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Can Quantum Entanglement Create Faster-Than-Light Communication? (mit.edu)
Slashdot reader StartsWithABang writes: If you were to send a space probe to a distant star system, gather information about it and send it back to Earth, you'd have to wait years for the information to arrive. But if you have an entangled quantum system -- say, two photons, one with spin +1 and one with spin -1 -- you could know the spin of the distant one instantly by measuring the spin of the one in your possession.
This "incredible idea to exploit quantum weirdness" for communication was the subject of a recent Forbes article [which blocks ad-blockers] as well as a NASA mission directorate. ("Entanglement-assisted Communication System for NASA's Deep-Space Missions: Feasibility Test and Conceptual Design".) And Friday MIT News reported a research team is now making progress toward capturing paired electron halves for quantum computing on gold film. "Our first goal is to look for the Majorana fermions, unambiguously detect them, and show this is it. "
This week even 85-year-old Star Trek actor William Shatner cited quantum entanglement in a discussion of Star Trek's transporter technology, arguing that "Although a lot of the concepts in science fiction are absurd to our Newtonian minds, anything is possible because of the new language of quantum physics."
This "incredible idea to exploit quantum weirdness" for communication was the subject of a recent Forbes article [which blocks ad-blockers] as well as a NASA mission directorate. ("Entanglement-assisted Communication System for NASA's Deep-Space Missions: Feasibility Test and Conceptual Design".) And Friday MIT News reported a research team is now making progress toward capturing paired electron halves for quantum computing on gold film. "Our first goal is to look for the Majorana fermions, unambiguously detect them, and show this is it. "
This week even 85-year-old Star Trek actor William Shatner cited quantum entanglement in a discussion of Star Trek's transporter technology, arguing that "Although a lot of the concepts in science fiction are absurd to our Newtonian minds, anything is possible because of the new language of quantum physics."
TLDR: No.
Next story please.
Personally im suprised they havent tryed this allready. Imagine cabability to send commands to mars in realtime with hardly any delay. In fact that would be perfect test for this. Snd prome to mars that uses entagelment pairs are primary communication method and have old tech radios just as backup... tests once and for all if its really can go faster then light or not.
I thought Slashdot had a policy of rejecting Forbes links. Fuck StartsWithABang. Fire EditorDavid. And no, faster than light communication isn't possible through quantum entanglement. The no-communication theorem shows that it's not possible through quantum entanglement. This is a shit article from a shit poster posted by a shit editor.
He continually picks the dumbest articles. This one in particular is incredibly stupid.
But the tunnel effect can... As long as you stay near the Planck length.
Is a "quantum mechanic" someone who fixes really tiny cars?
The basic problem is that as it stands there is no way to tell if what one detects is random noise or a message.
This in part because we can't send anything more than a bit at a time.
If science advance far enough in terms of producing entangled pairs that we can potentially encode a whole text, never mind something like a video file, in one go, then it may be settled once and for all. This because the likelihood of random fluctuations producing the same output as such complicated input is minimal to say the least.
What in living hell is that dildo Ethan Siegel (AKA StartsWithABang) doing spamming his malware-ridden Forbes articles (which he gets paid foor here again?!?!?!
Fuck you Ethan.
Fuck your Stupid Beard.
Fuck your self-aggrandizing blog.
And oh, die while you are at it. Painfully if possible.
I used to think this was an option too, but the more I read about it, the more it became obvious that it wouldn't work. This is because, while you would easily and immediately have an influence on the paired quantumdot at Earth, even if you were 10 lightyears away, there is no way to direct or guide to any particular state in front. Meaning, the moment to interact with your entangled electron or photon, it would 'set' its state, but in a random way.
So the information encoded in entanglement is only extractable when you look at correlations between measurements on both the entangled systems. So to access that correlation information, you would need communication anyway, and that communication could not be FTL. If you only look at either system, but not the other, then you need no such communication, but you also can extract no information from the entanglement. This is actually a good thing, because much of science is done by ignoring entanglements, and the reason we get away with that is the information we are ignoring cannot interfere with our interpretation of the results of our experiment.
Suppose we split up two qubits in an entangled |00+|11state, where we've established that Alice is going to measure two overlapping bell curves with their double-slit experiment.Suppose Bob likes wavy interference patterns. The rules of quantum mechanics allow Bob to do, on his qubit, any unitary transformation like |0|112|0+12|112|012|1.
This takes our state to:
14|00+14|01+14|1014|11
Now supposing that Bob measures his qubit as 0 or 1, then Alice must measure either the wavy interference patterns 12|f0(x)+f1(x)|2 or 12|f0(x)f1(x)|2.
Bob can thereby instantaneously change, from a quantum perspective, what the outcomes of Alice's measurement are going to be.
Alice's wavefunction must change instantaneously and might even change retroactively: she may have already measured her qubit before Bob does this unitary transformation and measurement: nevertheless, to satisfy the predictions of quantum mechanics, her measurements must be consistent with Bob's manipulations. But that can't send messages. Because this thing that Bob has done is not directly visible to Alice. That's for a couple of reasons, the first being that this only generates one photon of results on the double-slit screen, which isn't enough to see the pattern! But suppose we measure lots and lots of these qubits to try and see the pattern: then the problem is that Alice doesn't know which ones Bob measured as 0 or which ones Bob measured as 1. Since there was a 50/50 chance of Bob getting either, what Alice sees is therefore:
14|f0(x)+f1(x)|2+14|f0(x)f1(x)|2=12|f0(x)|2+12|f1(x)|2.
Alice therefore still measures two overlapping bell curves, overall!
Where are the interference patterns?! That is very simple: when Bob and Alice compare their measurements in the first case, Bob's 0-measurement can be used to "filter" Alice's patterns into 12|f0(x)|2,
the bell curve of photons which passed through only the first slit, and his 1-measurement filters the results to give 12|f1(x)|2,
Bob's transformation then changes how he can filter Alice's patterns: Alice's overlapping bell curves are now made up of the ones he measured 0
for, which describe one wavy pattern, and the ones he measured 1 for, which describe the other wavy pattern, and they add up into the non-wavy pattern.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
I used quantum entanglement in a SF story I posted in my journal (a better copy without /.'s patented smart quote mangler is here). I called them "jump radio" in the story.
