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For the first time in the history of quantum mechanics, scientists have been able to transmit a black and white image without having to send any physical particles. The phenomenon can be explained using the Zeno effect, the same effect that explains that movement itself is impossible.
The journal article is in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1614560114)
Wikipedia has an article about the quantum Zeno effect.
Related stories:
Physicists Break Distance Record for Quantum Teleportation
First Covert Communication System with Lasers
Long-Range Secure Quantum Communication System Developed
China's "Quantum-Enabled Satellite" Launches
How to Outwit Noise in Quantum Communication
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Direct Counterfactual Quantum Communication Claimed
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 19 2017, @03:39AM (14 children)
If this actually works, we will see applications in the arbitrage markets very soon.
Conversely, if we don't see applications of this in the arbitrage markets, the traders have been unable to replicate the process described in the paper. Frankly, I'm surprised this was published at all instead of being marketed to the trading houses that spend millions on more direct fiber routes to cut communication times for higher profits.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 19 2017, @03:46AM (2 children)
Oh, nevermind, they aren't communicating directly, they're hitching a ride on the phase information of a wave instead of a particle. No speed value to traders there.
To determine whether light appears in a channel, one refers to the amplitude of its wave function. However, in counterfactual communication, information is carried by the phase part of the wave function. Using a single-photon source, we experimentally demonstrate the counterfactual communication and successfully transfer a monochrome bitmap from one location to another by using a nested version of the quantum Zeno effect.
So, in a normal slide projector, you pass light through a patterned semi-transparent plate and the changes in amplitude of the passing light waves project the image.
In these guys' version, they're encoding their image information on the phase of single photon waves.
But, if photons are particles and waves at the same time, are they really communicating "without particles?" It seems to me that ignoring the photon's particle like properties doesn't make them cease to exist.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday May 21 2017, @09:36AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 21 2017, @12:11PM
Fun extension: what happens when those wave packets get out of phase with each other?
Is that dark matter? Are we swimming in a universe of mostly out of phase wave packets, where we only see the ones that have become phase aligned?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday May 19 2017, @09:21PM (10 children)
If someone found a way to communicate faster than the speed of light - through entanglement or something else entirely - they'd have a functioning time machine, so the stock markets would soon be a thing of the past.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday May 19 2017, @09:24PM
I should add, that "through entanglement" bit was entirely speculative. It's almost certainly not possible and certainly impossible given current understanding.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 19 2017, @09:31PM (8 children)
Simple communication faster than the speed of light isn't a time machine per-se. It gets you ahead of the light speed propagation of information, but in near-earth areas (the only areas with information relevant to the stock market that are presently reachable by man-made devices), the difference is seconds - far less than the affect that the telegraph had on trading when it came into play - it won't collapse the market, but it would turn certain high speed trading operations on their heads.
Actually, thinking about options pricing models, they use techniques quite similar to quantum communication tools... wouldn't it be weird if the two could be fused into a more powerful (profitable) combined strategy?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday May 20 2017, @12:18AM (7 children)
Simple communication faster than the speed of light isn't a time machine per-se.
Any faster-than-light communication is ambiguous as to whether it's going backwards or forwards in time - in some reference frames it will be forwards, in some it will be backwards. All you have to do is to get your transmitter/receiver into the right frame(s) and you can send messages back to last Tuesday.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday May 20 2017, @01:00AM (6 children)
All you have to do is to get your transmitter/receiver into the right frame(s) and you can send messages back to last Tuesday.
If you're limited to the neighborhood of Earth, you'll never get back to last Tuesday. You might receive a message from "5 seconds in the future" about a distant star going Nova, but anything that happens on Earth propagates away from Earth at SOL, instantly communicating that back is just repeating what you already knew, not working forward in time.
Instant communication would be a great Distant Early Warning system, but you're not going to get messages about where you are from the future.
Now, since instant quantum communication is "off the table" anyway according to current widely accepted (made up) theories, you can as easily posit weirder particles that travel in retrograde time and then try to harness those to talk to last Tuesday about tonight's lottery numbers. The trick is in analyzing the LHC data to find evidence of these retrograde time particles when none of their sensor arrays have been designed to look for them.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday May 20 2017, @01:03PM (5 children)
Instant communication would be a great Distant Early Warning system, but you're not going to get messages about where you are from the future.
Yes, you can, because "instant" is not well-defined. One person's "instant" is another's "into the future" and another's "back in time." All you have to do is set a chain of "instant" communication machines in the right reference frames and they can bounce messages back and forth as far back in time as you like.
