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Human Eye Could Detect Spooky Action At a Distance
KentuckyFC writes "The human eye is a good photon detector--it's sensitive enough to spot photons in handfuls. So what if you swapped a standard photon detector with a human eye in the ongoing experiments to measure spooky-action-at-a-distance? (That's the ability of entangled photons to influence each other, no matter how far apart they might be.) A team of physicists in Switzerland have worked out the details and say that in principle there is no reason why human eyes couldn't do this kind of experiment. That would be cool because it would ensure that the two human observers involved in the test would become entangled, albeit for a short period time. The team, led by Nic Gisin, a world leader on entanglement, says it is actively pursuing this goal (abstract) so we could have the first humans to experience entanglement within months."
I'm thinkin', me, and Halle Berry ... or maybe Famke Janssen.
Yeah, okay, so I just watched X-Men on cable.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Hrmm. "The first humans to experience entanglement", huh? And how long before the experiment becomes the basis for a porn movie plot?
I sense a host of new bad pickup lines coming in the near future.
It can see sexy action at a distance.
...about unexpected side effects of Human entanglement...
Would it be a love story?
Kidding aside not sure if it makes any sense for a cautionary tale as my understanding of this is quite limited.
.... ... }
int main (void) {
...is one still an observer?
It may be a first, but lets hope they keep it boy-girl. Same sex entanglement can't be much fun.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I've heard that frogs have the ability to detect single photons. This is from a cryptographer who jokingly proposed a frog-based system for quantum key distribution.
But on a more serious note, what does it really mean for two people to become entangled? And does it matter that the photons are detected by a human retina? Could the entanglement just as easily happen if the photons were fired into my left butt-cheek?
so we could have the first humans to experience entanglement within months
I'm guessing the avalanche of crazy whacked out girlfriend stories is about to start...
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For any of you who do not follow politics, science wishes to inform you that your eyes are capable of spotting spooky action at a distance. Thank you and good night.
The EYES have it...
But, will they be HUMAN or remanufactured to spec eyes?
If these eyes become sentry features, then approaching enemies might fear "Hills have eyes"... signs posted around the perimeter...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Yes, I'd love to have parts of my body involved with someone else's body parts on a subatomic level with impossible to predict effects. And I would like that body part to be both irreplaceable and in very close proximity to my brain.
"Contrarily the lookaside buffer might not be the panacea... "
keepin it real frosty
AC keepin slashdot frosty since 1999
FYI.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
is for NERDS....
And I don't get a lick of it. I started to RTFA but then I started to nod off and drool.
This sounds fascinating... sooooo anyone care to offer an explanation? Pictures are welcome... and metaphor encouraged!
Scientist 1: "Dude, I totally just got a jones for Chinese food."
Scientist 2: "Whoa, me too!"
Scientist 1: "Freaky!"
I'd like to see more research in this direction. It might eventually have implications on the experimental testing of the microtubules-tapping-into-the-quantum-gravity bullshit that Roger Penrose has been peddling as an explanation for how the brain gets intelligence. It might not be great for Penrose's book sales in the long run but it will be good for science, or at least we can hope.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Are these metric handfuls? or nautical?
http://downwithpants.org Overthrow the tyranny of your pants
That's not what entanglement is. It's knowing "this is currently the same as that" or "this is currently the opposite of that" without knowing what "this" or "that" actually is. There is no "connection" or "influence", just a relation that says knowing what "this" is tells you about what "that" is (until it gets changed by interacting with the environment).
... somebody should tell them that a bar and lots of beer usually give the same result.
These pickup lines work on female quantum physicists.
Or scientists. Or Hojima's "army of female scientists dedicated to the study of human reproduction in space"...
We live in the physical world and experience entanglement all the time. Physics doesn't stop outside the lab.
That's a cute gimmick, but that's all it is.
ROFL I'm not sure that double vision simultaneously contracted with beer goggles is the same thing as photonic entanglement... though I'm certain that there is room for such a story somewhere
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They're just chemicals. If they ever did achieve momentary entanglement, chances are that there would be no way of detecting or knowing such a thing had actually occurred. In the grand scheme of things, one person may register as having seen a tiny, dim flash of light that is identical to the tiny, dim flash of light that the other one saw.
The ______ Agenda
Just this, what if, contrary to all expectations, that human beings cannot be quantum entangled.