Free Martian Whores!
I would love to find out where Mr. Shatner got the wisdom to make that insightful statement.
Not to put him down, but his background as an actor and "writer" hardly gives him the background to understand what that statement means.
I suspect that both he and our current Prime Minister have a publicist with at least an undergraduate degree in physics.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Can quantum entanglement methods be used to allow a web browser, while running an ad-blocker, to access Forbes? This might be real progress.
Quantum world weirdness has already been proved with quantum delayed choice experiment.
Somewhere there is a 130+ IQ point scientist and sometime this scientist will come up with another thought experiment, which will later be supported by actual experiment which will provide a different spin, and potentially a breakthrough in quantum mechanic understanding. We just don't know how old that scientist is or even if he or she already born.
My grandfather did not believe in satellites. Several hundred years ago people did not care about heliocentric model. Modern people are so limited, as such they have made a practical simplification to treat speed of light as a constant. Quantum delayed choice experiment is a first salvo, a first spin to this oversimplification.
There is a legion of geeky nerds who are racking their brains around quantum mechanic phenomena and more experiments more discoveries will expand our knowledge horizon.
So is Bob fucking Alice or what? She is such a tease. And don't get me started on those middlemen.
Slashdot reader StartsWithABang writes:
Reader? Reader? I very much doubt StartsWithABang ever reads anything here.
Can Quantum Entanglement Create Faster-Than-Light Communication?
No, it can't. This has been known for years, and gets pointed out in every quantum story on Slashdot multiple times.
If a headline asks a question, and the answer is known, I should think the last Slashdot could do is to put that well-known and proven answer in the summary.
And Friday MIT News reported a research team is now making progress toward capturing paired electron halves for quantum computing on gold film. "Our first goal is to look for the Majorana fermions, unambiguously detect them, and show this is it."
Does that have anything to do with the aim of FTL communication? Or did you just put it in because it had the word "quantum" in it?
This week even 85-year-old Star Trek actor William Shatner cited quantum entanglement in a discussion of Star Trek's transporter technology
And just when I thought it couldn't get any more tenuous...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Suppose I have two marbles in my bedside drawer, one red, one blue. In the morning, I get up and put one in my pocket, leaving the other behind, but without looking at either. I then go to work, say on Alpha Centauri, 4 light years away (say in a NAFAL spaceship). At some point, I pull out the marble in my pocket, and see that it is red. I now know instantly that the marble in my drawer back on Earth, four light years away, is blue.
Can that be used for communication? No. Quantum entanglement makes the choices more complex, but it doesn't allow for FTL communications any more than the marbles in my pocket do.
Well...when fucking or being fucked, there is always some entanglement involved...
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Nice attempt, but Slashdot's comment parsing has completely bolloxed-up your ket notations. (Not that most readers would've understood it apropos of nothing, anyway.)
Well, I also can't prove that you aren't capable of reaching out with your thoughts, grabbing the Moon, and hurling it into the Sun.
However, the preponderance of evidence strongly suggests that you can't. In fact, it would be silly to believe that you could, even though noted physicists like William Shatner say "anything is possible". I'll even go so far as to claim that you can't, even though I admittedly don't have a lot of experience, experimental data, or resources to devote to telekinetic orbital mechanics.
Don't worry about sending out space probes and waiting for info to come back. At the rate greedy people, and countries who don't understand the word "overpopulation", are destroying the planet, probe information will be a moot subject.
Use tachyon particles instead and ignore the part that implies that special relatively is wrong.
It has already be proven by real scientists.
It's called the "no-communication theorem" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem
The only faster than light effect that has ever been observed (and has in fact repeatedly been demonstrated), is the situation where a journalist sees the word "entanglement" and immediately starts typing "faster than light communication" without any time delay whatsoever.
In this case, the experiment is about sending entangled photons along a classical channel (interstellar space), using the entanglement to reduce noise a little bit. Those photons still travel at the speed of light, but using a particular quantum trick the error rate can be slightly lower than that achieved by sending non-entangled photons. It's not even a spectacular gain, but I guess every photon counts when you're sending information from a probe that's far away in space.
No faster than light communcation to see here, move along.
Real scientists have figured it out, you thick-tongued mongoloid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem
There you go.
Scroll to the bottom and read the references if wikipedia isn't good enough for you.
Subject says it all. Forbes' fuckery is what inspired me to switch from one to the other.
Specialization is for insects. -Heinlein
Not to mention superposition.
But if nobody saw them do it, she can be both pregnant and not pregnant at the same time.
Current theories on quantum entanglement say no. But those theories are only 80 years old at most. If you went back 90 years they still believed that the Milky Way was the only galaxy. Even 20 years ago it was widely held by the astronomical community that large impacts were a thing of the past and the solar system had been swept clean of impacting asteroids/comets, that is until Shoemaker Levy 9 slammed into Jupiter. I find it pretty amusing that people so blindly state things to be proven/disproven based on our species infinitesimally short foray into what we would call today the sciences. If there's anything that we should have learned by now its that "impossible" is a massively overused word. Go back even 70 years and most of the stuff we have today (personal computing, communications, data storage, space travel, etc) would have been thought "impossible".
Meaning, the moment to interact with your entangled electron or photon, it would 'set' its state, but in a random way.
didn't we overcome the uncertainty principle when making quantum computers?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
But if you have an entangled quantum system -- say, two photons, one with spin +1 and one with spin -1 -- you could know the spin of the distant one instantly by measuring the spin of the one in your possession.
From what I have read, there is nothing magical about quantum entanglement.
Instead of photons lets use a coin. You take a coin and split it in half such that one half has the heads and the other tails. Now place each half into a separate sealed box. While doing this DO NOT LOOK AT THE COIN HALVES as this is where quantum entanglement claims to be magical and influential. Now send those boxes out to two locations anywhere in the universe. Now open one box, see what is contains and you will know immediately what the other box contains.
