Testing Quantum Behavior — From Earth to the ISS

KentuckyFC writes "Einstein famously believed that the instantaeous effect of quantum entanglement would allow 'spooky action-at-a-distance' in violation of special relativity. Every test of entanglement on Earth has so far agreed with quantum mechanics but naysayers continue to point out various loopholes that might allow the results of these experiments to be determined in advance rather than instantaneously as QM suggests. Today, an international team of scientists is proposing the mother of all entanglement experiments, to be performed in space. The plan is to send entangled photons between an observer on the ground and one on the International Space Station. By the peculiarities of special relativity, the high relative velocity between the observers means that both will always be able to claim to have carried out their measurement first, thereby ruling out the naysayers' arguments (abstract). The experiment, called Space-QUEST, would be housed aboard Europe's Columbus module and would give the much-derided ISS a stab at doing some decent science for a change."

Comments

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[Stooshie]

I posted this next week and it's still the first post.

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[rugatero]

No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!

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[Stooshie]

There's nothing to measure (until next week at least).

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[xalorous]

Last week's measurements should be arriving any moment now.

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[kclittle]

Frist posts like this are just sooooo tomorrow, don't you think?

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[Anonymous Coward]

It's a quote from Futurama. Professor Farnsworth is at the horse track and his horse looses at the photo finish.

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[Stooshie]

boinked!?!

WTF???

LOL!!!

Re:Post

[Anonymous Coward]

hehe! boink, boink, boink!

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[aikodude]

It's a quote from Futurama. Professor Farnsworth is at the horse track and his horse looses at the photo finish. actually it was a quantum finish. there'd be no problem with a photo finish.

Re:Post

[skuzzlebutt]

Your comment has been moderated: SqRt(-1): Will Be Insightful

Re:Post

[ailnlv]

That's a really complex rating system for comments

Re:Post

[Stooshie]

Yeh, you can be rated +1i funny and -1i Troll at the same time.

Slashdotted already?

[Thornburg]

Apparently the entangled photon link they were using to host the webpage couldn't hold up under the strain of Slashdot.

Re:Slashdotted already?

[andrewd18]

It was working fine until you tried to observe it.

Re:Slashdotted already?

[xalorous]

Leave that cat out of this? Oh, that's right. The Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment is related to the same hypothesis.

Re:Slashdotted already?

[morgan_greywolf]

No. It was and was not working until he tried to observe it. The probability cloud collapsed on one possibility: the cat^H^H^Hsite is dead.

Re:Slashdotted already?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Mr SchrÃdinger, a box arrived in the mail for you today, and I opened it. By the way, why would somebody send you dead cat?"

sounds more like a metaphysical question

[xalorous]

Kind of like the chicken and the egg.

Re:sounds more like a metaphysical question

[Anonymous Coward]

This question is not metaphysical.

First was egg.
It was produced by chicken's ancestor.

Re:sounds more like a metaphysical question

[morgan_greywolf]

First was egg.
It was produced by chicken's ancestor.

Nope. First was chicken. It was intelligently designed 6000 years ago to lay eggs.

Re:sounds more like a metaphysical question

[gnick]

First was egg.
It was produced by chicken's ancestor. Actually, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" is a trick question. The rooster's ancestor came first, thus enabling the chicken's ancestor to produce the first chicken egg. Otherwise, the egg would have been barren and appropriate for frying and application to toast.

Of course, other eggs had been around for a while...

Re:sounds more like a metaphysical question

[naasking]

First was egg.

Bzzt, wrong.

Re:sounds more like a metaphysical question

[naasking]

thus enabling the chicken's ancestor to produce the first chicken egg

The chicken's progenitor did not produce a 'chicken egg', by any meaningful definition of 'chicken egg'. So the chicken came first!

How do you entangle a photon in the first place?

[andyh3930]

Just that...

Could it be useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wondering if you could put one of the quantum photons in an optical switch, and perhaps use the the reading of the other photon to flip a bit. That might actually be useful. If this were viable, NASA could have something better than radio for their next generation of probes.

Now if they're only watching the thing bounce around randomly on its own, and it happens to be in synch with its paired photon - I'm not sure how useful that could be.

Re:Could it be useful?

[imstanny]

Just wondering if you could put one of the quantum photons in an optical switch, and perhaps use the the reading of the other photon to flip a bit. That might actually be useful. If this were viable, NASA could have something better than radio for their next generation of probes. Now if they're only watching the thing bounce around randomly on its own, and it happens to be in synch with its paired photon - I'm not sure how useful that could be. Now, can someone untangle the that for me?

Re:Could it be useful?

[YA_Python_dev]

Now if they're only watching the thing bounce around randomly on its own, and it happens to be in synch with its paired photon - I'm not sure how useful that could be. Not very useful for what you have in mind: even with funny quantum mechanics tricks you still can't transmit information faster than light.

Re:Could it be useful?

[locofungus]

I'm not sure what you are trying to suggest, but you can't use entangled photons to communicate faster than light.

I've not RTFA - it's down - but basically the EPR effect allows someone to create two photons and then measure if their polarization is H or V. The result is completely random BUT, both photons will always give the same result.

Now Alice measures her photon first and lets say we get H, then Bob's photon must instantaneously turn into H (previously it was a mixture of H and V - the dead and alive cat) so that when he measures his photon he also gets H.

What's already been done is to ensure that Alice and Bob decide what measurement to do, and make the measurement, so close to the same time that it's impossible for there to be any way for Bob's equipment or photon to "know" what Alice is going to do (or vice-versa) except at superluminal velocities.

But because Alice and Bob are in the same inertial frame there's still, at least in theory, a concept of who did the measurement first and who did it second. (Alice and Bob can have synchronized clocks and record the time they did the experiment. Then they can, using normal communication, tell each other what time they did the experiment and they'll both agree who was first and who was second.)

What this experiment will do is mean that Alice and Bob won't agree about who was first and who was second. Alice and Bob's clocks cannot remain synchronized, so that according to Alice, and people sitting next to her, she did the measurement first, but according to Bob, and people sitting next to him, he did the experiment first. And BOTH will be correct because the two measurements are space like rather than time like.

Tim.

Re:Could it be useful?

[SBacks]

He's suggesting using entanglement to communicate faster than light. I think he's forgetting that once your manipulate the photon, it will no longer be in sync with its pair.

Re:Could it be useful?

[locofungus]

What's already been done is to ensure that Alice and Bob decide what measurement to do, and make the measurement, so close to the same time that it's impossible for there to be any way for Bob's equipment or photon to "know" what Alice is going to do (or vice-versa) except at superluminal velocities.

Just to clarify this paragraph because I've realized it's confusing.

Alice and Bob both randomly decide to measure the H/V polarization or the +/- (45 degree) polarization.

Then they get together and compare results. Where one has measured H/V and the other +/- then they throw the results away because they don't tell them anything useful, but where they've made the same measurement they find they always get the same (or opposite) results.

It's when they make the measurement that neither they, nor their equipment or photon can "know" what the other is doing.

There's also something called Bell's inequality that basically proves that the results of all of Alice and Bob's possible cannot be "known" by the photon ahead of time. (no local hidden variables).

Tim.

Re:Could it be useful?

[SBacks]

I've never quite understood why this conflicts with GR. It seems like from Alice's perspective, when they both make their measurements, Bob is the superposition of having the same result or the opposite result. It is only after they communicate (restricted by the speed of light) that his results can be compared with hers and his superposition collapses. In other words, there are two measurements done by Alice, one of her photon, one of Bob, and they don't require any faster-than-light communication.

Am I missing something here?

Re:Could it be useful?

[Stooshie]

But I think the second part suggests that if you let your photon bounce around randomly, you may be able to know when it's in sync with it's pair thus knowing the phase of the paired photon.

At the other end, once the fixed photon is in phase it moves to the next "bit" in the message and waits for the pair to be in phase again before "transmitting" the next "bit".

Presumably this all takes place in something approaching nanoseconds.

Re:Could it be useful?

[SBacks]

But I think the second part suggests that if you let your photon bounce around randomly, you may be able to know when it's in sync with it's pair thus knowing the phase of the paired photon. But, you can't know when its in sync unless you measure it. And, once you do that, it will no longer be in sync.

Re:Could it be useful?

[camperdave]

Now Alice measures her photon first and lets say we get H, then Bob's photon must instantaneously turn into H (previously it was a mixture of H and V - the dead and alive cat) so that when he measures his photon he also gets H.

What's already been done is to ensure that Alice and Bob decide what measurement to do, and make the measurement, so close to the same time that it's impossible for there to be any way for Bob's equipment or photon to "know" what Alice is going to do (or vice-versa) except at superluminal velocities.

Schrodinger's cat was either alive all along, or dead all along. The only thing that changes is the knowledge of the observer, not the state of the observed. Similarly with the entangled photons. They are both going to be H polarized, or V polarized the entire time. It's just that the observers will not know which until they make the observation. It's not like Alice's photon somehow transmits an "I've been observed as H polarized" message to Bob's photon. These "both alive and dead" and "mixture of H and V" statements are euphemisms for "Unknown".

That is, unless I'm missing something fundamental.

Re:Could it be useful?

[BlueParrot]

I've never quite understood why this conflicts with GR

It doesn't (there are other points where GR and QM conflict, but entanglement is not one of them ). Einstein thought it did because he assumed that any such interaction would be deterministic and could hence be used for communication (THAT would break GR ). Essentially Einstein never liked the idea that the universe was based on randomness, hence the famous "god does not throw dice with the universe" quote. As a consequence he repeatedly tried to disprove quantum mechanics by inventing scenarios in which the random nature of QM would conflict with GR. The surprising, and somewhat ironic, outcome of his attempts was however new insights into quantum mechanical interactions that just seem to confirm the random nature of QM.

Also, to be pedantic about it, entanglement doesn't in principle imply that an interaction is quicker than the speed of light. You could alternatively claim that the interaction occurs with the speed of light, but the ENTIRE UNIVERSE ends up in an indeterminate state similar to that of Schrödinger's cat until you receive Alice's message. Thus you can keep interactions restricted to the speed of light ( locality ) but in order to do so you would have to throw out the notion that Alice exist when you do not hear from her ( realism ).

In practice throwing away realism would force you into a rather solipsist interpretation of reality which I think even Kant would have issues trying to accept, and thus most of the time we just stick with the much more comfortable notion of having a reality with instantaneous long distance interactions. If nothing else this is a lot easier to visualize than imagining the entire world entering a superposition of states until you receive Alice's message. From a purely physical point of view the two cases are indistinguishable however, so it doesn't really matter either way.

