Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Is it possible to send messages faster than light using quantum entanglement?

Episode Date: November 12, 2019

With vast distances between habitable planets how will we eventually communicate with aliens? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials easier.

Complex problem solving takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the. iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught.

And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people, an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show. And we had a blast.

Take a listen. Sue and I were, like, riding the lime bikes the other day. And we're like, we're like, people ride bikes because it's fun. We got more incredible guests like Megan. store plus news of the day and more. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network. Hey, Daniel, I have a question for you that you might not like.

Uh-oh, what is it? It's about aliens, your favorite topic. Ooh, I love it. already. What is it? Okay. So if we can't send messages faster than light, right? All the other planets are light years away. Wouldn't any communication or messages exchanged with aliens take years or decades? Oh, you're right. I don't like that question. Hi, I'm Horham, a cartoonist, and the creator of Ph.D. Comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and the co-author of our book.

We have no idea, a guide to the unknown universe that tells you all the things we don't know about the universe. Yeah, it's a great book, which also functions as a nice quantum banana stand. Or an anything stand, really, once you're done reading it. It's multipurpose. You could buy thousands of copies and build a whole. house out of them. But welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeart Radio. In which we try to find amazing and crazy and fascinating things about our universe and explain them to you. We want to take you to the cutting edge of science and break it

down so that you have a working understanding of it. Science is not something meant just for a few people in an ivory tower. Science is by the people of the people and for the people. That's right. It's a constitutional right to know your science and to have physicists explain it to you. That's right. It doesn't make it democratic, but it should be accessible. Do you think is physics governed by democratic principles, Daniel? It'd be awesome if we could change the laws of the universe by voting on it. Like, hey, who wants to have faster than light travel? Ooh, ooh, me. And we all vote on it. And then it's possible. That would be pretty awesome.

And the universe has to follow the rules. Hey, if it's a democracy, right, then we could like amend the laws of physics, right? Well, if our government is any indication, I think we'd all be in deep trouble. I think Mitch McConnell would stand in the way of any revolution we want in the laws of physics. Yeah, I think we'd probably splinter into different universes. That's right. We'd have people arguing for these set of laws and other people saying, no, we want this to be possible. Maybe we should not wish to have that kind of power.

Yeah, yeah. Let's stick to the undemocratic universe in which we actually live in the dictatorial quantum universe. That's right. So, yeah, so today on the program, we'll be talking about. a problem that a lot of people see if we ever do find other life in the universe, right? Yeah, there are certain things about the laws of physics, which are fascinating but also frustrating that put limits on us. And, you know, if we did find aliens, even on one of the nearby stars that are light years and light years away, it would be difficult to have a

conversation with them because light or anything else takes years to get there and years to get back. Yeah, it would be a really awkward conversation. conversation, right? You'd be like, hey, how's it going? And then you'd have to wait 20 years or more, maybe, to get an answer that says, pretty good, you? They'd have like a revolution since then or have evolved into something else or whatever. How do you have a conversation? Yeah, you might not even be alive, right? Like if we talk, if we're trying to talk to another civilization that's a hundred light years away, it would take 200 years to get a response. Just to get a response. And then imagine what that conversation would be like, you know, the first statements of that conversation

would be like, huh? What? Wait, can you hear me? What? Is this thing on? You know, that's a thousand years right there. Yeah, just to decode our language too, right? Like, it would be kind of awkward. It'd be like talking to my nine-year-old, right? Like, hey, can you pick up your shoes? Hey, can you pick up your shoes? 20 years later, you'd be like, what? It'd be like having any video conferencing meeting. You know, the first 10 minutes of every video conferencing meeting between humans who speak the same language use the same technology is still, I can't hear you. What?

What was that? No, this is not working. It'd be like the ultimate nightmare conference call wouldn't it? I really would. We would waste 200 years just to say you're on speakerphone. Or you're muted or sorry, I thought I was muted or hey, you're in the bathroom and you're not muted, right?