Here's where things go off the rails with articles like this. No on has ever claimed they could influence or change the value of one side of the coin such as to change the other half at it's distant location. I would argue the values in quantum entanglement are already set the moment the photons are split apart, and like the coin, they can not be changed by looking at them.
I also can't prove that you aren't capable of reaching out with your thoughts, grabbing the Moon, and hurling it into the Sun.
I'm going to steal that, and you can't stop me...
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
seriously, please reject all stories with links to forbes from now on.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
So shut the fuck up and let the real scientists that get paid to do this stuff figure it out. All of you lack the requisite experience, experimental data, and resources to do otherwise.
But once you know 'it can't be done', to use a phrase from quantum entanglement itself, you will immediately know the grant money 'dried up'.
I'm just typing this before I crawl into my Primer tube at the storage depot to take a peak if FTL works in the future.
Actually there's an interesting proof by David Wolpert that this sort of thing can't work the way you think it can. It sort of goes like like this in rough outline. There's only so much information that the state of the universe can encode. If you import information from another time frame to the current time frame you have to lose some information. He goes on to argue that information transport from the past, which is immutable, to the future must be lossy. So you can't send information outside the light cone faster with perfect fidelity. This is not the same as a lossy channel-- which can use error correction to encode perfect transport.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
EditorDavid: you need to stop accepting submissions from this guy Ethan Siegel. He has links to Forbes that contain MALWARE in the adverstisements.
Violating causality is no joke...
Okay, if it's more than just a speeding ticket, what should the penalty be then?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
There are some theories, most prominently the De Broglie-Bohm theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Broglie%E2%80%93Bohm_theory) which assume that the Universe itself is inherently non-local.
These theories are basically Aether theories (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories) which assume some kind of unknown medium (possible that medium is space itself). Do not confuse these with the Luminiferous aether theory.
If there is such medium that can explain a lot of things eg. why the Universe appears to be the same in all directions, etc. This was explained before with the Inflation theory, but that one bit the dust (http://www.space.com/28423-cosmic-inflation-signal-space-dust.html).
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
As a child, my grandfather was taught his blood would boil if he ever went more than 100 m.p.h. Glad he didnt listen.
According to the Forbes article, if you read the quantum state of a particle here, you can learn the corresponding state of the remote particle, no matter the distance. It would seem like this could allow you to gain knowledge about distant events, provided you knew the particle on the other end was being used to influence those events. For example, suppose you had a particle here on Earth and your twin had another entangled particle on Alpha Centauri. Suppose the two of you had worked out a system where each of you would consult the particle as an Oracle for major life decisions. If this was the case, you and your twin would know what life choices the other was making instantly, without having to communicate.
So the upshot of this is that a sufficiently advanced alien race could be keeping tabs on Earth from very far away by having seeded entangled particles throughout our planet eons ago. Since our actions are based on random events (the weather, the stock market, random number generators, synaptic activity in our brains, etc) such an alien race could know an incredible amount of information about how we operate by consulting their entangled particles.
So, think about it. We are being watched. Each random occurrence on Earth gives our alien overlords the ability to spy on us, while themselves being so far away that we could never see them. I bet you'll never look at a Magic-8 Ball or a coin flip the same way again.
Tachyons have never been observed. Even if they can exist, there is no known means to generate them. The only reason to believe such a particle is even possible is that they are a valid solution to certain equations in special relativity.
So you all figure it out. It took like 10 minutes.
Besides the fact it's straight up impossible, what nerd needs a primer on the concept of quantum communication? Bad article, with bad summary.
Yes you can know the state of the other if you have mastered control. Once control is mastered you set the binary state in sequence 1 to 0 and then 0 to 1 , Pole state N to S, S to N , what ever. Then the flip is always expected, and when it is not.. it is because the sender reversed it.
Know what the most lovely thing is about science versus religion/superstition/mysticism/faith-based beliefs? Science can believe something completely absurd is possible, explore it, discover they're totally wrong about it, it was indeed utterly absurd as predicted, and not only is that okay, it's encouraged behavior. How many 'absurd' things has some researcher in the past believed, that the scientific community (and even the public-at-large for that matter) scoffed at, ridiculed and even ostracised the researcher in question over, and then turned out to be completely and totally correct, turning everyone else on their ear, and revolutionizing the field? So quantum entanglement can't be used for FTL communications; so what? The question had to be asked, the answer had to be sought. Doesn't mean it was wasted time, doesn't mean anyone should have their life ruined over it, doesn't mean that someone isn't going to keep looking for ways to create a way of transmitting information faster than light, either. Who needs to be scoffed at, ridiculed, and ostracised, are people who, through peer pressure and mob thinking, seek to prevent science from 'wasting it's time' by exploring seemingly absurd ideas. Every 'failed experiment' is not a failure if there was something learned from it, even if that amounts to 'X doesn't work'. Sometimes, the journey is more important than where it ultimately takes you.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I would vote for Trump if it would mean the Nerd Holocaust. It's high time to purge society from the geek scum.
Before thing comes first
Violate Causality
I now have first post!
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Obviously, I am not a physicist, so I genuinely asking this.
I get that the change of the state would be random and thus there is no way to predict how the state will change. But do you need to know?
I mean lets say the ship was 10 light years away and the partner was here on earth.
Let's say that we figured out a way to both measure a change in state instantly. How it changed isnt important, only that it did change.
We also figured out a way to change the state when we want to.
Could we not just use frequency of the change like mores code?
I also seems not correct to say it cannot work because we would violate a law. As I understand it, no one has a clue how quantum works. Hell, maybe those little suckers just make a tunnel that connects right through space time to the partner. Who knows!
From my limited understanding on the subject, the actual entanglement only allows you to know the state of the other particle at the far site when you measure yours. You can't actually change the state of either particle, which you'd need to be able to do in order to effect communication. However, it also seems like it's been proven that it's not because the states are determined when the particles interact -- experiments have been done to prove that the state of both particles is determined when either is measured. I assume this is an optimization technique so the universe only needs to compute the states of the things that someone cares about. Anywhoo, the mechanism by which this information is communicated is unknown (last I checked). I'd guess that they're investigating this mechanism to see if there's something there they can leverage.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The NASA report isn't about faster-than-light communications, it's about sending more bits per photon than current optical transmission systems, thereby transmitting data "faster" in the same way that LTE is "faster" than 3G.