Re:Could it be useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

you are.
bell's inequality.
look it up.

Re:Could it be useful?

[alexander_1975]

It's not like Alice's photon somehow transmits an "I've been observed as H polarized" message to Bob's photon. These "both alive and dead" and "mixture of H and V" statements are euphemisms for "Unknown". That is, unless I'm missing something fundamental. Apparently, because that is in a way what is going on:

The both 'alive and dead' IS NOT an euphemism for unkown... A single system can be in a superposition of two states. In this case we are talking about a single system consisting of two photons. Measuring the state in a certain base on one side WILL collapse the wavefuntion of the entangled pare. See for example also the 'wheelers delayed choise experiment': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler's_delayed_choice_experiment
However, even if the system is 'pushed' into one of the eigenstates of the measurement machine, it can still not be used to transmit information faster then light.

Re:Could it be useful?

[michelcolman]

Isn't there a way to tell whether a photon qubit is still coherent or not? That might allow communication. For example, in an experiment where single photons (one at a time) were sent out that could go through either one of two openings, an interference pattern emerged suggesting that the photons actually went through both openings simultaneously (in different parallel universes, possibly). If a detector was added to figure out which opening the photons had taken, the interference pattern disappeared. If you can invent some kind of similar or different experiment that will give a different result for polarized and mixed state photons (for example, if I'm not making some fundamental mistake, the same setup with two openings but each opening equipped with a polarization filter), the ISS can act as the detector. Use a trickle of entangled photons while the ISS is or is not measuring the photons, and check whether an interference pattern comes out. If yes, they just transmitted (or are about to transmit?) a one. Otherwise, it's a zero. Although on second thought, this entire setup will probably count as a measurement for the quantum gods, they can't possibly be that easily fooled :-) By the way, I don't know anything about quantum mechanics other than what I picked up here and there...

Re:Could it be useful?

[TexVex]

Classical physics tells us that if you know the angle of polarization of a photon, then its chance of passing through a polarizer is the square of the cosine of the difference in angles between the photon and the polarizer. If you have a 45 degree photon, it will always pass a 45 degree polarizer, have a 50% chance of passing a 90 degree polarizer, and will never pass a 135 degree polarizer.

QM tells us that when you have two entangled photons and measure both of their polarizations, the chance the results will correlate is the square of the cosine of the difference in angles between the two polarizers . If you measure them at the same angle, the results always correlate. If you measure them at 45 degrees apart, the measurements correlate 50% of the time. If you measure them 90 degrees apart, the measurements never correlate (the results are always opposite). No matter how you look at it, this means either the results are predetermined at the time the photons are created based on the angles the polarizers will be at the time the measurements are taken, or that one measurement somehow influences the other later so the past isn't immutable.

Either way you look at it, it means the universe doesn't work the way we expect it to. If you're a glass-half-full person you want to believe in FTL and time travel, and if you're a glass-half-empty person then you think maybe the universe is deterministic.

That's why this stuff gets everyone who understands its implications all in a tizzy.

Re:Could it be useful?

[amnezick]

but if i sit on the moon and have alice and bob click a remote signal when they do their measurement i will be able to tell who was first and who was second because relativity simply sucks and time is only in the human mind.

Re:Could it be useful?

[brunascle]

they actually are both H and V polarized at the same time. you can think of them as just being "unknown" for the sake understanding why you cant use it to communicate faster than light, but it isnt what's actually going on.

we know this because in a quantum superposition, different possibilities in the superposition can interfere with other possibilities, making certain results more or less likely. this is shown by the double-slit experiment. shooting photons at a screen through two slits produced not two stripes like you'd expect, but several stripes. this is because each photon went through 2 waves of possibilities, one through each slit, and the waves then collided with each other, making certain ares of the screen more likely to be hit than others.

Re:Could it be useful?

[naasking]

That is, unless I'm missing something fundamental.

Your description of entanglement is known as a "hidden variable theory" of QM, and exactly what this experiment is trying to refute once and for all. QM really imply that the cat is both alive and dead.

Re:Could it be useful?

[wurp]

You have missed something fundamental.

Here is the issue:
If you assume, as you do, that the photon has some predetermined phase A (for angle), then the likelihood of it passing through a filter at another angle B is cos(A-B) * cos(A-B). Experiments testing this by passing photons through a filter at angle A (all photons that make it through have phase A) and measuring how many make it through a filter at angle B confirm it.

BUT, if the photon had an initial angle A, and Alice and Bob both have filters at the same angle B, EVERY TIME the photon with either pass through BOTH Alice and Bob's filter, or NEITHER Alice nor Bob's filter. That can't be explained by your classical model. It can only be explained by "spooky action at a distance".

(It can also be explained by assuming that the universe splits into two cases, one where the photon passes through both filters, and one where it passes through neither, and some mechanism that prevents communication between the universes. This is the many-worlds or relative-state formulation of quantum mechanics, discovered by Hugh Everett in 1957 but unpopular until many years later.)

IHA14YOBSIPBIANAP.

(I have a 14 year old BS in Physics, but I am not a physicist).

Re:Could it be useful?

[locofungus]

That is, unless I'm missing something fundamental.

Yes, you're missing something fundamental.

Going back to one photon.

We'll have four polarization states H, V (the normal horizontal and vertical polarization) and +, - the 45 degree polarizations.

Now Alice produces a stream of H photons and sends them to Bob. Now if Bob measures to see if they're H/V then he will always get H.

But if Bob measures if they're +/- he'll get 50/50 + and -, with each individual photon being + or - at random.

After measuring +/-, if Bob then remeasures H/V he'll again get 50/50 H and V. The measuring of +/- destroys the knowledge about H/V

If Bob measures at an angle other than 45 degrees then he'll get different proportions but he'll get sin^2 theta with one polarization and cos^2 theta with the other polarization.

Now lets consider entangled photons that will always give the same result for Alice and Bob. Initially we'll assume that Alice will always measure the horizontal polarization (0 degrees) Now lets consider that the photon "knows in advance" whether it will go through a horizontal polarizer i.e. it has (an infinite number) of hidden variables. Regardless of what measurement Bob does, an ensemble of photons can distribute values amongst these hidden variables so that Bob gets the expected correlations relative to Alice and the angle of his measurement.

But now let Alice vary her angle as well. Now the correlation depends on the difference in angle between Alice and Bob. But that angle isn't known (and hasn't even been decided) at the point the photon has been created. It could have a big "look up table" saying "If Alice angle is n and Bob angle is m then do/don't go through Alice's filter and do/don't go through Bob's filter BUT the photon that arrives at Bob's detector has to know what measurement Alice will/has done and the photon that arrives at Alice's detector has to know what measurement Bob will/has done.

But because Alice and Bob independently randomly decide what angle to measure "long" after the photon was created and their independent decisions are made so close together in time that neither can know what the other has/will do when they make their measurement due to the speed of light limit then there is no way for the photon to use its "lookup table" and get the correct statistical results.

It doesn't matter how you construct that "lookup table", unless you allow some sort of faster than light communication, using the lookup table will give different results to QM.

If you want the formal maths for that bit of hand waving then lookup Bell's inequality. He actually deduced the inequality that could be tested to prove no local hidden variable theorem was consistent with the results of QM based on measuring particle spins while most of the tests that have been done have used polarization of photons but the underlying theory is the same.

These experiments have already been done, and Bell's inequality has come down on the side of QM. Because Alice and Bob make their measurements so close together in time, not all observers will agree which one is first but (perhaps unfortunately) Alice and Bob will agree who was first and who was second. What this experiment does is close even that loophole - even Alice and Bob will be unable to agree who made the first measurement and who made the second.

Tim

Re:Could it be useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm afraid you're missing something fundamental.

Re:Could it be useful?

[fph il quozientatore]

I've not RTFA Don't even try, if you read TFA you'll observe it, and therefore you'll modify it!

Re:Could it be useful?

[tzanger]

How on earth do you transport these photons to two separate locations without their container affecting them?

Re:Could it be useful?

[Artifakt]

The observer in the Schrodinger's Cat 'paradox' is the first particle to come in contact with the cat (typically a photon). If you define the entangled quantum state as the cat plus the apparatus then it's typically an Infrared photon passing through the air inside the box, and if you define the entangled state as the whole box, then it's typically a photon in the room. The 'observer' could be an electron orbiting one atom in the table top supporting the box, or various other possibilities. That's what QM means by observation, not a living entity, or a self aware entity with memory, or a self aware entity with memory actually trained in Quantum Physics. The first particle outside whatever you've already defined as an un-collapsed state vector, that interacts with it, reifies the state vector. An un-reified state vector with the mass of a cat 'collapses' in an extremely tiny fraction of a second.
          The only known way to prolong this is by extremely low temperature methods, where something with the mass of a cat could theoretically be a Bose-Einstein condensate and not one of the three classical states of matter.

Re:Could it be useful?

[locofungus]

Realise I've not really answered this.

Bob can't be in a superposition of the two results because Alice's measurement has already determined what result he must have got. If Alice sends a polarized photon (that she's created and knows the polarization) to Bob then she knows what result Bob will get if he measures the same polarization even if Bob doesn't know what measurement to make and just makes a random guess.

The speed of light prohibits Alice from knowing whether Bob actually bothered to do the experiment until later but Alice knows in advance, provided Bob hadn't taken a coffee break, what result Bob got, even though, from Bob's POV, his result was completely random.

i.e. Alice and Bob can have a random number generator that can simultaneously generate the same stream of random numbers at opposite ends of the universe and yet nobody can predict what the next random number will be until Alice and Bob makes their measurement.

(Of course, in the simple random number example, the results could be explained by a local hidden variable but we can design experiments where a local hidden variable cannot explain the results)

Tim.

Re:Could it be useful?

[michelcolman]

So this does allow faster than light communication, right? If Bob modulates his angle, Alice will be able to tell.

Re:Could it be useful?

[locofungus]

No.

They can't communicate using this.

Alice can't tell if Bob modulates his angle. Alice and Bob can't even agree who made the measurement first which makes it kind of hard to imagine how they can use it to communicate.

Alice measures her photon and gets one of two results completely at random.
Bob measures his photon and gets one of two results completely at random.

When they get together they discover that, although their individual result were random, their combined results display a correlation related to the relative angle of the polarizations they measured.

Tim.

Re:Could it be useful?