Although actually I would like to hear what it sounds like when an alien goes to the bathroom. Oh, really? That would be your opening question. No, but if that audio was just delivered to me somehow, yeah, I would like to hear that. That would be fascinating. What if that's the only thing we ever learned about aliens is that they accidentally butt dialed us when they were in the bathroom and we got to hear it. You're assuming they have a butt or they might have multiple butts. You don't know that?

Yeah, so many questions could be answered by that accidental phone call. Yeah, you might get like two separate calls on your phone, one from each butt. Hey, your left butt and your right butt are both calling me. I've got to go back and forth. Maybe they have a whole different call waiting system, depending on the number of butts they have. But, you know, this is a fun topic to explore, but I read a lot of science fiction,

and in science fiction, they often have this same problem. Like, let's say it's a million years in the future, and humans have colonized the galaxy and have a galaxy-spanning empire. How do you even govern an empire if it takes a thousand years to send a message from one side of it to the other? Right. Like if you think about it, one fact that always blows my mind is that the United States is only like 250 years old or less. So imagine having a conversation in between the Declaration of Independence and now.

It's a whole different country. Absolutely. It's a whole different country. And I think there's also something interesting there. I think something about the size of nations was determined basically by the speed of information transit at the time. you know, nation states came to be. And the reason we don't have globe-spanning empires might also be because we didn't have instantaneous communication until fairly recently. Oh, I see. Like your furthest calling could be like, hey, I am, peace out, I'm leaving.

And by the time you get the message and say, no way, dude, they're gone. Tighter coordination between the UK and the American colonies might have prevented the American Revolution, right? England could still be a globe-spaning empire. Anyway, that's ridiculous speculation on a top. topic I have no expertise in, but... Yeah, that's a different topic.

That's Daniel and Jorge confuse history. Another production of I-Hard Radio. That's right. But I think this is a really interesting one. And in those books and science fiction novels, they often try to avoid this problem by inventing some way for these people to communicate faster than light.

They have some clever way, some telephone that communicates instantly from galaxy to galaxy or even inside the galaxy, so that they can talk to their subjects and their political connections in a reasonable time. Right.

So that each page of the science fiction story doesn't go 200 years later. Or there's like 300 blank pages until the next thing. Bob's great-grand-nephew answered the phone. It says, what? Who's this? Your phone. Wouldn't that be a fun thing to get in the wheel

from your grandpa? Like, hey, put a call in to some aliens. If they call back, this is what I wanted to know here's the conversation tree I started yeah exactly but yeah it's a big problem

with the idea of a connected universe I think right like you can imagine a galactic empire or you know just getting to know our neighbors it would be a problem it would be a problem

and in a lot of these science fiction novels they try to solve this problem by sort of painting over it with a magic phrase they say well you know maybe scientists in the future I figured out a way to use, here I'm doing air quotes, quantum entanglement. And that just sort of solves the problem.

That's a popular solution in science fiction to this problem. Yes, exactly. Quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement sort of solves the problem of faster than light communication. All right. So then today we're going to answer the question. Can we use quantum entanglement to send messages faster than light? Because I would love to talk to the aliens more rapidly.

I would love to download their physics library and not have it take a billion years. And so I want this to be true. I want us to be able to send messages faster than light using quantum entanglement or anything. Well, I think like any phrase in science fiction, just put the word quantum in it. And it sounds both magical and plausible. Do you think that's going to be true forever? Like won't that trope get tired? Won't people be like, yawn, quantum?

The new thing is, I don't know. What is the new thing? Dark matter? Dark quantumness? Dark matter. Oh my gosh, you're right. And there is even that novel. Have you read that novel called Dark Matter by Blake Crouch?

No, I haven't. Very popular, I think it was a bestseller. It's actually about quantum mechanics, but the title of it is Dark Matter, which is very confusing. It has nothing to do with Dark Matter, except I think that Dark Matter is a sexy buzzworded physics that they were him or his agent or his publishing house were trying to latch on to. Well, there you go. That should be the title of our next book, Dark Quantum.

Dark quantum, yeah, exactly. Maybe we can use dark matter for faster than light communication. Quantum after hours. Cinemax dark matter. Oh, geez. Well, anyways, yeah, the idea is, like in science fiction, can we actually use quantum, this idea of quantum entanglement to send messages faster than light?

