Slashdot Mirror
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."
We live in the physical world and experience entanglement all the time
Absolutely. This is just a PR stunt, and very bad science if you think that science involves not misleading naive people for the purposes of PR.
The claim that the two human observers would be entangled is problematic at best. Not only wouldn't any entanglement last longer than the coherence time of a human being (~10^27 particles in thermal equilibrium at 310 K!), it is difficult to understand how the researchers would fail to notice that in some reference frames one observer would detect their photons quite a bit sooner than the other observer. In those frames the entanglement of the observation systems never happens, which is why sensible people don't talk about such things.
The very notion of assigning "an instant" to an "event" that is by its nature nonlocal is simply incoherent. This is what makes the whole business spooky: it cannot be described using the relativistic physics that necessarily describes the world of human experience.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I think perhaps we are constantly entangled, but that our "consciousness"
Just because it's unusual to us doesn't mean it's mystical or magical. For your idea to actually be science and not philosophy you'd need a much better grasp of what you're actually saying. Saying something like "we're all constantly entangled" doesn't really mean a lot, since entanglement doesn't occur on a macro-scale.
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.
AccountKiller
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?
The coins-in-envelope model is the same idea as the "hidden variable" theory, no? As I understand it, observations don't support the idea that the photons (or whatever) have a "heads" or "tails" hidden away somewhere that they synchronized when they were together- the probabilities are wrong.
Now Alice opens her envelope and sees tails. So she knows Bob must have heads. (...) Alice only has access to the information she *brought* with her when they separated.
That's correct, but that's not the whole story. From what you said, it looks like classic mechanics is good enough to explain it, and it's not.
The problem is that there is not only one way you can measure the state of this "coin" -- depending on the orientation of your measurement, you get heads or tails on that specific orientation. So, when Alice measures the coin in a specific orientation, this *orientation* is "felt" by Bob's coin, and it may influence the result of Bob's measurement. That effect simply can't be explained by classic mechanics.
For a more detailed explanation, see the section on Bell's Inequality in http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/f04quantum/notes/lecture1.pdf (warning: requires a bit of math).