According to standard quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics cannot be used for faster than light communications. Now, I'm usually the first to point out that physics isn't mathematics; standard quantum mechanics may simply turn out to be wrong in the long run on this point. But so far, there are neither experimental nor theoretical results suggesting that it needs to be modified.
First law of media: whenever a news title ends with a question mark, the answer is no. So, FTL communication: nope, and entanglement can't help it.
NASA-sponsored research at U. Illinois: use superdense coding, with some interesting twists (note to myself: read about it). That's no FTL, but usung fewer photons for communication than the number of bits communicated. Such technology may become applicable in a distant future.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
2. Do you support taxing it heavily via legally-binding international treaty, or only for countries with successful capitalist economies?
3. Do you accept the authority of secret federal courts to compell you to break the entanglement without notifying the communicants and without a proper warrant solely via a national security letter even if it might implicate you directly in a crime?
4. Do you accept The Greek Oracle's claim to have patented this by traveling in time back to the Big Bang and being first to file in Eastern Texas, or do you accept Francios Googol's claim in Belgium that we all have a right to give away a cleanroom re-implementation of it even if it uses some/much of the open sourced API originally implemented by The Sun outside the jurisdiction of The Federation or The Empire or The Collective?
Etc.
.
Does any of this sound familiar? ;-)
Error: NSE - No Signature Error
I'll bite. I shouldn't but, what the hell? I'm busy elsewhere so I may not even have to deal with any additional derp.
So... If I give you the benefit of doubt, will you actually listen? Science doesn't really work like that. First, you make an observation. Have you observed faster than light communication?
To put it into a bit different light, you aren't supposed to have to prove you're not guilty in a court of law. Not at all. The burden is on the State to prove that you're guilty. It's pretty much like that. Until you have an observation, you have nothing except conjecture. It's nice mental bubble gum but it's sure as hell not science - or even something worthy of formal debate.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Although transmission through space time does not allow FTL communication (AFAWK) wormholes might allow us to bypass parts of space time giving us effectively a short cut which takes less time.
Of course wormholes might not exist but they don't go against the same laws of physics we cite which gives us c.
Then again there are so-called tachyons postulated in the quantum world and they might also provide for FTL communication.
What I think is interesting if it were possible to create a warp drive and people ended up scattered about the galaxy Internet of the very distant future could resemble one giant sneaker net of ships ferrying information.
Also posting links to Forbes is a lost cause. We can't read them.
I run Ghostery and uBlock Origin in a Chrome incognito window for my regular browsing. Forbes first opens up to a welcome page. But every Forbes link after that opens up to the article without ads. Am I doing something wrong (right)?
My browser is entangled with an ad-blocker and everything collapsed when Forbes observed it.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
What? Since when is science a court of law? New scientific hypotheses aren't assumed to be false before they're proven true, the assumption depends on the experiment and background knowledge (and perhaps the gumption of the experimenter). New scientific theories aren't assumed false before they're proven true, nor are scientific laws assumed to be false before you can point to something and say, 'aha! it is true after all!' To become a theory or law in the first place requires many observations or calculations of an aspect of our universe, and then also ensuring that these results don't come about by some other means.
But all of this is subject to new ideas and new interpretations. It used to be thought true that the atom was the smallest particle in the universe. It used to be thought true that the sun orbited the Earth. It used to be thought true that the species of the Earth were placed here fully formed and evolved to their final states. All of this has been since proven otherwise by later information, but for a time these were scientific truths.
And finally, have you observed the Big Bang? Have you really been unable to know both the speed and position of an electron or are you just not trying hard enough? Observation has never been an absolute necessity for science, calculation and proving the negative are just as much a part of the scientific method as physical observation.
We know they exist, they were the answer to a New York Times crossword puzzle. Or at least, those were the sequence of letters that fit the space and made sense.
This link will work fine even with ad blockers:
http://webcache.googleusercont...
You can also change your user agent to Googlebot to workaround such shenanigans.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Your post is absolutely correct, and also quite informative. However, there is a way to potentially communicate FTL, although communicate may not necessarily be the right word.
Imagine, if you will, that you've sent your space battle fleet to the homeworld of the Vulcans (i.e. planet Vulcan, because they're highly logical and not because Roddenberry is unimaginative). It's a 5 year trip, and today is the anniversary. You call the Vulcan ambassador into your office, and check your entangled particle measurement device. Reading the result, you look him square in the eye, and demand unconditional surrender of all of Vulcan's assets on Earth...
Because 5 light years away, the commander of your battle fleet measured his entangled particle. As had been prearranged, if it was spin +1, he was to continue on to the next stop on the planetary domination galactic tour leaving Vulcan unaware (i.e. planet Kronos, home of the Klingons); but if it was spin -1, he was to immediately begin the attack. It was, so he did... and when you measured your particle and found it was spin -1, you knew the attack was underway. Had it been +1, you would have offered the ambassador a drink and a military alliance against the Klingons, but that's the way the coin flips.
It's not exactly communication per se, but it can be used to indicate instantaneously at a distance which of a predetermined set of actions has been randomly selected.
You're assuming that the state has a location. Why can't the state exist in many/any place at the same time? Entanglement may just be the case where a single state is shared.
Seriously. The guy doesn't know anything about it. It's great that he's enthusiastic, but making statements like "anything is possible" when even to the amateur scientist this is quite clearly not the case is fucking stupid. The man has exactly zero expertise on the subject.
I had this idea 12 years ago and worked with many people to make it happen. At the time no-one ever thought of this and found it an amazing idea. I will be contacting many people, this sounds like someone broke the confidentiality contract.
That's absolutely not how science works. Claiming something is impossible without proof is just as wrong as claiming something is possible without proof.
didn't we overcome the uncertainty principle when making quantum computers?