And so as usual, we were wondering if anyone had even heard of quantum entanglement or how to pronounce it, or whether it could even be used to send messages faster than light. So as usual, I walked around the campus of UC Irvine, and I was grateful, as always, that they were willing to answer a random question about a random topic. And so before you hear these answers, think to yourself,

do you think quantum entanglement can be used to send messages across the universe faster than the speed of light? Here's what people had to say. I don't know enough to answer that question. I don't know. No, I have not. I don't know, but I hope it can. I'm not sorry.

No, I've not. I do know what that is. You do? Do you think it can be used to send messages faster than the speed of light? That is correct. You think it can? 100%. So what do you think of those answers, Jorge?

All right. Well, I think they're probably pretty common answers. I don't think up until a couple of years ago, I would have known what quantum entanglement was. Yeah, a lot of people had never heard of it. Though one guy was like, oh, yeah, 100%. That's totally possible. I was like, I want to invest in this guy's company. This guy knows something.

Wow. What does he know that we don't know? I don't know. I didn't spend the time to dig into it with him. Was he an alien, possibly? Probably. Oh my gosh. I met an alien.

I didn't even realize it. I have to rewind back in time. Remember what that person looked like. If you can rewind back in time, Daniel, that's, what do you know that I don't know? I just use my quantum entangled particles, right? That solves every science fiction problem. Dark quantum phone. Dark quantum foam.

Perfect. I think that is the perfect blend of buzzwords right there. That solves any problem. There you go. I'm going to suggest that to my students next time they have a research problem. Have you tried dark quantum foam? Many people haven't even heard of quantum entanglement, much less the idea of using it to talk over long distances. It's the topic that's actually decades old, but I think only recently has it entered any sort of the edges of the cultural zeitgeist.

Well, I think I remember a couple of a year or two ago, there was a big. news item saying that scientists had finally teleported something and they used quantum entanglement to do it. Yeah, there was some very misleading science headlines about how scientists had teleported something into space. But yeah, they hadn't actually... Misleading headlines, what? Misleading science headlines, yeah. No, that was... That wanted you to click on it? That's weird. Yeah, they had used quantum entanglement and we did a whole episode actually about teleportation, whether it's possible. and there is one aspect of teleportation, which is possible, which is teleporting a quantum state that is saying,

here we have some particles in a quantum arrangement over here. Can we make other particles, not the same particles, other particles have the same state over there? It's sort of like, you know, copying something. It's like emailing something to somebody else, but emailing a quantum state. And to do that, you do need to have quantum entanglement. Yes, quantum faxing.

That is not a phrase anybody has ever said out loud before, I think. Oh, right. Can I lay my stake on it? Yes. Yeah, they didn't actually move anything to space. People think when they hear teleportation that you've disappeared some matter somewhere and reappeared it somewhere else. That's the common understanding of teleportation, which is why the headlines for that article

were so misleading. But they did use quantum entanglement in that experiment. Quantum entanglement is a real thing. It can be used to do some interesting science, right? It can be used to quantum fax things, for example, which is fascinating and useful, but not faster than the speed of light in that case. But yeah, I think that would be a more better name for it, quantum faxing, because it's not really teleporting, it's more like faxing, right? Yes, exactly. That is quantum faxing. And is it sort of related to this idea of using it to communicate faster than light, or is that totally different than quantum teleportation?

No, it's different. I mean, the idea of quantum entanglement is to have two things that are far apart, but they have some connection to each other. And can you use that to send some information? And you can use it to send some information, but the question is, can you use it to send information faster than the speed of light? But maybe before we dig into that, we should talk about what quantum entanglement is, so everybody has a clear sense for what that means.

Yeah, let's talk about quantum entanglement. So what is quantum entanglement? I feel like I know the word quantum sort of, which means magic. and entanglement means that two things are kind of like intertwined or, you know, kind of like one of them depends on the other. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. Entanglement means that there's sort of a constraint on the pair.

