation from a star gets distributed more or less evenly in all directions but I wonder how much the mass of nearby matter makes a difference in the production of energy. After all, isn't the sun rotating around the same axis that the planets are revolving, causing a centrifuge-effect toward its equator? Also, wouldn't the cloud of particles ejected as solar wind act as a kind of black-body absorber of radiation that draws greater energy from the sun where it is denser? I mean, in general it seems like energy at both the solar system level and that of the galaxy tends to flatten out in the same plane, right? So imo there seems to be reinforcing-interaction between gravity and EM light-conductivity that stimulates greater radiation in the horizontal plane as well. This is admittedly a hunch based on intuitive echoes of data and logic since I haven't heard of any research on how radiation is distributed in all directions around the sun.

Hi Inertron, Bill Angel, Little bang and Farsight,

As I had suggested previously on this thread Quantum Particles Faster than Speed of Light? that the process of quantum cloning would lead to "pseudo-FTL" signalling. See the general discussion on L Gisin's Experiments at Geneva... this additional important link to First observation of 8 entangled photons smash entangled record. This accords with Gisin's recent paper...

Impossibility of covariant deterministic nonlocal hidden-variable extensions of quantum theory NGisin (published 28/02/2011) PHYSICAL REVIEW A 83, 020102(R) (2011). The conclusion is this...

N Gisin wrote:We end this Rapid Communication with a few comments. First, our argument assumes a deterministic model, i.e., for any given λ, there is a unique pair of results, one on each side. For stochastic models, the situation is interesting [9,10] but goes far beyond the scope of this Rapid Communication. Next, our result emphasizes once again the extraordinary robustness of quantum theory against any conceivable change. This may explain why the founders of quantum theory could discover it based on the very sparse data available to them at the time: There was simply little alternative. Finally, one should mention that a way out of our entire argumentation is to assume the existence of one preferred universal reference frame which determines unequivocally one and only one time ordering for all events [11].

Note added. Recently, the results were discovered independently by Blood [12].

Clearly a new type of "extra-spacetime connection" is involved... a single universal frame of reference connecting a "now".

This new article in PhysOrg reinforces the fact that quantum cloning (even it not entirely perfect) could lead to this ability to send information "pseudo-FTL" I use the prefix "pseudo" since the information does not "travel" across the intervening space but instantly has access through quantum non-locality to it directly through entanglement.

Quantum copies do new tricks
One of the strange features of quantum information is that, unlike almost every other type of information, it cannot be perfectly copied. For example, it is impossible to take a single photon and make a number of photons that are in the exact same quantum state. This may seem minor, but it's not. If perfect copying was possible, it would, among other things, be possible to send signals faster than the speed of light. This is forbidden by Einstein's theory of relativity.
...[..]...
"Copying classical information is very important in our daily lives," says paper co-author Simon. "Think of the prevalence of photocopiers, faxes, scanners. It was quite surprising for physicists when they realized that the same thing is not possible for quantum systems, at least not perfectly. It is then important to study what exactly is possible and what isn't."

The research can be used in a variety of ways. First, it shows clearly that quantum information is preserved when copied. Even though the copies may be imperfect, the original quantum state can be recovered. In practical terms, it might lead to a precision measurement technique based on quantum physics for samples that have very low contrast, such as living cells.

Though these experiments by Gisin have taken more than 10 years... slowly the pennies are beginning to drop...