[locofungus]

You let them go there on their own. Photons have this innate ability to go places at the speed of light without having to put them in a box and carry them there.

Yes, there is a problem with them interacting with the environment and decohering but that's an engineering problem rather than a physics problem. Provided you're not sending them too far then most will get through without issue.

In any formal experiment you have to allow for the probability of decohering - and so you don't expect 100% correlation. The trick is to get that probability low enough that the errors don't swamp the signal.

Tim.

Re:Could it be useful?

[0xABADC0DA]

QM conflicts with GR in the same way that for example scan-converting a line segment produces a solid line when you step back, but produces "ladders" and "jaggies" at a pixel scale. You can generalize about formulas for lines, but that is not going to explain the value of a particular pixel.

But more to the point, entanglement is like a pointer. If you have "p = q = &val" and send p to the space station and q on earth and measure *p and *q there are no superposition of states or multiple universes or faster than light travel. There is only the dereference.

Ok sure the 'universe is a simulation' may not be predictive, but as a mental framework maybe it helps to make sense of QM. Like particles being miniature solar systems did until we learned more.

Re:Could it be useful?

[locofungus]

That might allow communication.

Never!

Faster than light communication violates causality - A causes B but B happens before A. It's just absurd.

If you think you've found a way around the speed of light limit then there's something you don't understand yet.

Tim.

Re:Could it be useful?

[Remus Shepherd]

And there's the rub, and the reason why people are still trying to prove QM after a hundred years. The equations appear to indicate that one of the following MUST BE FALSE:

1. Quantum Mechanics.
2. Locality.
3. Realism.

All the experiments performed so far strongly support QM, so we can't dismiss that. If locality is false then we have Einstein's spooky action at a distance and a conflict with GR. If realism is false...then nobody knows where the hell we are, or what we are.

But one of them *has* to be wrong. All these experiments are trying to prove is which one.

Re:Could it be useful?

[Lijemo]

We'll have four polarization states H, V (the normal horizontal and vertical polarization) and +, - the 45 degree polarizations. Now Alice produces a stream of H photons and sends them to Bob. Now if Bob measures to see if they're H/V then he will always get H. But if Bob measures if they're +/- he'll get 50/50 + and -, with each individual photon being + or - at random. After measuring +/-, if Bob then remeasures H/V he'll again get 50/50 H and V. The measuring of +/- destroys the knowledge about H/V

What I found fascinating was seeing this demonstrated to the naked eye using polarized lenses.

When two polarized lenses are placed next to each other at 90 degree angles, no light gets through, because all wavelengths are being blocked.

However, putting a third polarized lens between them at 45 degrees to both makes the group transparent again-- like looking through shaded glass, some of the light was blocked, but not all.

Completely counter-intuitive. I'd have had a hard time believing it without playing with the lenses myself.

Re:Could it be useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

In practice throwing away realism would force you into a rather solipsist interpretation of reality which I think even Kant would have issues trying to accept, and thus most of the time we just stick with the much more comfortable notion of having a reality with instantaneous long distance interactions. If nothing else this is a lot easier to visualize than imagining the entire world entering a superposition of states until you receive Alice's message. From a purely physical point of view the two cases are indistinguishable however, so it doesn't really matter either way. Man, I get one heck of headache every time my teenager is talking on her FTL cell phone with that guy from Alpha Centuri she met at VR summer camp. Being constantly tossed in and out of superposition can't be good for you... probably causes brain cancer, but the intergalatic telecom folks have scientists in their pocket who say it's safe.

Re:Could it be useful?

[evilviper]

Essentially Einstein never liked the idea that the universe was based on randomness, hence the famous "god does not throw dice with the universe" quote. As a consequence he repeatedly tried to disprove quantum mechanics by inventing scenarios in which the random nature of QM would conflict with GR. The surprising, and somewhat ironic, outcome of his attempts was however new insights into quantum mechanical interactions that just seem to confirm the random nature of QM.

This Disney-esque version of history is forced into an oversimplified mentality, to the point of being nonsense. It's not like Einstein was some old, irrational curmudgeon, where QM was concerned.

Einstein disagreed with QM early on, when it was still in it's infancy. He did not really try to disprove it, per se, so much as he just repeatedly extrapolated, based on the known data, different QM scenarios that seemed to apparently conflict with GR. This led to research and improvements to the theory of QM, to the point that Einstein was eventually satisfied. So much so that trying to unify GR and QM took up the last several years of his life.

Re:Could it be useful?

[michelcolman]

I suppose you're right. I was actually going to say you were wrong, but came to my senses while I was writing why :-) In itself, communicating with someone in the past would not have to violate causality as long as this person could not affect *your* past. If you send a message to someone now, he received it last week (many light years away), sent back the reply last week, and you receive it now (shortly after you sent the original message), causality is not affected. Even better, if you start moving towards or away from him at a sufficiently high speed, he will suddenly be in the future anyway. Big deal, so I thought. But then I figured it would be trivial to set up more than one connection, with different time differences, send a question with one link and have the reply sent via another link... So yes, you are right :-)

Re:Could it be useful?

[camperdave]

When they get together they discover that, although their individual result were random, their combined results display a correlation related to the relative angle of the polarizations they measured.

Of course. The entangled photons are images of each other. If I measure one, the other is going to have a related value. So it doesn't matter who measures what first, or if one measures and the other doesn't. Once one is known, the other is known.

Re:Could it be useful?

[frogzilla]

I'm pretty sure that the cat in the box thing is usually taken the wrong way. It was probably meant to show something was wrong with the interpretation rather than to suggest the cat was somehow both alive and dead. Cats are not both alive and dead.

Re:Could it be useful?

[The_Wilschon]

The particulars of quantum non-locality don't conflict with relativity, which doesn't strictly require locality, but merely causality. Causality and locality are generally conflated because having locality gives you causality. But, certain ways of breaking locality don't screw up causality, and quantum non-locality is one of them. You can't transmit any information non-locally using quantum effects, in essence.

Re:Could it be useful?

[locofungus]

Cats are not both alive and dead.

Exactly. But QM says they are.

H polarized photon = Cat dead. V polarized photon = Cat alive. 45 degree polarized photon = Cat dead, 135 degree polarized photon = Cat alive.

Until Alice and Bob make their measurements we really do find that the cat is both dead and alive.

But what does "measurement" mean? If we really were using dead/alive cats to do this experiment (currently we lack the ability to keep something the size of a cat in a superposition of states) then presumably the cat knows if it's alive. But where/how does this stop. If not a cat, what about a mouse? An amoeba? A virus? A protein? an O2 molecule? An atom? An electron?

I think currently we're up to the atom or small molecule point with still no sign of QM breaking down.

There are ways around these conceptual problems, many worlds being one.

Tim.

Re:Could it be useful?

[TexVex]

But more to the point, entanglement is like a pointer. If you have "p = q = &val" and send p to the space station and q on earth and measure *p and *q there are no superposition of states or multiple universes or faster than light travel. There is only the dereference.

No, that's not a correct analogy. You're basically just saying "it's hidden variables" in programmer speak. But Bell's Theorem proves that no theory of local hidden variables can explain all the things we observe.

Re:Could it be useful?

[jamesswift]

One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can't cope with...
The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.
Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.

Re:Could it be useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

realism (i.e. conterfactual definiteness) being false is one of the tenets of the many-worlds interpretation, arguably the simplest interpretation of QM (and possibly the one most physicists believe in today).

Re:Could it be useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I remember right this is useful for FTL communication, but I forget how the argument goes. I am hoping Tim can explain that one too while he is at it.

Re:Could it be useful?

[kmac06]

Double-slit-type interference has been observed with buckyball, and some biological molecule that is larger or on the same scale as buckyball, but the name of this molecule escapes me at the moment...

Re:Could it be useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, "hidden variables" refers to information being carried with that which is observed, the particle. That's why they say "local variable". What I am referring to is particles in physically different locations having shared state (ie, the variable referenced exists outside of normal space and time, ie it can be thought of as a function of a simulation). Or, in other words "spooky action at a distance".

In pretty much every case imaginable the programming model corresponds to quantum mechanics, including pointers. Yeah, it's not predictive so it doesn't help answer the questions about the universe, but it can help to ask the right questions.

Re:Could it be useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

IANAP(hysicist). However from my armchair position, it seems glaringly obvious that physicists are overlooking the possibility that the value being measured is predetermined when the photons are first entangled.

(Bad) Analogy: Suppose I take two gyro platters and link them somehow before spinning clockwise or counter clockwise. I separate them, but they're both spinning the same direction. I put them in a box that says "this end up" and send one to LA and the other to NY. Some dude in LA opens the box and notices that the gyro is spinning clockwise. Would it really surprise anyone that the gyro in NY is spinning the same direction?

That's how I see the photon entanglement thing: there's some "inertial" force (yes, I know that's not the best choice of wording given the circumstances) keeping the photons "in sync". So I'm curious if they'll even get consistent results measuring the two photons in different relativistic frames -- it could be like opening the second gyro while riding a roller coaster (so to complete the bad analogy, it may also matter how big the gyro is compared to the roller coaster hehe).

Re:Could it be useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with determinism? And there's no evidence whatsoever for any theory being supported over another in metaphysical/epistemological problems like this. For all we know it might all be dancing purple monkey-monsters.

~~panpsychism for the win~~ haha...

Re:Could it be useful?

[locofungus]

It ISN'T useful for FTL communication.

FTL communication is IMPOSSIBLE. It VIOLATES CAUSALITY.

What that means, in plain English, is that A can cause B but B can happen before A.

This is hard to grasp because we believe in a universal time and a preferred reference frame. But however intuitive that might be we've got to let go and accept the fact that we can have two events where it's impossible to decide which happened first and which happened second.

Tim.

Re:Could it be useful?

[locofungus]

Physicists aren't overlooking this at all.

This is called a local hidden variable theory.

Back in the 1960's (1969 IIRC) Bell proved that it doesn't matter how you design your hidden variable theory, there are experiments that will give different results from what QM predicts.

The most famous of these experiments was done by Aspect in 1982. He found that the results were compatible with QM and incompatible with ANY local hidden variable theory.

Ever since then people have been trying to come up with theories that can explain the EPR effect. Causality going backwards in time, many worlds, but, to date, nobody has come up with any (even theoretical) experiment that can give us any handle on what might really be happening "under the hood".

And a few people have been looking for loopholes in the various experiments that would mean that a hidden variable theory could still be true.

Tim.