Damn, it's already there
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I know I'm not the only one who has no idea what this article is about. And yes, I read TFA. Just one link or two is all I'm asking for. I know this is News for Nerds, but the subject matter seems just a tad bit obscure.
I know, I know, I should do a Google search. Problem is, I suspect that I'd have to construct my search queries very carefully, as I worry about what kind of results I'd get...
Would the principle of entanglement be explainable by the holograhic universe theory?
If a hologram is essentially wavefronts - is it possible that these can become in phase, or sync, or somehow related?
It seems like this might explain:
- Why entanglement is difficult to achieve and not even fully understood how to reproduce consistently.
- Why electrons seemingly at random, or with time, or when we know they are "disturbed", will disentangle. Disturbing one wavefront will cause a knock-on effect (literally) on the wavefront it's in phase with, causing it to take on an opposite property.
- Why there's an inverse relationship between accuracy of measurement of speed and location - the more you interact with the wavefront, the more uncertain it becomes. Also why pinpointing the exact location of a particle makes it seem like its speed is impossible to measure (it seems to be able to move in any direction at any speed, because we're unable to predict how the causality of interaction of the parts of the hologram works). If you pinpoint its exact speed, then knowing its location is really knowing the point it moved away from an instant ago and the point it will move to, and that would also take predicting the interaction of the hologram wavefronts, which we can't do and so seems random.
- The whole 'spooky action at a distance' - because there actually is no distance. Once the waves interact in such a way that disturbing one causes it to take on form X, and the in-phase wave to take on the opposite form, they are really "at the same location" until they are disturbed.
If this IS the case, it should have some interesting implications - it might be possible one day to disturb an electron in such a way that the one on your side ALWAYS takes on property X, leading to transmission of information faster than light.
This is getting closer to a novel by Greg Egan called Quarantine, in which a girl escapes from a mental institution. How she escaped, nobody knows. Cameras show nothing. Security doors show no logs. The plastic sheet used for the window shows no anomalies of breaking and fixing.
Turns out her brain was "broken" in a most unusual sense: she cannot collapse her own view. Instead, her multiple worlds (from the MWI) combine and create a non-collapsed lifeform. All this comes about in finding a created device that selectively prevents the collapse, but allows the user to change it at will.
It may sound strange, but I've been doing my own garage experiments around these lines. We know that lots of particles are "entangled" all of the time. It seems to me to be a data storage mechanism. If the particles are all just different representations of an underlying particle, it's a way of representing a lot more than is actually "real".
I'm very interested in the results of this experiment, because, in a real way, it's human observers realizing the "same" thing, at the "same" time, which is what I have come to realize is the phenomenon known as ESP.
I don't think there's any such thing as reading another person's thoughts, but I can propose a real quantum and biological mechanism for people to think along the same lines, simultaneously, and it even has implications for neural AIs, which is what I'm working on.
I don't mind giving away my brilliant idea, because I figure someone else probably thought of it simultaneously, and plus, the devil is in the details, ain't it?
I have 2 eyes, why not have 2 beams shoot into both eyes at the same time at different spots looking at a white background, or black background to detect?
Why do two people need to agree when one well educated physicist can agree with themselves? (cause all the best ones are crazy, oh wait, those are mathematicians)
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
See this which achives the same goal using nothing more sophisticated than a cardboard tube. Quote:
"A speculative venture I call 'quantum tantra' aims to change all that. By taking advantage of the theoretical quantum inseparability of observer and observed, quantum tantra seeks a more direct unmediated union with nature than conventional measurements can provide. Perhaps such union will take place as a communion of human minds with heretofore undetectable minds inside inanimate objects." ...
I would have thought they would be experimenting with cats, which Schrodinger demonstrated have strange quantum properties.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Doing experiments in a predictable and objective way using scientific instruments isn't allowing us to reveal anything new.
Instead we need to introduce a subjective element so that we can find whatever we want to find.
No girlfriend stories, period. This is Slashdot, after all.
http://thelazysci-fiauthor.blogspot.com/2007/07/observation-via-entangled-computers.html
but kind of different.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
Ok, so lets assume that you can get a burst of 'entangled' photons into your eye and someone else's eye at the same time. And the point is? Last time I checked the human eye was incapable of determining anything about a photon except whether it was received or not, and the color if in sufficient quantity for a long enough period of time. Polarization? Not a chance. So how would you know its been polarized the same as a photon that someone else received? You can't even ask them because they will be just as clueless as you. Of course they might just lie to you to play a joke. Its too early to be April 1st, so why are the 'scientists' saying all this?