No. Were previously we thought measuring quantum conjugate properties was a binary exclusive operation (i.e. measure one, you can't measure the other), we now know that it is more of a continuous spectrum; i.e. the more you measure of one property the less you can measure of its conjugate.
So you could measure both with some uncertainty if you perform weak measurements (i.e. those that don't restrict the wavefunction to a single state, but leave some room for superposition/uncertainty).
The total amount of information that you can extract from the quantum system is still limited by the uncertainty principle.
THEOREM.
Not LAW.
Wake me when that becomes a LAW.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
A theory is not proof. A theory isn't even concrete.
Wake me when it graduates to LAW status, please.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Faster than light communication is impossible and would break the universe as we know it;
General Relativity also broke the world as we knew it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I recall particle "interference" was gone, if particles were detected. Can't one use that with entangled particles?
I'll grant you that is an interesting read. They're basically saying they can measure a wavefunction and yet it doesn't collapse by the measurement of it. (To be precise, they measure a property through the wave-function, namely if it's polarised or not.) It doesn't say they could measure what kind of polarisation had taken place, only that it did or didn't. So it doesn't denote that once it is 'set' in a state, it's not random anymore (you can't choose in front *how* it would be polarised, without collapsing the wavefront). So what I said still stands. But, regardless, it does change the game, agreed. Because they say they can measure whether it's 'set', or whether it's not 'set', without collapsing it.
And, following logic, that alone would be enough to impart some information, indeed. Because if one had 100 individual qubits that are supposed to be in an undetermined state, yet when you measure it at Alpha Centauri (without the wave-function being collapsed), it would turn out some of them were undetermined, but some aren't anymore (because of polarisation of the entangled qubits done on Earth), you could create a pattern that sends information. Even if there were random fluctuations individually, you could still filter it out statistically.
Hmm. Is there any link/paper that handles FTL communication through this particular method? It seems to me, if that article is right, that it would be relatively easy to establish if it actually can be used for FTL communication*. I would have presumed someone would have done it already...(?) If so, I would welcome a link to such a paper.
*Note that the NASA experiment does not do that; as far as I've understood, they just want to maximise the information of photons send to the spacecraft through entanglement. But the information send is still at the speed of light, not FTL.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
that's quite the verbose way of admitting you were wrong.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Amen! ;-)
I would say you're partially right. Journeying on itself can be fun. However, at a certain point you have to draw the line. For instance, claims without (scientific) proof about subjects that we already know of that are impossible (in the sense that it breaks basic laws we otherwise already would have measured and observed it long ago, if true), is a futile endeavour. It becomes the realm of pseudo-science, and that does more damage to science than anything else. That's why claims like that of the EM-drive, that violates CoE and CoM by simply bouncing microwaves around in itself as a closed compartment, is bullocks. If a microwave-oven (which it is, basically) could violate it that easily, without it leaving normal physics we already know of, then we would already have observed that through myriads of other experiments long ago.
That said, quantum entanglement is less well understood. It doesn't mean 'everything' is possible as some seem to believe, but the boundaries are more unclear. The statement that FTL communication is impossible is only true as far as the wavefunction can not be measured without collapsing it. Which has always thought to be the case, but I just got a link here to a paper which claims it succeeded in measuring a property (namely being polarised or not) without collapsing the wavefront. Which would make FTL communication rather a technical problem rather than breaking any physical law (not that it was defined as such, but it used to be regarded as pretty well established). However, I have little doubt that anything which is a mere *technical* obstacle, humanity can overcome, eventually.
Point is, if that paper is correct and it can be falsified and confirmed, it should be possible to set up a system to see if FTL isn't feasible afterall. Thus, science knows no absolutes, as you say. :-)
In any case, lets be sceptical until more experiments confirm or refute the claims of that paper.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
About time we started talking about Ansibles communications. How else will we deal with the descolada problem on Lusitania?
There is a catch, I can know what the remote state is after I discover the local state, but how do I go from that to the point where I can induce the remote state by forcing the local state. Once I can do this I do indeed have a faster than light binary data link. Perhaps I do not need to force the local state if my particles have more than one entanglement and those states are correlated so that I can improve my chances of guessing one state by discovering another correlated property. This allows me to discard some pairs and resolve the state of others, with the binary data being encoded in those choices and not in the states of the particles themselves. Consider the following Chain of Entanglement (Q-chain) A[-1-B{-2-]C-3-}D There are relationships between the states of AB BC & CD there is also a correlation between AB & BC so that when we resolve AB we can better guess BC and therefore CD without ever resolving CD directly. If we then select a set of X Q-chains such that we have enough for our guessing to be statistically useful we can discard chain sets that do not have a value that corresponds to the value we wish to transmit.
If I can do something like I have described above I could communicate via a faster than light link.
To be precise, it's a verbose way of acknowledging I *could* be wrong. ;-)
Then again, if everyone would be willing to do the same thing on slashdot, debates would considerable improve around here. :-p
The only thing I find strange, seen the dramatic implications of it, is that there seems to be no paper who has tried it out and confirmed FTL communication. I'm sure it would have been world-news and we'd all heard about it, if it was the case. And it's been 3 years since that paper...
Thus, I'm leaving it open for now, but that doesn't change the logic behind it that, if confirmed, the major objection I raised in my particular parent post, has become largely void.
I'm actually not naively endorsing it, nor do I find it extremely likely, and thus I would like to see this paper confirmed by other experiments, especially in an FTL communication set-up, but facts are facts, and IF it would turn out to be true that you can measure a state of a qubit without destroying the wavefront, in principle, you could get information across. It's...well... it's the logical consequence of it, isn't it? Can't help it.
On the other hand, if I were proven wrong and FTL communication were possible, it's actually opening up a lot of possibilities. I'm not one to speculate into fantasies too much, but once you can have instant two-way--communication, it should also be possible, in principle, to, say, have a real-time experience on another planet with a robot-avatar you send to an extra-terrestrial planet before. (presuming you can live enough to wait out the time it needs to get there, so maybe Mars would be a better goal).
Anyway, first things first. I would like to see it confirmed or refuted.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
The only faster than light effect that has ever been observed (and has in fact repeatedly been demonstrated), is the situation where a journalist sees the word "entanglement" and immediately starts typing "faster than light communication" without any time delay whatsoever.