Re:Could it be useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, you seem to know this stuff, so I was wondering this:

is it possible to only measure H or V?

I don't know so much about this but had an idea related to communication utilizing that.

Do you know if there is some forum where to ask these kind of questions? Do you have a blog?

Re:How do you entangle a photon in the first place

[Daimanta]

Scientist used Entangle!

It's super effective!

Photon capture device go!

You entangled a photon!

It was added to your photondex.

Re:How do you entangle a photon in the first place

[alexander_1975]

You entangle 2 photons, f.e. by creating them at the same time from the same decay-process.

Derision

[OpenSourced]

would give the much-derided ISS a stab at doing some decent science for a change

That won't necessarily help with the derision, as nobody denies the fact that interesting experiments are possible in space. The main point of contention will still be if you need to keep live persons there continuously to perform them. It'd have to be shown that a satellite or a simple orbiting mission couldn't have performed the same experiments for a fraction of the total costs.

Re:Derision

[camperdave]

It'd have to be shown that a satellite or a simple orbiting mission couldn't have performed the same experiments for a fraction of the total costs.

Well, the real question would be how many experiments do we neeed to do aboard the ISS before it becomes cheaper than sending up mission after mission after mission.

Re:Derision

[YA_Python_dev]

You surely can save money on the purely scientific part of the ISS by removing the human presence. If you are fine with the possibility of humanity never leaving his cradle.

But the ISS is not only about science, it's also about engineering and learning how to live for long periods off the world (the MIR was pioneer, but its design and MO would be too dangerous to use beyond Earth's orbit). The next target will be the Moon and then probably Mars, but we had to learn how to walk before we can run.

Re:Derision

[Colonel Korn]

would give the much-derided ISS a stab at doing some decent science for a change

That won't necessarily help with the derision, as nobody denies the fact that interesting experiments are possible in space. The main point of contention will still be if you need to keep live persons there continuously to perform them. It'd have to be shown that a satellite or a simple orbiting mission couldn't have performed the same experiments for a fraction of the total costs. The cost of the ISS program is already ridiculously small, and the #1 thing that gets people interested in space at a young age, and in a lasting way, is the idea of people going into space.

I think it's like a zoo. Maybe the animals inside are being held in some sort of unfair captivity (I tend to think that in modern zoos most animals are pretty satisfied, but let's not go into that), but the interest and money generated by those animals creates the world's largest resource for saving their wild relatives.

Even if the ISS is never used in a way that provides more direct scientific knowledge per euro than unmanned missions, I believe it's worth it in the long term.

Re:Derision

[khallow]

I don't see it that way. By squandering money on a vastly inefficient toy rather than genuine space development, we've increased the chances that humanity never leaves the cradle. Here's the sort of questions that I think we should ask about any future large-scale NASA project:

1. Is there a coherent justification for the project? ISS fails here. Your post gives an example. We're burning over $150 billion dollars (through 2016) for somewhere around 100 man-years in space. Assuming it all works out. That's a big price tag for human presence and limited engineering experience.
2. Is there a better way to accomplish the same goal? For example, we could have completed a MIR equivalent by now for far less than the ISS, have phased out use of the Space Shuttle, and be ahead in scientific research. Plus, we'd have the research available to justify an ISS-scale station assuming it were warranted at this time.
3. Does this goal boost the US's presence in space? I see two criteria: a) Does it encourage more commercial activity in space from US business, b) Does it add useful infrastructure appropriate to the level of cost. ISS fails on both counts.

but we had to learn how to walk before we can run.

In my view, the ISS indicates that NASA isn't taking your advice. It has a long history of great leaps in manned space exploration: the Apollo program, Shuttle, ISS, Ares V. When will they try to "learn how to walk"?

Re:Derision

[WhoIsThePumaman]

It's also about hope. By showing everyone that it's possible to work together and create an installation in space we're inspiring children everywhere, much like landing on the moon did. The ISS is valuable even just for its inspiration and hope given to all those interested in science.

Re:Derision

[Anonymous Coward]

You surely can save money on the purely scientific part of the ISS by removing the human presence. If you are fine with the possibility of humanity never leaving his cradle. I saved money on the scientific part of the ISS by switching to Geico!

Re:Derision

[Anonymous Coward]

The main point of contention will still be if you need to keep live persons there continuously to perform them

You can. But sooner or later, the shit hits the fan. Literally. And then it's all over.

Spooky

[mburns]

Remember that Niels Bohr denied that such a test of nonlocality was possible. Einstein had said that this phenomenon was "incredible" in his "EPR" article, thus rejecting his own prediction. And Bohr replied in effect that such things were taboo metaphysics.

Re:Spooky

[orangesquid]

I am not a physicist, but it seems to me that this experiment could raise some interesting possibilities, multiple ones of which could be simultaneously true. (1) Quantization is much more complex than thought, occurs on multiple levels, relies on several decoherence phenomena, and Schroedinger's equation is a special case of something else. (2) Special relativity is quantized and has its own decoherence, and is also a special case of some larger system. (3) Quantum statistics do rely on hidden variables, and these hidden variables are so numerous as to be immeasurable and have their own special behavior involving a decoherence phenomenon that is different from previously observed forms of decoherence. (4) The notion of information, as we understand it, is a special case of something much more complicated. (5) Quantized spin is a special case of something else not before seen in experiments. (6+) Other things.

No matter what, it should yield some new ideas and possible ways to investigate ToEs, GUTs, and high-energy physics orders of magnitude larger than anything we have any idea about to date.

Re:Spooky

[mburns]

I could have mentioned that Jauch is a physicist who spoke of quantum states as a kind of categorical proposition. Now, categorical propositions are not the same kind of stuff as the pure geometry of spacetime. So the upholding of nonlocality does show the existence of a separate system other than general relativity.

Re:Spooky

[kmac06]

And then John Bell showed such a test was possible, and then the experiments were done. If this experiment is done, no (serious, mainstream) scientist will be surprised by the results. These sorts of experiments are just done to verify what we essentially already know to be true. However this experiment is really cool (has some global quantum key distribution stuff in it if you read the proposal), and of course the question isn't always what the results will be if it's done, but if it can be done at all.

And to think..

[Paranatural]

I just thought Space Quest was an amusing and juvenile way to waste time as a teenager.

Re:And to think..

[truthsearch]

Roger Wilco!

Still a naysayer

[DaveInAustin]

This will be really neat, but do we need to have people on the space station to do this experiment? It's not like someone going to be observing the photons with his or her eye and agreeing or disagreeing with the an observer on the ground?

Space Quest?

[Dan! Dan! Dan!]

I hope they remember to save their results often.

Re:Space Quest?

[LordKaT]

I hope there's at least one incompetent janitor involved to save the universe when these photons morph into door to door insurance salesmen.

Or, at the very least, they remembered to take jockstrap from locker.

Re:Space Quest?

[Stooshie]

I prefer mild mannered janitors that save the world. ;-)

(Get that reference and I can probably age you to within 5 years).

Re:Space Quest?

[chriseyre2000]

Could be

Re:Space Quest?

[aproposofwhat]

Mild mannered janitors?

Phooey!

'spooky action-at-a-distance'

[Anonymous Coward]

>> 'spooky action-at-a-distance'

Rodney Dangerfield: I got some of that 'spooky action-at-a-distance' last week. I tried to pick up this girl at a Halloween party. I said "Hey baby, your place or mine"? She told me "Both".

Robust enough?

[Thelasko]

As I understand it, a quantum entangled photon is very fragile. I don't understand how or why it's fragile, but wouldn't that make this extraordinarily difficult to do? The trip to the ISS is pretty bumpy.

Re:Robust enough?

[SBacks]

Its pretty bumpy for a giant spacecraft pushing itself through the atmosphere. It shouldn't be as bumpy for a single photon.

Plus, I assume they'll be using hundreds or thousands of photons over the coarse of the experiment, even if 90%+ are affected on the trip there, it will leave plenty of data points undamaged.

Re:Robust enough?

[Thuktun]

Plus, I assume they'll be using hundreds or thousands of photons over the coarse of the experiment An experiment involving entangled photons is hardly likely to be coarse.

Re:Robust enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

As I understand it, a quantum entangled photon is very fragile. I don't understand how or why it's fragile, but wouldn't that make this extraordinarily difficult to do? The trip to the ISS is pretty bumpy. Why is this marked informative? Didn't RTFA?
http://arxivblog.com/?p=317

Re:Robust enough?

[canavan]

They aren't going to ship the photons in a Sojuz or the Shuttle (in a highly reflective box?), instead they'll probably be using a laser or similar device to send the entagled photon directly to the ISS. The ride is still bumpy with the atmosphere between the sender and receiver, but it's probably manageable, as demonstarated in this experiment, sending photons over 144km. They explicitly mention that this proves the feasibility of the ground to ISS experiment.

Re:Robust enough?

[Thelasko]

that deserves mod up right there.

In order to get to the bottom of this....

[SGDarkKnight]

they will need to enlist the help of Roger Wilco.

Re:In order to get to the bottom of this....

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you need a janitor?

Re:In order to get to the bottom of this....

[Stooshie]

they will need to enlist the help of Roger Wilco

Actually, I'd prefer it if it was Seargant Bilco

Science coverage on /. is crappy

[YA_Python_dev]

Coverage of science news on slashdot is very often crappy, but we see the worst when it comes to space news.

would give the much-derided ISS a stab at doing some decent science for a change.

"For a change"?!?! Where the hell are you getting your informations about the science done on the ISS? On Fox News? There is *a lot* of science done on the ISS: literally hundreds of small, medium and big experiments have already been completed and the rate is increasing now with the European and Japanese labs on board and will increase even more starting next year with crews of six people.

Sure it would be nice to do even more, and sure the costs are high (in part due to the STS, a nice but incredibly inefficient LV), but all this group-thinking about the "white elephant" ISS is akin to saying that kernel programming is easy. It's stupid, flat wrong and insulting for the people that get a lot of good work and science done.

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[Anonymous Coward]

Any special reason why you feel the need to deride Fox News? Because they do not portray cases as you would like to have them portrayed?

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[robert899]

would give the much-derided ISS a stab at doing some decent science for a change.

"For a change"?!?! Where the hell are you getting your informations about the science done on the ISS? On Fox News? Where the hell are you getting your information about science reporting on Fox News? The Daily Kos?

Fox reports science news just as well as other MSM outlets.

