Atom Wave: Relativity Entangled

Atom Wave

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Relativity Entangled

Again, once more I step into the fray. You must by now be somewhat familiar with Special Relativity, as it is the discovery of a most famous man; Albert Einstein. For a number of years, some in the scientific community have been of the opinion that Einstein blew it by not embracing Quantum Mechanics in its early years, he did!
It turns out that Quantum Mechanics works very within modern physics theory, and this is including something that Einstein didn’t consider. One of the oddball properties of Quantum Physics is that you can entangle particles. With Entanglement, you can remotely transit the properties of one particle; say spin to another particle some distance away. This can be a real problem for Relativity given that experiments conducted by Alain Aspect and others in the 1980’s and onward to today have proven that Relativity can be violated with its no object can travel superluminal clause.
It’s not like this event was completely unexpected. Back in 1964 John Bell showed theoretically that in experiments involving particle spins measured across nonparallel axes, no local theory could manufacture the results. Now locality is a part of Relativity, all observers (clocks) must be independent of each other. There can be no privileged observers, and no absolute space. Since 1981, experiments run by Alain Aspect and others using entangled light have demonstrated superluminal locality violations.
Now don’t kid yourself, I still have reservations about these results. Special Relativity is a very well established science in nearly every other respect. Then there are the limitations inherent with Quantum Entanglement that brings into question the meaningfulness of the results. One is that you can’t transmit superluminal information between two particle systems by measuring the state of one of them. It is also that Quantum systems forbid the copying of information; Entanglement is a statistical process, just as with the rest of Quantum Mechanics.

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