Obligatory xkcd.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
You missed KGill's point.
In a court of law, the burden of proof is with the prosecution, not with the accused.
In science, the burden of proof is with the one making the claim, not with the one refuting it based on current knowledge.
And to paraphrase Marcello Truzzi the more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary the proof must be.
Denying faster-than-light communication is not an extraordinary claim, because nothing has ever been observed to go faster than light.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
The technology would have to be developed to hold and manipulate the electrons once separated from their entanglement. The absence or presence of a manipulation to the electron would indicate 1 or 0 as in the binary code. There wouldn't be anything transmitted. The faster than light would be only because the other pair of entangled electrons had been incorporated in the communication technology of the space craft before it left Earth. Any manipulation of one electron instantly effects the other. This could be applied to even Earth communication without the need for cell towers or satellite transmission. Now that we have broken out of the mold new ways of perceiving the universe are going to bring us new tools too. We all need hobbies to work on.
We could build intelligent space probes and send them to our nearest stars. If they are small we could send 5 to 10 each for redundancy. They would be as artificially intelligent as we could make them. Then they would answer a series of yes/no questions about the system. That way we could categorize interesting systems to investigate further.
We could also send larger probes able to replicate and repair themselves such that they could investigate indefinitely. If the AI we sophisticated enough we could send short formulas with which it could infer to match the progress we have made in science and technology. Possibly building a better communication system later and get relatively instantaneous results.
My understanding is that from the Universe's perspective, causality cannot be violated, but our ability to actually measure what is going on is limited and can look like it.
that's quite the verbose way of admitting you were wrong.
He isn't wrong. Weak measurements don't allow for FTL information transfer.
The state of the entangled pair stays undetermined while you make a weak measurement, because it doesn't affect the wavefunction much (which is the whole point of weak measurements).
Only a strong measurement will collapse the wavefunction and put each entangled particle in a certain state, but which state that is, is random, and cannot be controlled.
Maybe I don't get this. Let's say we travel 20 light years and want to know whether there is life on a planet there. You take two sets of entangled particles. One for yes, one for no. When you get there and find the answer, you interact with the appropriate particle. Instantly the other one back home has its state set. So when you notice back home, you check to see if it was the yes or no. You now instantly know the answer.
Awesome. You should make a website about that.
Keeping with traditional 'wisdom' of entangled particles (there has been given a link which cast some doubt on this), the reason why what you say doesn't transfer information is as follows:
Say the answer is yes. You open the box with yes. It automatically collapses the wavefront, making the particle determined to a +1 or -1, whatever. You have no control over whether it's +1 or -1, however; it happens fully randomly. So you can't impart info directly that way, agreed?
But, you say, that doesn't matter, since it's the 'yes' box with the qubit that is of importance, and you know that means 'yes'. But... how can the folks back at Earth know? If they open the yes box, they'll see a +1 or a -1. But if they open the no-box, they'll see a +1 or -1 as well. That's because the wavefront collapses in both cases *regardless* of who measured it (you at 20 lightyears, or the folks at home). So the only thing you see, is a +1 or -1 in both boxes, and you can't know if it's there because YOU measured it and caused the wavefront to collapse, or whether it's due to THEIR measurement. In both cases, as soon as anyone measures it, you get a random outcome. And if you don't measure it, you don't know if 'the other side' has changed it or not.
It's the *measuring* that makes it collapse in a random way, whomever observes the state of the qubit. And you can't get the state of the qubit *before* you observed and measured it, and you can't know if it's there because *you* measured it, or *they* did. Basically, the only thing you know is, if you measure a +1, they'll have a -1. But that doesn't help anything in conveying any information, since it's randomly determined.
Now, there's been a link to a paper which claims it is possible to measure whether a qubit is determined or undetermined *without* collapsing the wavefront. Obviously, that would change things. If true. But if not, it's easy to see with my explanation why you wouldn't get any info out of it.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
..why is this /. news?
99% of readers would have long ago been through this - since quantum non-locality has long been mainstream science.
The simple upshot is that setting a state for a particle in another light-cone, is a long way from sending a message - let alone a sensical one containing information a human could understand.
This "incredible idea to exploit quantum weirdness" is neither incredible nor an exploit as this reader found out in about 1996, in about 2nd year Uni.
Extraordinary or not, you can't make a claim of impossibility without proof. Lack of observation is not proof.
In Google News you can easily customize the tool to avoid anything coming from Forbes.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
"anything is possible because of the new language of quantum physics"
I know Shatner is an actor with no clue, but seriously no line of scientific inquiry will ever have "anything goes" as its conclusion.
Don't cry into your keyboard, you'll short it out that way
Just finished mass effect 2 where they described exactly this doing exactly that.
You do not understand entanglement.
Heisenberg has shown that effect can precede cause at the subatomic level.
No.
Wake me when you decide to post anything worth reading.
I like the idea that we are not giving up on this endeavour. It is necessary that we "somehow" find a way to do this.
FTA:
In common bar magnets, which have north and south poles, two magnets are attracted if opposite poles face, but will repel if the same poles face each other. Similarly, in a magnetic tunnel junction, the current flow across the layered materials will behave differently depending on whether the magnetism of the layers points in the same, or in the opposite, direction — either resisting the flow of current or enhancing it. This spin tunneling work, which dates to the 1990s, revealed that pairing two thin magnetic materials separated by a thin insulator causes electrons to move, or “quantum tunnel,” through the insulator from one magnet to the other, which is why it is called a magnetic tunnel junction. “This change in the current flow, very significant, can be detected very easily,” Moodera says.
Since these magnetic materials are atomically thin, rather than north and south poles, their magnetism is associated with the up or down spin of electrons, which is a quantum property, and they are characterized as parallel when their spins are in alignment, or antiparallel when their spins point in the opposite directions. “So all you have to do is change from parallel to anti-parallel orientation, and there you have this beautiful spin sensor, or spin memory,” Moodera says. “This spin memory is non-volatile; that’s the most striking thing about it. You can set this particular device in a particular orientation, leave it alone, after a million years it’ll be still like that; meaning that the information which is stored here will be permanent.”