So I think it's simplest if you think about just two particles. Now, it can apply to other things than just particles. It can apply to quantum fields or quantum systems, but just to have a visual thing to hang our mental hats on. Let's talk about, for example, two electrons. And electrons we know have these weird quantum states, It's like they can be spin up or they can be spin down. And for an individual electron, before you've looked at it, it could be either spin up or down.

And sort of like the Schrodinger's cat in the box until you ask the electron, are you spin up or down. It's sort of both. It's not determined. It's 50-50, one or the other. Until you like poke it, right? Until you ask the electron whether it's spinning up or down. Right. And we did a whole episode on quantum spin, how you can measure an electron spin.

You pass it through a magnet and either goes left or goes right. and that's how you're measuring it. You require it to make a decision about whether it's up or down so that it can interact with an experiment you've built in a certain way. And that's useful for thinking about an individual electron. A quantum entanglement is about pairs of electrons because sometimes you can arrange these electrons in a special way so that they're not independent.

They have a constraint on them. Like their spins have to be opposite, for example. If one is up, the other one has to be down. Like you put a rule that says that they're not totally, independent. Yeah. Like, if you throw two dyes, they can be whatever they want to be each one. But if you put a constraint on them saying they both have to add up to seven, then that's

a constraint between two things. Exactly. Because quantum mechanics has a lot of weirdness and a lot of fuzziness, but there are some rules even quantum mechanics can't break, like conservation of momentum. And spin is a kind of momentum. And so if these electrons, for example, came from another particle, say a photon generated an electron and a positron. That photon has an overall spin zero, for example.

Then the electron, if one of them is spin up, the other one has to be spin down in order to conserve overall momentum. Their spins have to add up to zero, which is the same original amount of spin that the photon had. So that's how you do it physically. That's how you apply a constraint to two electrons to say, you can't both be up and you can't both be down. If one of you's up, the other one has to be down,

so you maintain your compliance with this other law of physics. Right. And you can set that rule to whatever you want to be. like you could also say they both have to be up or they both have to be down or they can't both be the same thing. It's just like a rule, right? Yeah, if your photon has spin one in a certain direction,

then you know that both electrons have to be spin up. And if it has been minus one, which is the same as spin one in the other direction, then yeah, the same thing applies. But it's most interesting when this constraint adds up to zero because then each electron can be up or down and it's the combination

of the two that has the constraint, not the individual one. So each one is free to be up or down, but as soon as you know that one is up, the other one has to be down. Okay, so that's the basic idea of entanglement. It's like two particles that have some kind of... They're both quantum, so they're both weird and fuzzy, but there's some sort of constraint between them,

some sort of rule that says that when you open those two electrons, they need to follow certain rules. That's right. And the magic there is what happens if you open just one electron. So electron A and electron B. Say you open the box for electron A, you interact with it, you measure its spin, it's been up. Now you know something about electron B, right? You've measured something about

electron A and learned something about electron B. That constraint allows you to extrapolate your knowledge about the first electron onto the second one. That's the magic because the two have this constraint. And that happens sort of instantaneously. As soon as you measure it on one, you know something about the other one, even if in the meantime you've taken that other electron and moved it a light year away. So that's where the communication part comes in, right? That's where the sort of magic, fast than light, tempting thing comes in. You take these two electrons, they're quantum entangled, you move them really far apart

without breaking the entanglement somehow, and then when you measure something about one electron, you learn something about something really, really far away, and you've learned something faster than light can travel. All right, well, let's get into the details here a little bit more, and how this was actually one of Einstein's ideas, right? It was. It was sort of Einstein's big backfire. So let's get into it. But first, let's take a quick break.

I had this overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call. I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation. And I just wanted to call on and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation. a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community.

September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere.

Now it's a personal mission. I don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasas Come Again, is back.

This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment, with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in, like, over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-20. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters

sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing vivas you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash? because you have to do the code switching?

I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. Yeah. But the whole pretending and coat, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasasas Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro, tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition.

This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union, shopping around online, looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge.