This was previously on /.
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/feb/13-is-quantum-mechanics-controlling-your-thoughts/article_view?b_start:int=1&-C=
"The human being himself, to the extent that he makes sound use of his senses, is the most exact physical apparatus that can exist." (Goethe, Scientific Studies)
> the two human observers involved in the test would become entangled...
Not really. By definition, once "observed" the photons cease to be entangled (the wavefunction collapses)- and by "observed" we mean that one or the other photon is sensed by a rod or cone in one of the observers' eyes.
I shudder at the thought of kibiribbits.
Stop it, please.
This crazy talk about spookiness and entaglements is making me nervous.
.
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- aqk
F U
I live in the DC metro area, I already have all the entanglement anyone needs, just getting to work every day. Anyone who wants to research "strange matter" just needs to examine the so-called brains of Beltway drivers.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Scientists are hailing the scientific breakthrough on human entanglement as the "ball-and-chain" phenomena. They admit that generally the entanglement only last for a short amount of time commonly referred to as the "honeymoon period" after which the attraction continues to degrade over varying periods of time.
... entangling alliances with none." - Thomas Jefferson
In some cultures, that means you're married.
to my mind...
Your thoughts...
Is a handful of photons?
Sounds like a frikkin lot of photons to me. I would've thought a human could see much less than a whole hand filled with photons.
> no, yes, maybe (tagging beta)
... the coin halves are not put in the envelopes until the envelopes are actually opened. That's what makes it spooky.
It has been proved theoretically and experimentally that there is no way to fix the information at the point where the entangled particles depart. The information content depends on the action of receiving it, and the two receiving actions are probabilistically interlinked.
What makes me feel slightly uneasy about this is that these entangled photon are bound to be flitting around in nature all the time - and while there are, admittedly, some that I wouldn't mind getting entangled with, there are more that I would rather not be too intimate with.
If xkcd makes a comic about a quantum entangled romance, I would be really, really, bored and unsurprised. Because they've already made enough comics about romance and I miss the good old classics.
Where do they get *those*?
Oh, attached to people. Never mind. This sounded Frankensteinian. :P
If this is about the micro to macro connection, what's the difference between having two people directly observe photons and having two people observe the results of each detector? Can the individuals be entangled with the detectors?
"we could have the first humans to experience entanglement within months."
Assuming this is possible at all, then almost certainly this has happened before many gabillions of times and nobody noticed.
Human eye is actually able to detect single photons but we're programmed not to notice them unless they are above a certain threshold.
Quote from: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/see_a_photon.html
guru in training
if this happens all the time anyways, and thats what causes deja-vu. yes, its a dumb idea, yes its still fun.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Yeah? Tell that to Yog-Sothoth!
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
Sorry - we do have bound states of strange and charm though which are rather boringly called D_s mesons.
A rather neat trick: http://www.polarization.com/haidinger/haidinger.html
Exactly which base is entanglement considered?
http://xkcd.com/540/
-until someone gets a fly in their eye
Welcome to the flock, my brother/sister.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
That sounded so hot until I read the last bit, and realized your name is Dale Gribble.
...
Yes, but hypothetically this could lead to a simple "eyeball morse code" which would someday allow instantaneous binary communication across light-years of distance. If you're a kooky Ray Kurtzweil fan, this is pretty huge.
Then again, if you're a kooky Ray Kurtzweil fan, you're probably not in the least bit surprised by this development, and wondering why it has taken so long.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
People have tried to tie together mysticism, quantum mechanics, and consciousness before. At best it's an interesting exercise in thinking. At worst it's nonsense gibberish. To my knowledge it's never really produced anything approaching science.
You can say that again. The movie What the #$*! Do We Know? being a prime example. That movie is so farking stupid that I nearly collapsed my left lung into a singularity from laughing so hard....
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
Is there any difference between a person "becoming entangled with" a system and "collapsing" the system? Isn't that the whole point of the EWG interpretation of QM?
Jessica Alba and I have volunteered to be quantum entangled.
Hey - I'll be entangled with Jessica Alba any way I can managed it!
Pug, exceedingly glad there's no -1, shallow as hell option - {G}.
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Ya... I'm an eye geek... I'll keep reading about this :)
http://www.AmherstburgVisionCentre.com