A spin sensor that is non volatile may hold the key. It may not. We will see. Entangle a pair of these, when they untangle they trigger the sensor.
In any case, lets be sceptical until more experiments confirm or refute the claims of that paper.
Scepticism is, of course, part and parcel to all true science.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
You can now observe a superposition without destroying it, see https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22336-quantum-measurements-leave-schrodingers-cat-alive/ so communication is possible by having two entangled pairs of particles, which you periodically "weakly" observe without disturbing the superposition. The sender "strongly" observes one or other of the particles. When the receiver weakly observes one of the particles is no longer in superposition which of the particles is no longer in superposition determines the bit state.
This obviously suffered the problem that you have to transport the particles in superposition at sub-light speeds, and there is a finite number of them limiting the amount of information that can be transferred. Unless of course two sets of weak observations can encode data into the corrections.
I could imagine a system with two entangled particles held in superposition, each in continuous weak observation by means of a feedback amplifier. Then deliberate small errors are introduced into the corrective feedback, such that the other end must correct for it. These errors would appear like frequency modulation allowing encoding of a data stream using only a single pair of entangled particles.
No!
No, it clearly can't no matter how many marbles you have.
Only because Quantum uncertainty will make you lose your marbles.
If you have two coins: one showing heads, the other tails - ordered as such by a cat in a box, which also died, so you can't ask it which coins is which. You send one of the coins to Andromeda. At that point, you open your coin box and read... TAILS! Hurray, now you know that the coin in the Andromeda spacecraft is HEADS! Faster than light communication bitches!
NO.
While true, it still sheds some doubts on my former absolute stance it wasn't possible, I regret to say.
Let's say you can perform weak measurements with some uncertainty, without it collapsing the wavefront.
As long as that uncertainty is lower than the statistical chance it being equal to a random number (aka, 50%), it would still mean one could get information out of it in a statistical way.
Let's say you have two qubits, the right one mean yes, the left one no. If you can check both qubits without collapsing them, and you note that the first (yes) is more likely to be in a determined state than it is to be in an undetermined state (this would be the 'some uncertainty' you spoke of), then you would be 'more close' to the answer being yes than no. And, if you would have 10 pairs of those, and it almost always showed the right qubit to be in a determined state, it would augment the statistical certainty that the message is 'yes'.
While the amount of information you would get from it is indeed limited, it would still mean you can get *some* information from it. In that case, how meagre it may be, you would have information at FTL.
Well, that's what I think of it, reading that paper. Feel free to point out any mistakes in my reasoning.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Well... let' say I *could* be wrong. ;-)
you're right that the entangled pair stays undetermined on itself, but, as far as I can see, this doesn't stop the possibility of retrieving info.
As I interpreted the paper, what they're saying is that they can determine if the wavefunction has collapsed or not, without it actually make it collapse by doing so.
In that case, let's say I have 100 qubits, 50 times 2 qubits. You agree before you leave Earth, that they'll all stay in the uncollapsed state, unless you want to say something, and what you're going to say is agreed on in front. For instance, if the first one is collapsed, it means 'A' and it means you must send a probe into the star A, if the second one has collapsed, it means 'B', and you have to send a probe into star B. Now you measure the qubits in the way the paper describes. You look at the first pair; you see it indicates the first qubit is in a determined state, and the second isn't. You look at the second pair; you see it indicates the first qubit is in a determined state, and the second isn't. You look at the third pair; idem. You look at all 50 of them, and the vast majority of them indicate the first qubit is in a determined state. Then it's pretty sure Earth send 'go for the first star A', no?
It doesn't say in what polarisation-state qubit A is in, exactly, but you don't need to know that. Only that it indicates that it's collapsed.
So..what am I missing here? If the paper is right. If. Wouldn't that mean you *can* retrieve info this way?
You are right that a weak measurement doesn't influence the outcome of the state it is in, but nothing prohibits the folks *on Earth* to do a strong measurement, thereby collapsing the wavefront, and the guys at Alpha Centaury to measure it in a weak way, thereby identifying the first qubit has collapsed.
No?
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
That's not how entanglement works. In your example, with entangled photons being sent from halfway between A and B, all A and B can do is measure their particles and then, afterwards, find out that their measurements matched. Neither A nor B can choose which information to send.
It can be proven that both particles really were in a superposition of states until they were measured, and they did not contain any hidden variables that would determine the outcome, so the "information" of what state the particles ended up in had to travel faster than light from one to the other, but A and B have no control whatsoever over this information. All they can do is compare their measurements and find that they somehow ended up matching.
If someone ever did find out how to transmit actual, usable information faster than light in any way, that would automatically mean that it would also be possible to send information back in time. Things that are simultaneous for some observer are actually not simultaneous at all for a different observer who has a different speed (as has been proven with GPS satellites). So something that travels "instantaneously" for one observer, is actually traveling back in time from another point of view. Repeat this back and forth to send information back in time to the same location, allowing you to get tomorrow's stock quotes, or possibly hiring a hit man to kill you before you could send the message you hired him with.
Now, with parallel universes this could still work without contradictions (you might get a message from one universe but end up living in another universe where things are completely different) but it certainly is not as problem free and straightforward as you make it seem.
Trust me, people are not just saying FTL is impossible because they are narrow minded. Scientists that are much smarter than you have thought about this a lot longer and harder than you. That does not mean that they cannot possibly be wrong, but you certainly ought to educate yourself on the subject before dismissing their hard work like that. It's not as simple as you think.
I think the point is, one making the *original* claim is the one that needs to provide proof.
Thing that lack any way of observation, are scientifically worthless. Maybe they exist, maybe not. But you can't say anything sensible about it.
Next!
If you postulate 'God', thus, it's for you to prove God exists. If you can't prove that, saying 'but you can't proof he doesn't' is besides the point. In the best case, it just means it should be ignored, just as the postulate 'tooth fairies exist', and 'magical dragons exist'. Maybe they do, and maybe they don't, but since you have no way to know, the complete concept is worthless in a scientific context.
