even if the positron is on the other side of the universe, the positron wave function will collapse to the spin Down state. The reason why is because the two particles came from the same quantum event and their wave functions got tangled up with each other. It is this wave function entanglement that is called the quantum connection ."
"Okay, my brain hurts." I rolled my neck to the right then left and scratched my head. "I think I understand this, but you said Einstein had something to do with this?"
"Oh, I forgot to mention, this thought experiment is called the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Experiment, or most commonly the EPR experiment, because they came up with it. Einstein didn't like this instantaneous 'spooky' action and suggested this is a problem with quantum mechanics. Well, like it or not, EPR is real. It has been verified many times over. But to Einstein's credit, the reason he didn't like it was because the instantaneous events could enable signals to be sent back in time. Let's not get into that, but it turns out that statistics won't allow that to happen. You can go read about that yourself in a quantum book somewhere."
"Well, if you can't send data with it, what use is it?" I was getting more and more confused. "How deep does the rabbit hole go, Alice?" I asked.
"Curiouser and curiouser," Larry smiled. "Back in the early part of the first decade of this millennium, several experiments were conducted that enabled data transmission via EPR. An optical setup was rigged so that the photons from a laser beam were quantum connected in a special cube of a material called KD-star-P, and then split into two separate paths. The reference beam was then encoded by polarizing the photons to a spin Up or vertical Up polarization. The other beam shifted instantaneously to a spin Down or vertical Down polarization.
"Following that effort several different labs even used EPR to teleport at the speed of light an information-encoded bunch of photons from ten or so meters across a lab. A couple experiments around 2013 even showed that atoms could be teleported across a great distance at the speed of light. Here is how it worked." Larry scrolled through the slides until he found the right one again. "Uh . . . let's see. This is the one . . . a beam of photons are entangled or 'connected' inside a laser and then split and sent down separate paths." He pointed out the red laser beams with the little handheld pointer connected to the mouse. The mouse pointer on the screen would move wherever he pointed the hand wand. My guess was that it was like a light gun for a video game; a thought which distracted me for just a moment.
He continued, "Now each of these photons in the beams are quantum connected to each of the photons in the other path. The left beam here is interfered with another optical beam that is encoded with data. Now the data contains much more information than say a single RAM chip might hold, say a terabit of data, and it would require a lot of energy and time to transfer a terabit of data. But the interference beam it makes when imposed on the quantum connected beam is just a few kilobits. We pump that low bandwidth interfered beam over to the other connected beam here on the right. When the two beams are interfered together in the right way, bang! The encoded photons disappear on the left side and appear on the right side! This allows us to send huge amounts of data from one storage device or memory chip to another through a puny low-bandwidth optical fiber. Cool, huh!"
"You mean that really works? Sounds too good to be true, man, we could make a computer without low-bandwidth wire or optical connections that could operate at like a terahertz or much faster than that!" This stuff was exciting.
"Now you understand, Steve ol' boy. The problem is that we haven't figured out how to make good use of it just yet. In order for this to be useful, you have to be able to do calculations and instructions on the data right there
"Okay, my brain hurts." I rolled my neck to the right then left and scratched my head. "I think I understand this, but you said Einstein had something to do with this?"
"Oh, I forgot to mention, this thought experiment is called the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Experiment, or most commonly the EPR experiment, because they came up with it. Einstein didn't like this instantaneous 'spooky' action and suggested this is a problem with quantum mechanics. Well, like it or not, EPR is real. It has been verified many times over. But to Einstein's credit, the reason he didn't like it was because the instantaneous events could enable signals to be sent back in time. Let's not get into that, but it turns out that statistics won't allow that to happen. You can go read about that yourself in a quantum book somewhere."
"Well, if you can't send data with it, what use is it?" I was getting more and more confused. "How deep does the rabbit hole go, Alice?" I asked.
"Curiouser and curiouser," Larry smiled. "Back in the early part of the first decade of this millennium, several experiments were conducted that enabled data transmission via EPR. An optical setup was rigged so that the photons from a laser beam were quantum connected in a special cube of a material called KD-star-P, and then split into two separate paths. The reference beam was then encoded by polarizing the photons to a spin Up or vertical Up polarization. The other beam shifted instantaneously to a spin Down or vertical Down polarization.
"Following that effort several different labs even used EPR to teleport at the speed of light an information-encoded bunch of photons from ten or so meters across a lab. A couple experiments around 2013 even showed that atoms could be teleported across a great distance at the speed of light. Here is how it worked." Larry scrolled through the slides until he found the right one again. "Uh . . . let's see. This is the one . . . a beam of photons are entangled or 'connected' inside a laser and then split and sent down separate paths." He pointed out the red laser beams with the little handheld pointer connected to the mouse. The mouse pointer on the screen would move wherever he pointed the hand wand. My guess was that it was like a light gun for a video game; a thought which distracted me for just a moment.
He continued, "Now each of these photons in the beams are quantum connected to each of the photons in the other path. The left beam here is interfered with another optical beam that is encoded with data. Now the data contains much more information than say a single RAM chip might hold, say a terabit of data, and it would require a lot of energy and time to transfer a terabit of data. But the interference beam it makes when imposed on the quantum connected beam is just a few kilobits. We pump that low bandwidth interfered beam over to the other connected beam here on the right. When the two beams are interfered together in the right way, bang! The encoded photons disappear on the left side and appear on the right side! This allows us to send huge amounts of data from one storage device or memory chip to another through a puny low-bandwidth optical fiber. Cool, huh!"
"You mean that really works? Sounds too good to be true, man, we could make a computer without low-bandwidth wire or optical connections that could operate at like a terahertz or much faster than that!" This stuff was exciting.
"Now you understand, Steve ol' boy. The problem is that we haven't figured out how to make good use of it just yet. In order for this to be useful, you have to be able to do calculations and instructions on the data right there
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