And Since the two of you can’t agree on “when” things happen, it’s possible that you will get a faster-than-light message that seems to predict your future.

Here is the reason why a faster-than-light signal would be travelling through time:

If one were able to move information or matter from one point to another faster than light, then according to special relativity, there would be some inertial frame of reference in which the signal or object was moving backwards in time. This is a consequence of the relativity of simultaneity in special relativity, which says that in some cases different reference frames will disagree on whether two events at different locations happened “at the same time” or not, and they can also disagree on the order of the two events (technically, these disagreements occur when spacetime interval between the events is ’space-like’, meaning that neither event lies in the future light cone of the other).[19] If one of the two events represents the sending of a signal from one location and the second event represents the reception of the same signal at another location, then as long as the signal is moving at the speed of light or slower, the mathematics of simultaneity ensures that all reference frames agree that the transmission-event happened before the reception-event.[19]

However, in the case of a hypothetical signal moving faster than light, there would always be some frames in which the signal was received before it was sent, so that the signal could be said to have moved backwards in time.

If a mars rover uses an “entangled particle transceiver” to send data back to NASA saying it fell over the rim of a crater, the communication is more “real-time” than anything else.

An astronomer watching the rover fall over the edge is getting the information after the delay caused by the limits of the speed of light.

Nothing went back in time.

Dr Lene Hau and her Harvard-based team has managed to non-randomly alter the quantum states of atoms via light, and, vice versa. The researchers have shown that light can be slowed to a bicycle speed and even stopped(!) within a laser-supercooled Bose-Einstein-Condensate (BEC) of sodium. The temperature of the condensate is a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero. At such a temperature the sodium atoms share the same low quantum state behaving en masse like a “super-particle”. The researchers then trained two lasers on this condensate: the first, a coupling beam; and the other a probe beam. Via their manipulation or ‘wavelength-tuning’ of the sodium condensate with the coupling beam, they were then able to get the condensate to slow down the probe laser light and bring the light to a complete stop within the condensate! During the deceleration, the laser beam light pulse shrank from a length of several kilometers to just tens of microns, fitting entirely within the sodium condensate cloud! The probe light left a kind of holographic imprint in the BCE atoms, and the researchers were able to manipulate/process that ’stored light’ via electric- and magnetic fields. They were able to coherently transfer (change) BEC sodium atoms from one quantum mechanical state to another.

For full article/discussion see here
http://www.seas.harvard.edu/haulab/publications/pdf/OPN_Ultraslow_light.pdf
mini video here of Dr Lene Hau discussing her work: http://www.nature.com/nature/videoarchive/trickofthelight/

it just gets too crazy at this level of understanding, we aren’t living in 3 dimensions we’re living in 11 we just dont see anything but 3 spatial dimensions because of gravity. all other dimensions are overlayed on our space.

While the article concludes that ‘the contents of those notes are beyond our control, and so can’t be used to transmit any useful messages.’, I certainly would rule it out. So, there’s a handy way to transmit binary data over arbitrary distances.. maybe? That would be nice.

Myke, I think what they are saying is that altering the state of one electron affected the other one, for reasons that can only be explained by their theory?

What exactly does this mean? They both vibrated in the same pattern at the same time? Are they 100% identical? If one particle was disturbed, does it affect the other one? If not, couldnt the particles influence each other when together enough to seemingly still “communicate” when separated?

Am I missing something?

Let me put it this way: if the particles were really exchanging information, let’s have two spaceships flying by: one from particle A to B, the other from particle B to A. Both spaceships are at the midpoint, C, and travelling quite fast. One spaceship says, aha! information traveled from A to B, faster than the speed of light! The other spaceship says, aha! information traveled from B to A, faster than the speed of light!

Not all interpretations of QM have “wave function collapse”… in these other interpretations, things make much more sense and nothing travels faster than light speed.

Go take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics

What was discovered here is that the entanglement of these particles took place across another dimension, and that in this extra dimension these particles were separated by 1/10,000 the distance in three “natural” dimensions. Information traveled, via the entanglement, across this distance in the extra dimension, at or below the speed of light.

The real news here is that we can leverage this extra dimension for communication at the very least.

“it would have to travel at 10,000 times the speed of light”

Unless I misread the original article, 10,000 times the speed of light is the MINIMUM speed given the resolution of the equipment that was used.

Well done….is there a question in there, or nothing more than a random fact? OK, I have one too!

Wikipedia says:

“Bagpipes are a class of musical instrument, aerophones using enclosed reeds fed from a constant reservoir of air in the form of a bag.”

Anyways, in Ender’s Game they claim that the buggers are why we figured out HOW to communicate faster than light. I guess now that means that we used them (the buggers) to figure out how to carry information using quantum entanglement as opposed to just taking measurments in two swiss cities.