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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.
I sense a host of new bad pickup lines coming in the near future.
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!
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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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.
So I'm guessing that the unit of measurement for frog-based quantum encryption is the "ribbet".
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
no, that is Freaky action. This is about Spooky action.
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).
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.
'Quantum consciousness' and all that is complete and utter bunk.
There are no quantum-entanglement phenomena going on in the body.
To put it in simple terms: It's too warm, and too wet.
Or in a bit more advanced terms: The decoherence times are FAR too short to have any chemical effect, much less a biological one. Almost nobody takes Penrose's ideas seriously, but just for the hell of it, the cosmologist Max Tegmark did the math a number of years ago to prove it.
Here's a link to an article about that paper that was in Science.
Well, your retina is a little more sensible to handfuls of photons than your left butt-cheek, but apart from that, it's no difference. By interacting with an entangled particle you acquire its entanglement.
In this experiment, the entanglement will happen only momentarily in a few cells of the people's retinas. Then the self-interactions of the eye will kill it. So it's not interesting in the consequences, but in the concept of having a micro-macro connection, a human measuring apparatus having quantum mechanical properties.
But what would it mean to people becoming entangled? Technically, their actions would be correlated. Practically, its completely impossible to do it. A person's nervous system is a very slow and noisy system. By the time it would take to the entanglement couple itself all the way from the eyes to the brain it would be long dead. And to spread to rest of the body, pft.
But I can make a car analogy. If those entangled people would be driving cars, the cars would become entangled to. And if Alice turned right, Bob will be turning left at the same time. And vice versa. Not as a result of their actions, just a correlation. But of course this is silly and impossible.
That said, it is one of the funniest articles I've ever read (yes, I RTFA. Sorry;). Filled with subtle jokes, and has some science juice. It appears that the eyes are a quite good detector indeed, very resistant to noise.
entropy happens
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.
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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?
I shudder at the thought of kibiribbits.
>To put it in simple terms: It's too warm, and too wet.
Penrose never claimed that quantum computations were going on in the conscious brain. In fact, he specifically says "non-computational action". What he proposed is that quantum processes in collections of microtubules might manifest macro behaviors at the neuronal level. Tegmark is way off base when he starts ranting about quantum computing and doesn't seem to understand Penrose's theory. As to Tegmark's claims of to rapid decoherence... he doesn't have a clue how hot or how wet or what other factors might be in play at the microtubule level, so really it's just one guy's opinion...
> Almost nobody takes Penrose's ideas seriously...
Well, technically it's Hameroff's theory, but Penrose was a big and influential supporter. However, there are still a few advocates of the idea as evidenced by the large number of books on the subject from Mindell, Walker, Paster, Radin, Rosenblum, Kuttner, Talbot, Stapp, Barrett, Lockwood, Wolberg, Clayton, Stern, Jibu, Yasue, Tuszynski,...(I got tired of typing - I didn't run out of authors)... So "almost nobody" seems a bit of a mischaracterization...
BTW, for the record, I don't personally buy into the Hameroff-Penrose theory of quantum consciousness, but at least I understand it. I wonder if Tegmark ever read "The Emperor's New Mind" or "Shadows Of The Mind"...
I can propose a real quantum and biological mechanism for people to think along the same lines, simultaneously
Do two different brains operate in the same way, though? What data format do you use for the transmission of information? It's not like we all install the same mental OS when we're born...
I genuinely don't believe that we can "stream" thought from one brain to another in the way you seem to be suggesting. Neurological development isn't fixed, it's highly influenced by environment, culture, genetics, food... That two independent brains would interpret the same information in exactly the same way seems highly unlikely, if not impossible. Hell, I'm honestly amazed that we even manage to communicate as well as we do.
I'm also willing to admit that my viewpoint here has been highly influenced by Wittgenstein :)
That's what mirrors on the ceiling are for.
I don't therefore I'm not.