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Fox News is a deliberately biased organization that trumpets its "fair and balanced" nature - and that is only the first inaccuracy you see in every broadcast? Nobody to the left of Tony Snow has any respect for Fox News as a journalistic enterprise (hell, Tony Snow - one of their so-called "fair and balanced" broadcasters - was hired by the White House to be their spokesman - because he was so good at communicating the Republican message! If the Clinton White House had hired Ted Koppel, the right would be all over it). Fox Sports, maybe; Fox News, no.

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[cybrpnk2]

Oh, dude, you've gotten me started. I worked on Space Station in the early 1990s and still haven't recovered from the bad taste that experience has left in my mouth. Political boondoggle white elephant doesn't even begin to cover what a stupid mess the ISS is. The only thing worse than setting it up in its shuttle-payload-upmass-hostile 57 degree inclined orbit to allow Russian participation is totally cutting off Shuttle participation in 2010. ISS was DESIGNED for Shuttle resupply during its lifetime and that resupply was first strangled and then totally cut off. Soyuz and Orion taking astronauts to this thing is a joke, and doing resupply by Jules Verne is a criminal waste. The dirty little secret about ISS is that at full mass and max solar array deployment upon completion, this thing is going to deorbit even faster from atmospheric drag than it is now and no way can Progress or Jules Verne is keep the completed assembly reboosted - only the Shuttle could. Do your homework about how far that thing fell during the years following Columbia when no shuttle visited, and that's without the full solar arrays. Once the Shuttle stops going, ISS is heading straight for the Pacific even if it takes a few years to deorbit and get there. And secretly if not in public, NASA will breathe a sigh of relief when it splashes. But I digress. Nobody even knows anymore how much ISS costs anymore because of crooked accounting hiding the drawing of funds from everywhere within NASA, but nobody argues it's at least $100 billion dollars. I cannot prove an absence of good science. Instead, YOU tell ME what the top three discoveries on ISS have been. Hell, just tell me one thing we have learned on ISS that we didn't already know. "Bones decalcify in zero G"? This was new info worth $100 billion?

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[Anonymous Coward]

>Where the hell are you getting your information about science reporting on Fox News? The Daily Kos?
>Fox reports science news just as well as other MSM outlets.

There's something about Fox News. I don't watch Fox News on TV, nor do I read it online, but sometimes if I post an opinion slightly to the right of Stalin, all of a sudden I'm accused of drinking the Fox Kool-aid.

Captcha: fascism

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[Falkkin]

If you want good coverage of space/astronomy news, I recommend the Bad Astronomy Blog:

http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/

Speaking of which, Phil Plait (the "Bad Astronomer") is also no fan of the ISS. From his article on this same experiment:

"So some European scientists came up with the idea of using the International Space Station (I know! Using ISS for science! Wow!) to test this out."

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[Artifakt]

Of course this will get moderated off topic (and should) but I can't resist.
1, Fox News actually went to court and won an advance judgment that said, even if it could be shown that the newscasters had deliberately lied about a concealed source being reasonably unbiased, and it was proved that the source actually worked for a political party and was paid to make the claims that it made, Fox would still be protected by the normal laws about concealing the identity of sources and this situation wouldn't constitute possible malice with respect to libel laws. Name another news agency that has even sought such a protection.
2. In 2002, there was a study of the media where the only thing that was examined was accuracy of attribution. That is, if a news source quoted a person and said that person was a lawyer in the state of New Jersey, the study checked to see if the person was really liscenced before the New Jersey Bar at the time. If they said a source was a Vice President at a fortune 500 company, the study checked to see two things - was that company really in the 500, and was the guy's title really VP and not Assistant VP or similar. NPR and BBC both scored in the 3.8 to 4 out of a possible 5 range. PRI, MSNBC and ABC ran somewhere near the middle. Where did Fox score? 2.2 - right next to Al-Jazera!

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[YA_Python_dev]

I agree with a few of your points, but:

The dirty little secret about ISS is that at full mass and max solar array deployment upon completion, this thing is going to deorbit even faster from atmospheric drag than it is now and no way can Progress or Jules Verne is keep the completed assembly reboosted - only the Shuttle could. WTF? An ATV can give to the ISS a bigger dV than the Shuttle, especially if you consider all the propellant for the boosters on the Zvezda module that an ATV can bring and the STS doesn't. But I agree that the downmass capability of the Shuttle (or something equivalent) would be useful even after 2010.

Nobody even knows anymore how much ISS costs anymore because of crooked accounting hiding the drawing of funds from everywhere within NASA, but nobody argues it's at least $100 billion dollars. This is an often-cited figure, because it's a nice round number, but it's for the whole project from 1990 to 2017 and including all the activities on Earth. IMHO it's money well-spent for 27 of engineering and science (yes, I know, we are just getting started with science, give them the opportunity to demonstrated its value after the station is completed).

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Fox reports science news just as well as other TV outlets.

Forgive my modification to your quote, but I think that print offers better coverage of science issues. And while Fox News may report science news as well as CNN does, an astrologer reports as much science as either one of them as well. Fox News is crap. If other TV channels are also crap, well, good job my friend, you're still watching crap.

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[gregbot9000]

Why do they need to put it on the ISS any way? Isn't there another side to the planet that we could work on? Or is it just easier to go to space than try and do science in China?

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[cybrpnk2]

The Jules Verne used the remainder of its unused docking fuel to raise ISS less than 5 km, and that one time kick that cannot be counted on to be there every time. Docking fuel is supposed to be allocated to docking, not reboost, during mission planning. JV also transferred less than a ton of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide to Zevzda. THis is primarily intended for attitude control, not reboost. Even if it wasn't, final completed weight of ISS in 2010 is slated to be 460 tons, so fuel being transferred from JV to Z will be only 1/460 of total ISS mass. When I get home from work today I'll get my textbooks out and calculate delta V between two concentric circular orbits at 300 and 320 km and then use ideal rocket equation to figure up the required specific impulse to get said delta V from a 1:460 mass fraction, but I already know the answer in my heart - Zvezda ain't runnin' that hydrazine thru no ion drive. This totally ignores that it is even dumber to launch resupply to a 57 degree Russian space station from an equatorial European launch site on an expendable rocket than it is from a 28 degree American launch site in Florida on a reusable one. Do the math. Houston, after 2010, we have a problem.

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[CowboyNealOption]

ISS is estimated to cost $158 billion by 2017 (according to wikipedia, the source of all knowledge; I assume the US isn't paying for all of it). Current cost of the war in Iraq is over $500 billion (US is paying for all of that). Each person can decide for himself/herself which is the bigger waste of money, but the chances of something positive coming from the ISS is considerably greater in my opinion.

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[khallow]

I agree with the accusation that the ISS is a white elephant. Your claim of "hundreds" of experiments is padded by a considerable number of low value experiments such as archiving (in addition to the regular sampling if I read the list correctly) fluid and tissue samples from the crew of each expedition (there have been 17 returned expeditions so far, hence, 17 "experiments"). Let's put this in perspective. By the time the ISS has run through 2016, it'll have consumed around $150-160 billion between NASA and the other participants. This includes a decade or so of the Space Shuttle which we could have phased out in 2000 or earlier, if it wasn't for the ISS. Even after completion, it'll cost almost $2 billion dollars a year to maintain.

In comparison. including launch costs the MIR station cost a few billion and the first serious NASA proposal in the mid-80's was around $12 billion in today's dollars, including launches. If NASA had gone with a scaled down station, it would have been completed years ago and generating a similar quantity of useful science (over its lifetime) for a small fraction of the cost of the ISS. The high maintenance cost means that there's a good chance that it'll be cheaper to splash the ISS and launch a new station, than to leave the ISS up there. Finally, I think it's clear that the primary purpose of the ISS has always been to extend the lifespan of the Shuttle (and deliver public funds to NASA contractors) rather to do anything useful in space. In that, it has been remarkably successful.

I find it odd that ISS supporters have to resort to the numbers game and other vague arguments (like lauding the value of "international cooperation"). If you can't find 5 or so big reasons that justify the ISS, you're not going to make up the difference with thousands of mediocre ones. What justifies almost $2 billion a year in maintenance and the huge opportunity cost of putting almost a sixth of a trillion dollars into this project? As I see it, we could have done a hell of a lot more in space with that money.

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[c6gunner]

Each person can decide for himself/herself which is the bigger waste of money, but the chances of something positive coming from the ISS is considerably greater in my opinion.

Well, you know what they say about opinions ....

I have nothing against the ISS - I think it's a worthwhile scientific endeavour, and a marvellous and inspirational example of human ingenuity - but I can't say I much appreciate your blatant trolling. Nor do I agree with your pessimism. I'm not sure why you sop badly want the Iraqi people to continue to suffer, but please, keep your opinions to yourself from now on.

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[Anonymous Coward]

"...if I post an opinion a few billion light years to the right of Hitler, all of a sudden I'm accused of drinking the Fox Kool-aid."

Fixed that for you...

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[butterwise]

ISS is estimated to cost $158 billion by 2017 (according to wikipedia...)

No problem: it is now estimated to cost $15.80 by 2017 according to wikipedia.

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[Richard W.M. Jones]

literally hundreds of small, medium and big experiments

So simple division gives me a cost of about $1 billion per experiment give-or-take 50%. That's real value for money!

Rich.

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[Phisbut]

Why do they need to put it on the ISS any way? Isn't there another side to the planet that we could work on? Or is it just easier to go to space than try and do science in China?

It has to do with special relativity and they need to perform the experiment with a high relative speed, not just distance. At this moment, the place to perform this experiment that moves the fastest happens to be the ISS.

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[CptPicard]

The only thing worse than setting it up in its shuttle-payload-upmass-hostile 57 degree inclined orbit to allow Russian participation is totally cutting off Shuttle participation in 2010.

So you're saying that it should have been a US-only project, only flyable to by the Shuttle and that it's a waste of money? Sounds to me like such a project is better of handled in a co-operative fashion, sharing costs...

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Fox News went to court and argued that they could knowingly distribute false information as news because the law doesn't explicitly forbid it. Let me repeat that: knowingly report falsehood as news.

Note that Fox did not deny they were falsifying the news story on BGH; they argued only that what they did was not covered by the "adopted rule" of the FCC. A purely technical legal argument to defend broadcasting information they intentionally distorted and knew was wrong.