In practise, of course, since one has to have some pragmatism at least, we consider it 'not true' or 'non-existent'. That's, strictly speaking, not a purely scientific stance, but it is one that is de facto the most sensible. With a limited budget, personnel and time, you can't expect the scientific community to research every crack-pot idea and extremely unlikely idea or concept out there, certainly when that has no observational nor theoretical basis, after all. It's a matter of gradation, thus, and the lower you get on that scale (and without any theoretical substantiation, nor observational proof, you're scoring extremely low) the less likely it's to be considered worthwhile. 'Impossible' in that sense, just means: so extremely unlikely and doubtful that one is best of ignoring it altogether.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Are we arguing that no method of *transmitting* something FTL is possible, or are we arguing that it's not possible to violate causality?
We've already decided that "time" is relative to your inertial frame, so if you could communicate with Alpha Centauri using entangled particles, you could cause something to happen there that no one where you are could know about for 4.3 years, assuming lack of your little communications device...
*brain struggle struggle struggle sinkinggggg*
Maybe he confused Heisenburg with Asimov's Thiotimoline.
The burden of proof is on the one making a definite statement. If OP had said that FTL communication was possible, the burden of proof would be on OP. OP, however, seems to have assumed it might be possible, and that doesn't require proof. The statement that it's impossible is a definite statement, and requires proof. Moreover, it's a statement about both what we know and what we don't know, and that is not an ordinary claim. We know physics is incomplete, and we really don't know what we'll find.
We can say there's no way to do FTL compatible with known physics. We can say that we can't have FTL communication and Special Relativity without being able to communicate into the past.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Theories are concrete. If they weren't, they'd be conjectures or something else. Theories aren't proof, but neither is anything else in science. A law of science is nothing more than a theory that everybody is convinced is true.
We can't prove FTL communication is impossible, although that's very strongly the way to bet. We can prove that quantum entanglement in any form that agrees with current theories does not allow FTL communication.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Causality can't be scientifically proven in any test.
Time indexes only have relations to each other because agents decide to view them that way.
Only two (subjective) time frames are real: the instant and eternity.
See B Theory of Time, Sartre, Kierkegaard, etc.
Know what the most lovely thing is about science versus religion/superstition/mysticism/faith-based beliefs?
I was wondering when the "Im a science fanatic and Im too smart for religion" person was going to make a post. You are very smart. Good boy. You can go back to licking your Charles Darwin poster now.
What if someone creates a quantum physics emulator, and then runs genetic algorithms against it to find a useful way to communicate faster than light?
Just because no human has figured it out doesn't mean it isn't possible. Maybe with enough analytical power, AI can find a solution. There may be a round-about path that nobody has spotted yet.
I suppose one problem with this is that there has to be some intermediate "success" to provide feedback to the GA system in order to evolve against. If it's all-or-nothing, it will probably get stuck at "nothing". Communicating the state of the entangled partner is one possible intermediate success, but is there anything between that and "real" communication?
Table-ized A.I.
Wake me when you actually work with quantum particles (like photons) and study their effects both quantum and classical.
I have the feeling I'll be asleep and waiting a long time for you to catch up.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Well, if we're going to go there, then Moore's Law basically is bullshit, and needs to be immediately downgraded to conjecture.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
If someone ever did find out how to transmit actual, usable information faster than light in any way, that would automatically mean that it would also be possible to send information back in time.
No! No! Ugh. No! Even if you could send a controlled bit of information from A to B faster-than-light using two entangled particles, all that means is that bit of info traveled from A to B quicker than it would have if it were traveling the speed of light. Nothing about this scenario sends anything back in time. If you assume that information you're receiving is traveling the speed of light, it might appear to be coming from the future, but it's only coming from the same time in someone else's reference frame.
Example:
An observer on a 155ly-distant planet with kick ass telescope is watching Ft Sumter about to be attacked. If the observer and Gen Beauregard possess a pair of entangled particles, (even if you could control the bit, which you can't) no instantaneous controlled bit of information can reach the general informing him that attacking Ft Sumter will eventually be a bad idea. Even to this telescope owner, the general is long dead and the battle long over. The information that was instantaneously sent from the observer today (in their frame) reached us today (in our frame). The light hitting the telescope today left Ft Sumter 155 years ago. Even in the observer's reference frame it was 155 years ago.
QQ babby no unnerstand kwantum intengomans
Look up relativity of simultaneity. I'm not talking about perceived simultaneity (observation) but actual simultaneity corrected for propagation delay. If two events are simultaneous for one observer (after correcting for propagation delay), a different observer with a different speed will disagree. There is no objective way of defining simultaneity. This can be exploited by sending a message back and forth using different frames of reference to really send it back in time.
At least it could if FTL transmission were possible.
Khyber - High school dropout stoner who pretends he is smart to cover for his deep insecurities in life.
Tachyons have never been observed. Even if they can exist, there is no known means to generate them. The only reason to believe such a particle is even possible is that they are a valid solution to certain equations in special relativity.
The only thing I've really heard reading physics books that lead me to believe their was some actual science behind it was an off hand mention in a Michael Kaku book that somebody showed that they could exist and probably did in the early universe, but hopefully can't any more because it would indicate the universe was at a false vacuum, and they would eventually cause instability to make it go to a more stable state (and changing the laws of physics and probably destroying/recreating the universe in the process).
Moore's Law has been either a good prediction or a self-fulfilling prophecy.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
They are consistent with relativity, mathematically. You can't accelerate anything up to the speed of light, but the maths doesn't stop you creating a particle already exceeding it. They would be very strange particles indeed - they would have imaginary mass, something never observed, and allow for causality violations, also never observed. So they might exist, but it's unlikely: They are not consistent with observations. If they can exist it would have to be under conditions so extreme that they have never been experimentally observed, like the early universe.
I used to think this was an option too, but the more I read about it, the more it became obvious that it wouldn't work
But according to the article, Captain Kirk says it would! So that's that.
then it must be so! ;-)
My only regret is, that Mr. Spock can't say that anymore.. :-(
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---