It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months, months, you can have this much credit card debt when it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it. And in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

and how we could use that to talk to aliens, right? Faster than light. That's right. We're hoping they're aliens and we're hoping we could develop this technology based on quantum entanglement to send the messages that aren't accidental toilet butt dials. Right, using my quantum facts, which I just invented 10 minutes ago. Okay, so let me see if I got this straight. The idea between quantum entanglement is that you take two electrons or two particles that are quantum

and you mix them up so that there's some kind of rule between them so that then if you separate them and you open one of them, you know something about the other, even if it's really far away. Precisely. You've learned something about something far away faster than light could get there. If you want to know what is the state of electron B, rather than going there and measuring it coming back, you can do it instantaneously by measuring electron A,

and that tells you something about what's happening far away. And normally in this universe, to learn something about an object that's really far away takes time. If you want to know what's happening in a star, a light year away, you need to wait a year for that light to get here. So this seems like a tempting way to learn things about things that are far away and maybe even to send information. That's sort of the idea. It's paint the picture a little bit maybe. So I take two electrons and let's say I make the rule that when I make the electrons, I make the rule that they both had to be the same spin. like that's a possible rule right

that is a possible rule yes if your photon has spin one then the electrons which have spin half each could be both having a point in the same direction to make that original spin one yes so I kind of I entangle these two electrons and then I send one of them to another star

Proxima Centauri yeah and I wait a while for it to get there it gets there and now I open my electron the one I kept and I see that it's pointing up you're saying instantaneously without having to wait to check on the other electron, I know that the other electron out there

is also pointing up. Precisely. You now officially understand quantum entanglement. This is the day forever, after which you are an expert in quantum entanglement. Congratulations. Right, but I guess what I don't know is how you can use that for communication. I mean, I feel like I just sent you a package

that I kind of already knew what was in it. And before you open it, I know what's already in it, but I'm the one who sent it. So I'm not sure how that helps us communicate. That is the rub, right? That's exactly the issue. But you don't exactly know what's in it, right? I think in the case where the photon has spin zero and so the electrons have to be opposite,

you don't know until you open it, which electron do you have? Do you have the one that spin up or do you have the one that spin down? And so you have learned something about something that's really far away. Before you measure your close by electron, it could be up or down. And the far away electron could also be up or down. It's not determined yet. There's still some randomness. But when you measure the spin of the close-by electron, then you instantly know the spin of the far-away electron, instantly.

The other way to get that information is to let the people who have the far-away electron measure its spin and then tell you. But that would take time for them to send you that information. So this is like a way to instantly know information that is far away. Now, that's not the same as communication, which requires controlling information. And this is the part that science fiction novels never get into. How do you use quantum entanglement to send information faster than light? They just sort of dot, dot, dot, dot from quantum entanglement to instantaneous communication. They never get into it.

Nobody actually knows. Nobody has worked it out. I mean, people have thought about it. And, you know, this thought experiment came from Einstein because, as you said before, Einstein was trying to show the quantum mechanics was ridiculous. Einstein was trying to prove that this new field of quantum mechanics makes no sense. So he actually came up with this thought experiment, like, could you do this in the scenario you're proposing in the quantum mechanics universe, if that was real, then you could do this absurd thing, like knowing something about something really far away. And so he proposed this in a paper and he said, look at this absurd outcome of your predictions of quantum mechanics.

Clearly, you must reject this whole idea. Instead, people were like, huh, I could write a science fiction story about that. No, instead people were like, that's a cool experiment. Let's go do it. And they did it, and it turns out that the quantum mechanics predictions, absurd as they were, were correct, that that's exactly what happens. What did they prove that if you take two electrons entangle them and then separate them, they're still entangled? Is that the experiment? They're still entangled, and that if you measure the first one, the second one instantly collapses to being the opposite of the first one.

It collapses to you, to me, but not to the person who's holding it out there. Yeah, if you measure electron A, right? then electron B, which can be really far away, it can be faster, it can be far away than light can travel in the time they measure it, then they measure that electron B also collapses at the same moment that electron A collapses. If they ask electron A, or you spin up or spin down, then electron B goes from being 50% spin up and 50% spin down to being either one or the other, being the opposite of electron A. So they've shown that this happens, that making a measurement in one location changes the physics of the universe somewhere far away.