And that is a new organization?

http://www.foxbghsuit.com/

http://www.2dca.org/opinion/February%2014,%202003/2D01-529.pdf

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[YA_Python_dev]

The Jules Verne used the remainder of its unused docking fuel to raise ISS less than 5 km, and that one time kick that cannot be counted on to be there every time. It's not a "one time kick", it's simply the first of four scheduled re-boost manoeuvres (yes, all four of them will be performed by JV). And it was deliberately small to keep the ISS low enough to be easily reached by the orbiter with Kibo.

It's not "unused docking fuel", the ATV was designed to perform big reboosts for the ISS.

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[Wanderer1]

Keep it up guys. This is the best debate I've seen in ages!

W

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[cybrpnk2]

No, I'm saying that IF cooperating with the Russians had ORIGINALLY been a goal of the program, that ISS would have a COMPELTELY different design and location than what is up there now. People just see photos of floating astronauts on TV and say, oh, what a cool space station. The reality is quite different.

The NASA Freedom / Alpha space station program in the late 1980s and early 1990s was well on its way to complete cancellation due to horrendous cost overruns and total program mismanagement and in-fighting between NASA HQ in Washington, the side "Level II" bueracracy that had been set up in Virginia, and Johnson Space Center in Houston. This may sound like an exaggeration, but ask anybody that was there. One thing and one thing only saved it - the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Next thing you know, all of these American carpetbaggers were headed for Moscow to try and broker cooperative deals with the newly-open-for-business Russian space organizations. I know becasue I was one of them, in Moscow in October 1993 when Yelsin literally sicced a tank on the die-hard Communists holed up in THEIR White House - what they call their national parliment building. I was there with a group to get a protein crystal experiment launched to Mir, and next thing I know the head of the factory for SS-20 production is asking us if we would be interested in a tour of his factory and possible Western sales deals as a small satellite launcher. Just a couple of years before I had blurry classified intelligence reports on his SS-20 locked in my work safe, figuring out how to simulate its trajectory capabilities for a star wars interceptor program in Denver I worked at - now this guy wanted to give me a tour the CIA might literally have killed for, and and wanted to sell me a rocket to boot. Them was crazy days.

The biggest carpetbagger of all ws Al Gore. Maybe he didn't invent the internet, but Al Gore sure invented the ISS, traveling to Moscow to sign a deal with the Russians where we would fly experiments and astronauts to their then-orbiting MIR station in exchange for turning the US-only Alpha into a joint American-Russian ISS. In one fell swoop the NASA station came a LOT more about politics and national prestiege than about science - the alternative to nuclear war and the crown jewel of Clinton foreign policy. And actually, this really WAS good for America, for Russia, and for the world.

But it was TERRIBLE for the ISS. The Russians with their spunky but primative Soyuz modules were totally unable to reach the original orbit planned for the US Space Station. So we obliged and changed the planned station cruise orbit to THEIR optimal Soyuz launch orbit, which OUR Space Shuttle could reach ONLY if WE took a 30,000 pound payload reduction on every flight. Thus began a totally insane, I-can't-detail-it-all technical death march of cutting the module sizes from 42 to 27 feet to trim weight (wonder why there's no US potty up there?), lauching the modules empty without equipment or experiment racks to save weight, risking crews on launches that ran the Shuttle main engines at a heart-stopping 109% of thrust presented to the public like that was a routine maneuver, and launching far fewer modules and missions than planned because we can't afford to get everything up from Florida to the 57 degree inclined Russian orbit. And once its up there and needs to be resupplied, we can get only 10,000 pounds of resupply payload to ISS instead of the 40,000 pounds a Suttle used to carrry to a normal 28 degree Florida-style, and most of that 10,000 pounds goes to the airlock and docking adapter in the payload bay. Read the newspaper articles carefully. "The shuttle delivered a ton (2000 pounds) of frozen pizzas and clean underwear to the astronauts". To those who know what was originally planned, and what has been tossed overboard to get this all to work, such a statement is a true tragedy. You cannot run this stati

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[cybrpnk2]

For reference, here's some pretty good Wiki articles on ISS and JV.

The facts: "On this first ATV mission, Jules Verne will deliver 4.6 tonnes of payload to the ISS, including 1 150 kg of dry cargo, 856 kg of propellant for the Russian Zvezda module, 270 kg of drinking water and 21 kg of oxygen. On future ATV missions, the payload capacity will be increased to 7.4 tonnes.

About half of the payload onboard Jules Verne ATV is re-boost propellant, which will be used by its own propulsion system for periodic manoeuvres to increase the altitude of the ISS in order to compensate its natural decay caused by atmospheric drag."

Also: On April 25, 2008, the European Space Agency announced that earlier in the day its first automated transfer vehicle (ATV), the "Jules Verne," increased the altitude of the International Space Station by about 2.8 miles (4.5 kilometers)--the first time an ESA craft had performed such an important task. The 12.3 minute maneuver was directed by ESA's ATV Control Center, which is located in Toulouse, France.

At 6:22 a.m. Central European Summer Time (CEST) (0422 GMT), controllers turned on two of the Jules Verne's four main engines. The two engines produced a thrust that increased the station's speed by about 8 feet per second (2.65 meters per second).

To achieve this re-boost in altitude, the ATV consumed 537 pounds (244 kilograms) of fuel. In all, the ATV carries about two metric tons (about 4,400 pounds) of propellant for re-boost activities.

After the burn was completed, the new altitude of the ISS became 212.5 miles (342 kilometers) above the Earth's surface.

The Space Station needs periodic boosts to raise its orbit because its orbit decays slowly over time due to a very small amount of atmospheric drag on the large structure as it orbits about the Earth.

In the past, the RSA Progress, the NASA Space Shuttle, or the ISS itself has performed such a maneuver. However, only RSA Progress and the ESA ATV are able to re-boost the space station to such a high level due to the amount of fuel onboard each vessel.

The Jules Verne ATV (ATV-001) will perform three additional re-boost maneuvers over the next few months: on June 12th, July 8th, and August 6th. Normally, the space station tries to keep at an orbital height of about 211 miles (340 kilometers) above the Earth's surface.

Later in August 2008, the Jules Verne, loaded with waste and unneeded materials from the space station, will be undocked from the ISS. The ATV has a capacity of carrying up to 6.3 metric tons (13,900 pounds) of unwanted material from the Station."

So what most people don't realize is that JV carries a LOT more (dense, low-volume) as mass as fuel for reboost than it does anything else in that cool pressurized comparment it has the astronauts go in. I understand that the JV maneuvers were held off to allow Shuttle attachment of KiBo at the lower and easy to reach altitude. But my point is that things are only going to get worse and will ultimately I think go beyond what JV is designed or funded to do to keep ISS up.

JV is an experiment in European autonomous docking technology, not an integrated reboost system. I have yet to see any plans for how many JVs will be flown in the long run - currently there are only 4 more in the pipeline thru 2015. The numbers above represent the data required to figure out just how many JVs will be required to keep ISS up for X number of years. I predict that when that calculation is finally run - and when NASA explains to ESA that there will be zero American funding to keep the JV production line running - that ESA will say, OK, we ain't payin no Euros to keep this junkheap up either, which side of Hawaii do you want us to splash the ISS in?

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[iamlucky13]

The parent post is overrated. It's not entirely correct and it's not very coherent.

I worked on Space Station in the early 1990s and still haven't recovered from the bad taste that experience has left in my mouth.

That is before any of the hardware had been launched. But it's unsurprising that the OP could be dissatisfied with the experience. Aside from being a government program and all the cliches that entails, the ISS has gone through many redesigns, and the effort of cooperating internationally has been an added source of delay and cost. He's not alone in such criticisms and the ponderous nature of government programs is one of NASA's biggest problems.

ISS was DESIGNED for Shuttle resupply during its lifetime and that resupply was first strangled and then totally cut off. Soyuz and Orion taking astronauts to this thing is a joke, and doing resupply by Jules Verne is a criminal waste.

The shuttle is a much more expensive spacecraft to operate than the ATV. The shuttle's advantages are it's manned, it is a versatile work platform, and it can carry cargo back to earth. It's overkill for basic resupply. Although Jules Verne didn't because there was a large amount of pressurized cargo on board, the ATV can carry up to 4.7 tonnes of spare propellant...much more than either the shuttle or Progress. There may also be a commercial option available for re-supply and reboost in the next 3-4 years through the COTS program.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with Soyuz or Orion performing crew rotation. Both of these craft have lower operating costs than the shuttle, and lower projected loss of crew probability.

The dirty little secret about ISS is that at full mass and max solar array deployment upon completion, this thing is going to deorbit even faster from atmospheric drag than it is now and no way can Progress or Jules Verne is keep the completed assembly reboosted - only the Shuttle could.

Total BS. The international partners are well aware of how much reboost the ISS needs and are planning accordingly. There is no secret. Progress, ATV, or the shuttle alone can't do all of the reboost, but combined they can. Also, once construction is finished, the ISS will be boosted to a slightly higher orbit to reduce the effect of drag. Lastly, the ISS is at nearly maximum drag, with only one more solar array to be added, but still growing in mass. Added mass works out net neutral. The momentum reduces the effect of drag just as well as it reduces the effectiveness of reboosts.

And secretly if not in public, NASA will breathe a sigh of relief when it splashes.

This statement, at least, is based mostly in fact. ISS is somewhat contentious at NASA, but it has its supporters and detractors. There will be quite a few glad not to have to divert resources to it, and plenty others frustrated by the loss of a unique laboratory environment and work platform. I doubt hardly anyone there would argue that it's completely without value, but many feel the money would be better spent elsewhere.

Nobody even knows anymore how much ISS costs anymore because of crooked accounting hiding the drawing of funds from everywhere within NASA, but nobody argues it's at least $100 billion dollars.

The contention of crooked accounting is unsubstantiated. If there's crooked accounting it goes on at lower levels, but the OP has provided no evidence of it. NASA funds are accounted for at the higher levels in the annual budget allocations. The problem with accounting for exact costs is that ISS draws on programs that have their own independent budgets. How much of the cost of the shuttle return-to-flight program should count towards the ISS, for example? More on cost here.

Hell, just tell me one thing we have learned on ISS th

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[thehater]

Do you have sources for either of those claims? I'm both skeptical and interested.

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[FleaPlus]

Mostly-naive question: What are your thoughts on the reboost potential of the SpaceX Dragon (assuming they get it up and running)?

Also, what ever happened to the possibility of using solar-powered electrodynamic tethers to reboost the ISS?

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[cybrpnk2]

Good post. You are objective, fair and mostly right on the money. A few comments, mostly clarifying my earlier points...