Thanks to relativity, if it's 10am on Earth and 9am on a travelling spaceship (from the perspective of Earth), it can also be 9am on the travelling spaceship and 8am on Earth (from the perspective of the spaceship). So Earth sends the "instant" message at 10am Earth time, it's received at 9am ship time, immediately sent back out and arrives on Earth at 8am.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday May 20 2017, @05:18PM
Sounds wonky to me, and since it's based on things that are "impossible" in currently demonstrated theory, it's all just as verifiable and important as the turtles (all the way down.)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday May 20 2017, @11:29PM (3 children)
So, I just want to draw this one out, on phosphor screen as it were:
Assuming that "spooky action at a distance" happens "instantaneously" (whatever that means), I'm going to define 0:00 as "now" for two frames, A and B which are located 1 light hour apart, stationary with respect to each other.
At 1:00, the light from A at 0:00 is reaching B, and the light from B at 0:00 is reaching A. If spooky action at a distance could carry information, it could carry that light picture from A to B and B could see what A looks like at 0:00 right away at 0:00. No amount of bouncing back and forth will ever get any information about what A looks like at 1:00 back to A before 1:00. Draw in C and D, make it a 3D system, same thing applies, information about A at 1:00 will not reach anywhere before 1:00.
If you want to include relativistic motion, B could be orbiting a black hole at close proximity and be experiencing 50% time dilation. Light from A at 0:00 now reaches B at B's concept of 0:30 local time, but C - located just to the side of the black hole and not experiencing significant time dilation receives that A 0:00 light at C 1:00 perceived time. Just because B is only up to 0:30 local time doesn't give anyone "access to the future" - it just means that B is aging more slowly. A 1:00 information could be "spooky transmitted" to B, and in B's frame of reference it's only 0:30, but when B transmits that information back to A, it's still going to be A 1:00 + transmission delays, the spooky information transfer doesn't reach back in time. Or does it? This is all made up, anyway, no accepted theories believe in "spooky transmission of information," so, maybe we entangle some particles, split them up, put some in B and they "age" at half rate, then when A does spooky transmission, it reaches B at the "age matched" time - but, wait, B 1:00 is A 2:00, so, again, A can't get information about A 1:00 that way until A 2:00. Try it in reverse, now B's 1:00 information is pushed out to "time matched" A at 1:00, woo hoo, you've put information into the past because at A 1:00 B is only at 0:30, bounce that around a contrived chain and then pop the information across a conventional light speed communication channel and you've got information about the future of B back in B, but this is only assuming that the "instant communication" particles are affected by time dilation and then "instantly communicate" backwards and forwards in the instant time frame... seems doubly contrived.
Just think like Hollywood: time travel just works, now write a story around it and the consequences, don't get hung up in the details - be like Mary Shelly: "reverse the poles, minus to plus, plus to minus - Eeeeeeeeeeeeee its Aliiiiiiiiiiiive!"
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday May 21 2017, @10:37AM (2 children)
Sticking close to a black hole to keep your clock running slow is general relativity, not special relativity, and is not symmetrical (A sees B run slow, B sees A run fast).
If there is just simple relative motion, then it's as I described (A sees B run slow, B sees A run slow). The line of "now" from A intersects B at a certain point in B's time, but B's line of "now" from that point in time has a different angle to A's, and so intersects A at an earlier time (if distance is increasing; if decreasing, repeated messages end up in the future).
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday May 21 2017, @12:08PM (1 child)
The "simple relative motion" example always tossed around on pop-sci shows is: A is A "stationary". B accelerates away from A to relativistic speed, now B runs slow. B keeps on going in a loop at relativistic speeds (lots of acceleration there), then returns to A - the "interstellar traveler" from "B ship" has aged 1 year, but his family and friends on A have all been dead for a thousand. What I've never seen the pop-sci shows get into is "C ship" that tears off in the opposite direction of B, now C is moving even closer to the speed of light, relative to B, but if they both arrive back at A simultaneously, A is aged the same for both of them, but why are they the same age as each other?
I still love the concept that the photons leaving the surface of stars 10 billion years ago are arriving in our telescopes "instantly," unaged since they were emitted.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday May 21 2017, @06:11PM
B and the C are the same age because they've undergone identical accelerations. The one who ages the most is the one who took the straightest path from launch to meet-up - in this case A, because he didn't accelerate at all, he just let "meet-up" come to him. The other two took wiggly paths, but identically wiggly, so the amount of time experienced by themselves on their trip is the same.
During the constant relative motion parts (among all three of them), they all see the others' clocks runs slow. But during accelerations towards each other, there are times when others' clocks run fast.
Kind of... but the standard physicist answer to this is that photons don't have reference frames, so you can't consider anything from their "point of view" - they don't have one. The math does pretty clearly point in that direction, though.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk