Saturday, October 31, 2009

Quantum Entanglement Network

As an initial disclaimer, physicists have basically outright said that what this project proposes is impossible, on the grounds that no signal can be sent by this means. I'm not sure how much credence to give it, since a) they never include any actual math, and b) I probably wouldn't understand the math anyway. (In fact, most of it just states "well it violates relativity, therefore no.")
Quantum Entanglement is when two atoms are linked, and at all times maintain opposite spin values. (Atom's have a property called "spin," and the two states are arbitrarily called "up" and "down." For computer networking purposes, "up" is "1" and "down" is "0.") They manage to do this even if separated by considerable distance, in violation of relativity. (Relativity asserts that the speed of light, c, is the maximum possible speed for any thing, signal, or event.) Hypothetically, one can read the value of an atom's spin, at the cost of swapping the atom to the opposite state.
I'm seeing a network box with an RJ-45 jack, and an atom entangled with another box. They are then synchronized to read their respective atoms at a periodic rate, both at exactly the same time. There are two spin states, and my teachings in logic teaches that NOT NOT A is equal to A, therefore nullifying the effect of the read.
I'm not sure how writing to the atom would work, but reading it and discarding its state may be one way to do it.
Anyway, I can see a sci-fi galactic empire operating with these. Star ships each have an entanglement box somewhere in their internal network, linked to one in a big closet in the capital of the galactic empire. In the capital closet, the entanglement boxes are networked to both each other and to the national internet, allowing communication throughout the empire. Other nodes would connect to other planet's internets, thereby establishing the galacta-net.
Since quantum entanglement is instantaneous, all of the galactic empire can respond with a ping time of at most 2000ms. (And this assumes from the far side of one planet, to the far side of the capital planet.) The FTL allows the commerce and communication needed to maintain the galactic civilization. (So yes, when I sell three tons of nanocomputers, their credit card payment goes through, and I pay my taxes, and so on.)
As a secondary advantage, quantum entangled communications would be untraceable. Earthly military forces could decide not to bother with encryption, since it's literally impossible for the enemy to intercept the message: it's not there to intercept. Unless they steal the entanglement box itself, and any good soldier would make a point of destroying it if it came to that. A definite advantage over radio and such.
Perhaps this is a good basis in sci-fi, where one must bend certain rules to have an exciting narrative. I shall try to read up why this wouldn't actually work.

1 comment:

Chris said...

Saw this old post and it reminded me of an interesting article I read last year:

Quantum teleportation achieved over ten miles of free space

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