"The shuttle is a much more expensive spacecraft to operate than the ATV" - Don't be too sure. That ATV is a custom one-off product (averaging at least $250 million each) and its expendable launch vehicle (runs $120 million each) is no real bargain, either. Expressed in $ per pound, future reboost fuel is costing ($250M + $125M) / (4.7 t * 2000 lb/t ) = $40,000 per pound. That's higher than shuttle, which has some economies of scale and reusability working in its bloated favor.

"There may also be a commercial option available for re-supply and reboost in the next 3-4 years through the COTS program" - True, but depending on the tech cavalry to come over the hill is mainly how ISS has become the mess it is in the first place. Based on my limited glimpses behind the curtain, my personal opinion is that SpaceX has a few more spectacular failures to go before they are ready to save the day on ISS.

"There is absolutely nothing wrong with Soyuz or Orion performing crew rotation. Both of these craft have lower operating costs than the shuttle, and lower projected loss of crew probability" - Funny story about projections: ask Elon Musk sometime where the debris field would have been for the maiden SpaceX Falcon 1 if there had been an early final stage shutdown or explosion (Answer - someplace between San Francisco CA and Savannah GA). I was told to not worry (and I did anyway, quite vocally from my padded cell) because the reliability of a Falcon 1 was too high for any failure scenario to be credible, much less the one I was worried about. Heh. Look what happened to the first two Falcon flights - failure, followed by final stage late engine failure. I'd be laughing last if I were laughing at all about that one, which I'm not. Rena, I'm looking at you.

"The dirty little secret ...Total BS. The international partners are well aware of how much reboost the ISS needs and are planning accordingly. There is no secret. Progress, ATV, or the shuttle alone can't do all of the reboost, but combined they can. Also, once construction is finished, the ISS will be boosted to a slightly higher orbit to reduce the effect of drag. Lastly, the ISS is at nearly maximum drag, with only one more solar array to be added, but still growing in mass. Added mass works out net neutral. The momentum reduces the effect of drag just as well as it reduces the effectiveness of reboosts." - Well, I was being metaphorical in saying a dirty little secret - it's more like the elephant in the middle of the room that I think being ignored. Show me any evidence that financial budgeting is being planned for on what it's gonna take to keep this thing up past 2010 and I'll shut up. I contend it's being kept off the public radar because all would agree it doen't make sense to finish if the true maintenance costs to keep it up were known, publicized, and widely understood. Hey, let's focus instead on the fact that there's a Buzz Lightyear toy on this mission!!! Also, the mass isn't really neutral - I agree that by increasing vehicle density it means the reboost has to occur a little less often, but it's still a lot greater load that's gotta be lifted when you do.

"The contention of crooked accounting is unsubstantiated." - I agree that's a low blow. I have absolutely no knowledge of true criminal wrongdoing or fraud and will say that the NASA officials I have worked with over the years are honest, ethical and hardworking. However, the accounting of money flow for Space Station is undeniably a rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul shell game played by all to keep the gravy train rolling under extremely difficult circumstances. I stand by my statement that NOBODY can truly say how much this thing costs.

"The [science]

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[The Bad Astronomer]

Thanks for the link lurv. I did write up an extensive description of this as best I could. It's a weird experiment!

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[Anonymous Coward]

There's even more. The Bush administration put together a team of news analysts who were fed information from the White House, which they would then present on the news as their own opinion. They did interviews and wrote editorials with supposedly expert unbiased opinions, but which actually contained little but regurgitated government press statements. Some of these people were analysts on major news networks - a position they were all too ready to exploit for Bush's gain. Which network employed the most of these tainted analysts? Why, Fox News of course!

Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[mollymoo]

A small, cheap, US-only station wouldn't have kept Russian space scientists and engineers funded and busy. If they were unemloyed they might have been tempted to build ICBMs and spy satellites for China, Iran, $enemy_du_jour.

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[x2A]

What, like when those emails of Florida Republican Foley came out, Fox reported it with a slight twist... they listed him as a democrat?

See 2:26 mins into this clip!

Fox. Biggest propaganda machine ever!

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[locofungus]

I read through your page but it's missing the most important part of this particular experiment.

You don't need to use entangled photons to set up a secure communication link, although you can use them to do this.

Where this experiment gets really weird, going back to your two coins glued onto a piece of wood analogy, is that Bob and Alice set off in spaceships at high speed with their boxes sealed.

At some later point in time, each opens the box and has a look to see what state their coin is in.

They then start exchanging signals to try and work out which one opened the box first and caused the wave function to collapse. But it turns out that BOTH of them are convinced that they were first (and both of them can prove that they are right and that the other is wrong - this is what is means when we talk about spacelike events - it's impossible for one to have caused the other because we cannot even decide which one was first)

The coin analogy breaks down in another important way - it's relatively obvious that in the coin case despite the coins being sealed in the box, they could already have made their decision (this is what is known as a hidden variable).

A slightly better analogy would be to consider two dice that are correlated. But instead of just being able to make a measurement of what number is on top, they can also make a measurement of whether the die is left or right handed (if you put one on the top and two towards you, then whether three is on the left or right face).

Now when you throw our hypothetical dice it can also turn "inside out" and change from left to right handed. Now comes the QM bit - if you measure what number is on top then you cannot tell if it's left or right handed but if you measure if it's left or right handed then you cannot tell what number is on top. (and making either measurement destroys all knowledge of any previous measurement of the other variable)

Alice and Bob take their two entangled dice, sealed in the box, away and then, just before they open the box, make a random choice whether to measure what number is on top or whether the die is left or right handed. Once they've done that they get back together.

If one has measured what number is on top and the other whether it's left or right handed then they throw their results away and start again (note that it's very important that they do not agree in advance what they are going to do so throwing away roughly half their results is inevitable) but some of the time they'll independently decide to measure the same variable.

Whatever Alice measures, whether it's L/R or 1/2/3/4/5/6, Bob gets the same result. But we already know that the die cannot both have its L/R state and its 123456 defined simultaneously, therefore something about the measurement must have affected the die. In Bob's world it was his measurement that affected the die and Alice just got a predictable result, but in Alice world their roles are reversed.

AFAICT, there's nothing really new in this experiment using the ISS. When Alice and Bob do the experiment in the lab their measurement events are still spacelike. But it's hard to get away from the idea that the lab frame is a preferred frame.

Tim.

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[Stooshie]

... I worked on Space Station in the early 1990s ...

Oh well, glad they got there burgers delivered.

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[iamlucky13]

Thanks for following up. Your comments here are pretty fair, I think.

Overall, the ISS is a (mixed) folly from the past we are now stuck with (and have the opportunity to utilize). As I understand it, we've spent something like $130 billion on it so far, and expect to spend another $20-30 billion on it through 2016. Perhaps it wasn't worth the entire $150+ billion, but I would personally contend that for the use we should be able to get out of it between now and the end of current plans, we will get our money's worth out of that $20-30 billion, and should therefore keep it now that we have it. I'm not sure about beyond 2016, but given their investments, I think our partners will lobby pretty hard for us to keep the station going beyond then.

A couple specific comments:

The shuttle isn't equipped to perform a simple reboost mission, especially not with just a fuel payload. Although the OMS engines have about 24,000 pounds of fuel at launch, much of this is typically used for launch and de-orbit, especially when going to the 51.6 degree orbit and when carrying a non-trivial payload. Also, for purposes of reboost planning, the shuttle includes over 5 times as much deadweight as the ATV. It's very hard to compare costs for shuttle reboosts to ATV reboosts, but for what the shuttle can provide during a typical mission, the cost is higher. Plus, the Europeans typically pay for ATV missions in exchange for astronaut slots. Depending how you account for it, an astronaut seat for a planned launch costs NASA quite a bit less than an ATV.

Loss of crew/mission projections are admittedly, just that: projections. But I wouldn't compare SpaceX's failures with brand new hardware and more limited ground testing to Ares 1 or Soyuz. Ares 1 uses a large amount of known hardware, and Soyuz almost exclusively so. I don't think SpaceX had even attempted to make detailed LOM projections for either flight. Regarding the ground risk, the LOM numbers may have been very high overall, but acceptably low for such a failure occuring at moments that might drop debris in populated areas. Honestly, any launch vehicle has these risks.

I would not, and NASA is not counting on SpaceX or any COTS participant to save the day. COTS is a bonus to save money if possible and encourage development of commercial launch services. I added that comment because it has potential to add extra value, not because COTS is a fix for any expected problems with Ares/Soyuz/ATV.

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[Stooshie]

... it is now estimated to cost $15.80 ...

Nice one! Although I expect that got changed back within minutes, if not seconds of you editing it.

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[zerkon]

props to the two of you... that is the most civil argument i've seen on slashdot in a long time.

Re:Science coverage on /. is crappy

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the tether experiments ended up revealing a lot of unexpected complications. They also would rob electrical power budgeted for other tasks.

The SpaceX Dragon won't carry enough fuel to make a noteworthy reboost. It would require a modified version that isn't currently planned in order to carry enough fuel to do that.

I was first

[bornyesterday]

My instruments clearly show that my post was made and appeared before any other posts.

Re:I was first

[Stooshie]

You must be on Hotblack Desiato's black spaceship then.

Why not go further?

[moosesocks]

Why not put the experiment on a probe traveling further and further away from earth?

Or perhaps on the moon.

Or mars.

This is actually a fairly exciting bit of science.

Re:Why not go further?

[jellomizer]

Because we already have people on the ISS, who can perform it. Making a probe to do the test will be expensive. Vs. Having someone up there and send up some stuff on the next trip up. Yes it is still expensive, but we are paying for it anyways vs paying for something new whith a higher chance of failure.

Re:Why not go further?

[marcosdumay]

Because we only need to send it far enough to know that light couldn't go from one end to the other during the tiny inaccuracy of our clocks.

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

From the source (Yeah, I dont know the code, shuddup)

"There is one way to settle the matter for sure: send entangled photons to two orbiting astronauts on board different spacecraft with large relative velocities."

I just imagined a catapult, an astronaut, and a baseball glove.....

Noooo!

[FireIron]

Please don't break reality. It's where I keep my stuff.

Re:Noooo!

[FurtiveGlancer]

Or so you thought, until.... This quantum observer issue gives a whole new meaning to "keep an eye on your stuff," doesn't it?

Re:Noooo!

[treeves]

It may be that if you keep your stuff in La-La-Land, you'll be much happier.

Re:How do you entangle a photon in the first place

[camperdave]

You entangle 2 photons, f.e. by creating them at the same time from the same decay-process.

