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Quantum Information Can be Negative
nerdlygirl writes "In a development that would probably even puzzle Claude Shannon,
information can be negative -- at least when the information is quantum.
The discovery, by
Horodecki, Oppenheim, and Winter, appears in the
current edition of the leading journal Nature.
If I tell you negative information, you'll know less. Apparently, researchers hope to use this to gain deeper insights into phenomena such as quantum teleportation and computation, as well as the very structure of the quantum world. More details can be found here and
here
A popular account of the article can be found on Oppenheim's
homepage, and a free version of the article can be found in the arxiv for those of us
without subscriptions to Nature."
If you were to place detectors so that you knew which slit the particle went through, the interference pattern would disappear-- that is, there would be no uncertainty in the position
Sounds like BS to me. How are the slits not detectors? Anything the particle interacts with in it's path is a "detector". The more I read stuff like this, and the longer we go without any real engineering based on it, the more I think some "researcher" is spending his NSF grant on the crack he's smoking.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The double slit experiment involves photons, not electrons.
;-)
Other than that you've taken a fairly simple experiment and explained it in such a manner that no one will be able to understand it.
The paradox can be very simply explained to the lay person.
The question to be resolved was, "Is light (photons) a particle or wave function?" In lay terms, does light travel in a straight line or in waves?
It turned out that if one tested for particles, one got results consistent with particles. On the other hand, if one tested for waves one got results consistent for wave functions.
In lay terms, this was a Major Mind Fuck for the scientific community. Theoretically particles either travelled in straight lines or in waves but not both. And certainly not based on the testing method.
What is ultimately uncovered is an even greater and far more interesting question: How can the results of a controlled experiment be affected by the observer?
Goggle the Internet for more info