Ah! It comes from the subtle glow of rotting meat, then.

Ignorance

[QuietLagoon]

"ISS ... doing some decent science for a change"

Of what you do not know, you should not speak.

Re:On Conservative Slashdot, we hate the ISS

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't you get the memo? America doesn't deserve access to space because space isn't in the Constitution or the Bible. NASA needs to be stopped, and we need to destroy their blueprints to ensure that we never spend any more of our tax dollars on this unholy science crap. Only when we have sufficiently rehabilitated ourselves in the eyes of the Religious Right (consisting of Hagee, Robertson, and Phelps) should we be trusted with anything more advanced than a flashlight.

Then you need a better naysayer...

[pla]

By the peculiarities of special relativity, the high relative velocity between the observers means that both will always be able to claim to have carried out their measurement first, thereby ruling out the naysayers' arguments

Of course, by that same logic, naysayers can always claim that each side carried out its measurement last, negating whatever benefit this "feature" supposedly proves.

Re:Then you need a better naysayer...

[SBacks]

Of course, by that same logic, naysayers can always claim that each
side carried out its measurement last, negating whatever
benefit this "feature" supposedly proves. But from each reference frame, they will be carrying out their measurement first. Saying that they each are carrying out their measurement last means that the naysayers no longer are arguing on a scientific basis, but are just being assholes.

Re:Then you need a better naysayer...

[FurtiveGlancer]

Absolutely not! ~

This is awesome

[BPPG]

space-QUEST is probably the best name for a science experiment ever.

Naysayers?

[nine-times]

By the peculiarities of special relativity, the high relative velocity between the observers means that both will always be able to claim to have carried out their measurement first, thereby ruling out the naysayers' arguments.

What naysayers? Naysayers of what? And what are their arguments?

Re:Naysayers?

[marcosdumay]

You know, that people that keep repeating that this year isn't the year of Linux on the desktop.

Re: Chicken and Egg

[FurtiveGlancer]

The chicken clearly and undisputably came first... in the dictionary.

Re:On Conservative Slashdot, we hate the ISS

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot the best reason for not going to space: how do you make money off it?

SpaceQuest?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess Sierra will sue them.. they trademarked the SpaceQuest name a LONG time ago ;)

einstein

[Brian Gordon]

He famously hated the idea of spooky action at a distance, and never accepted QM. He certainly didn't advocate it.

what's a measurement.

[oliverthered]

Could you please explain what a measurement is, since clearly interaction with something isn't enough or it would be measured by the air.

Re:what's a measurement.

[locofungus]

Could you please explain what a measurement is, since clearly interaction with something isn't enough or it would be measured by the air.

I'd like to help you with your question but I've got to pop over to Stockholm to collect my Nobel prize.

Seriously, nobody really knows what a measurement is. That's the whole point of Schroedinger's Cat.

Here's a real experiment:


Well there was a nice ascii art diagram but I can't get it through the lameness filter.
Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.

Basically H polarized photon source that goes into a +/- measurer then the two paths are joined and the H/V polarization measured again with H photons going to detector 1 and V photons going to detector 2



Every photon ends up at detector1 if we don't actually look which path the photon took through the +/- branches. As soon as we actually look which path the photon went then the H/V measurement gives 50/50 results to each detector.

Tim.

Re:what's a measurement.

[oliverthered]

what are you doing by looking? taking some energy away? converting the photon into something else? you must be doing something what is that something?

Re:what's a measurement.

[locofungus]

what are you doing by looking? taking some energy away? converting the photon into something else? you must be doing something what is that something?

You're collapsing the wavefunction into an eigenfunction of the Hamiltonian and measuring the corresponding eigenvalue.

But NOBODY knows what that means in the real world. You can grind out the maths to dozens of places of decimals and find that you get the same results from the theory as you get from the experiment. But the model doesn't really help us understand what a measurement in the real world actually is, just allows us to predict what the (possible) results will be.

Tim.

Thanks, that's much clearer

[p3d0]

Where one has measured H/V and the other +/- then they throw the results away because they don't tell them anything useful, but where they've made the same measurement they find they always get the same (or opposite) results. Even without any knowledge of quantum mechanics, I could have told them they'd always get the same or opposite results.

Re:Thanks, that's much clearer

[locofungus]

Even without any knowledge of quantum mechanics, I could have told them they'd always get the same or opposite results.

Ha Ha!

What I was trying to say was:

(dropping factors of sqrt 2)
|H> = |+> + |->
|V> = |+> - |->

|HH> + |VV> = |++> + |-->, so Alice and Bob get the same result if they measure H/V or +/-
|HH> - |VV> = |+-> + |-+>, so Alice and Bob get the same result if they measure H/V but opposite results if they measure +/-.

etc.

Tim.

Re:Thanks, that's much clearer

[p3d0]

Yeah, I dropped the parentheses just to give you a hard time. :-)

You're missing something fundamental

[p3d0]

Schrodinger's cat was either alive all along, or dead all along. Nope. That's classical physics. If it agreed with reality, we wouldn't need quantum mechanics.

Re:On Liberal Slashdot, we hate the ISS

[Das Modell]

How exactly did you manage to lump Iran, China and the EU together?

Goddammit!

[wurp]

The new Options thing that remembers the last time you posted w/o your karma bonus (and doesn't indicate to you that you are posting again w/o your karma bonus) SUCKS!

Forget SpaceQuest on the ISS

[j00r0m4nc3r]

I can't wait until they perform the Leather Goddesses experiment on Phobos.

Inventing the Ansible! :-)

[Iowan41]

It sounds like we are on the road to inventing the Ansible (Authoress Le Guin's term), allowing instantaneous communication, which would come in very handy in driving rovers around on Mars, for example.

Re:Inventing the Ansible! :-)

[Creepy Crawler]

Wrong. The Ansible was in Orson Scott Card's novel series Enders Game.

Re:Inventing the Ansible! :-)

[Paradigm_Complex]

While he did use "ansible" in a number of his books, Orson Scott Card wasn't certainly was not the first to come up with the idea, and he wasn't the one who coined the term. The OP is correct.

Re:On Liberal Slashdot, we hate the ISS

[Anonymous Coward]

They hate us the most right now.

2 billion?

[Anonymous Coward]

Chump change. That much is spent in Iraq what, every day, two days?

Re:2 billion?

[khallow]

3-4 months, last I checked. Quite a hunk of change if you ask me.

Re:2 billion?

[khallow]

Oh sorry, didn't see your subject line. I thought you were refering to the overall cost of the ISS. Sure, $2 billion is something like a couple days of Iraq. But you got to remember that on $2 billion a year, I bet we could stick up and maintain a few Bigelow inflatables. Wouldn't need the Shuttle or another heavy lifter like the Ares V either.

Ob. reference.

[shentino]

Roger Wilco on that one ISS. I just hope you keep things clean whilst doing the experiment.

And wow, "neater" is indeed the captcha code this time.

Re:On Conservative Slashdot, we hate the ISS

[Anonymous Coward]

Good one.

Because ALL conservatives who make money do so dishonestly
and
NO liberal has ever made a kazillion bucks or been dishonest or greedy.

Not Joe Kennedy.

Roosevelts were never rich.

Heinz/Kerry - poor as church mice.

Bloomberg was never rich until he changed parties.

(list goes on)

Tell me - Are ALL liberals so stupid to believe and repeat the Marxist mantra that only conservatives are dishonest greedy?

Here's the list

[iamlucky13]

For all the naysayers of ISS science, here is the list of past and present experiments for your review:

ISS Experiments by Expedition

Please note the count of experiments currently stands at 561, and the focus ranges from virology, to fluid mechanics, to relativity, to astronomy, and even engineering validation (not simply of space station components, but also of fully independent technologies). That's nothing to sneeze at.

And while a fairly large portion of them are relatively minor or PR projects like sleep habits in 0g and the Buzz Lightyear "teaching from space" program, there is an ample number of experiments designed specifically to take advantage of the unique environment the ISS offers and with a variety of potential future applications.

And don't forget the majority of these so far were conducted prior to the installation of the two primary laboratory modules on the ISS: Columbia, launched late last year, and Kibo, which is 2/3 delivered as of last week. These have also been done mainly by 2 or 3 man crews, with occassional help from shuttle crews. Once the ISS switches to a 6 man crew rotation, the rate at which science work is completed will be greatly enhanced.

But of course, carefully planned, executed, and generally useful science isn't as fun to talk about as broken toilets, so we'll just continue ignoring the successes of the ISS and focus only about the cost overruns, deleted components, and occassional operating problems.

Scaling

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, relativity is for macroscopic objects and quantum mechanics is for tiny quantum-scale objects.

Just like spiders can lift 10 times their weight, but humans can't. Different scales mean different rules.

Re:Scaling

[x2A]

Speak for yourself. I can certainly lift 10 times a spiders weight.

Re:On Liberal Slashdot, we hate the ISS

[x2A]

Well that depends on whether you're talking about GDH (gross domestic hatred) or GDH per capita. Per capita, countries you've been at war with more recently probably hate you more, but I guess even if China can muster a small amount of hate per person, that's gonna add up quite a bit more than other countries, even where people have to wake up extra early in the morning just to get all the hating in.

brainwave abduction

[Anonymous Coward]

is it possible to utilize the quantum entanglement property to effectively create infinite storage by using remotely entangled quantum computers?
This might happen if:
So called "spooky action" (Einstein) can be controlled at a distance...'using' the property as one would use radio carrier waves. The goal would be instant or 'teleported' 1 or 0. In this way, one can imagine using this capacity as a form of instantly exponential memory. Using 'visualized' storage backends which manage groups of entangled systems in much the same way fibre systems currently function So as you add layers of redundant entangled systems- one can imagine linking groups of distant systems using a matrix of entanglement, which forms a virtual pool which has distance, but does not have space between flips of 1 or 0. SO if these pulses can flush into memory on detection- you have this ability to have the star trek computer.

Einstein, Rosen, & Podosky were non-believers

[yayazozzy]

It is great that spooky action at a distance is finally making it into the mainstream. You might consider updating your topic sentence though. Spooky action at a distance is what Einstein steadfastly refused to believe in. Einstein, Rosen & Podolsky's disbelief inspired them to published a paper about the incompleteness of quantum theory (I didn't do it - it was the hidden variables). Cheers

Re:On Liberal Slashdot, we hate the ISS

[fm6]

How can China hate us? They want to be us!

Oops, sorry, I just answered my own question.