And it changes the physics of the universe faster than you could send information via light. It's not like something is happening in electron A and it secretly sends a message to Electron B, quick, I'm up, so you have to be down. They've separated these particles far enough away, like kilometers now, kilometers and kilometers, so there's no way for light to sneak that information.

But what do you mean it collapses in the other end, but they haven't opened it? You're saying inside the box it's in, it's technically collapsed or are you saying that whenever they open that other box out there they're going to find that it follows the rule

they do open the box and it follows the rule yeah like let's say I put two I take two electrons entangled them let's say I make the rule that they both have to be spinning the same direction

I think it's clearest when they have to be spinning the opposite directions okay so let's say I make the rule that they have to be spinning the opposite direction okay I entangled them I keep one in my box

and I send the other one to you in Alpha Centauri in a box Wait I'm an Alpha Centauri I have to go to Alpha Centauri in a tiny little fit I get to go to Alpha Centauri okay awesome I thought you already were there

but um all right I'm an Alpha Centauri with the other box okay yeah I sent you the B electron I kept the A electron I sent you the B electron and they're both entangled

and now you're saying if I open my A electron and I see that it's pointing up, I know that B is pointing down, but you don't know that B is pointing down, do you? That's right, but I measure it and it points down. Right. When you measure it, but up to the point that you measure it, you don't know if it's pointing up and down.

That's right, but how do they talk to each other? How do they know that one can point up and the other one can point down? They're separated, right? Say we make our measurements at the same moment, or within a bill a second of each other. Okay, we are separated by, a light year. There's no time

for electron A to tell electron B what decision it has made. Oh, I see what you're saying. You're saying that my electron, my A electron, the one I kept, could be either one. It could be either one, yes. If I do this experiment a lot, sometimes it'll be up, sometimes it'll be down. Yes. But the ones that it's

up, then yours will be down. The ones that it's down, yours will be up. Precisely. And before you measure any of the particles, both could be up or down. They have a 50% chance of being up and a 50% chance of being down. When you measure electron A to be up, then electron B, a light year away, has to instantly change from having even odds of being up or down to just being

down. It has to, because electron A was up. But how does it know that electron A was up? There's no way for that information to get to electron B in time. Electron A could have been down, forcing B to up. Electron A spin could have been down, forcing B. to be spin up, remember that both of them are undetermined until you measure one of them, and then suddenly both are determined. This is like you take two prisoners and you isolate them so they don't get to talk about their story, and you ask one, you know, who robbed the bank, and you ask the other one who robbed the bank, and their stories always agree, right?

Even though they could have lied. Either of them could have lied. Exactly. Either one could have lied. They either both lie or they both not tell the truth, but somehow they're in sync. And it's physically impossible for them to communicate because they are too far apart. When they first did these experiments, they try to isolate the things, but they weren't actually really that far apart.

It's hard to get two quantum entangled particles actually far apart. But now they've done it. They've quantum entangled particles between the surface of the Earth and things on satellites, for example. That's what that article was about we were talking about earlier. They quantum entangled physics on the Earth and physics in a satellite. Okay, so that's the spooky thing. It's like somehow the two prisoners have their stories. in sync, you know, the two White House officials are somehow saying the same thing

about the text messages, but they never talked to each other, and they couldn't possibly have coordinated. It couldn't. It's physically impossible for them to coordinate, yet somehow when electron A collapses to up, electron B collapses to down, or the other way around. How do I know they didn't coordinate before I separated them? Yes, that is one of the deepest questions about particle physics and quantum mechanics, is that is there a hidden variable? Maybe A wasn't actually both up and down. Maybe there's some hidden variable there, something that determines the forces A to be up,

and so, of course, B is down. It's no surprise that you have half of the cake. The other one is the other half of the cake because it's been those halves the entire time while they were traveling to be farther away. That's a really good question. They decided, like, hey, I'll be down. Okay, that means you have to be up,

and then they separate it. You were saying that's not what's happening. We know that's not what's happening. The explanation for that, and I know people out there who are desperately curious about quantum mechanics, and skeptical of this, want to know precisely the answer to that question.

Because when I was learning quantum mechanics, that's the thing I was wondering about. How do you know there isn't some hidden variable, something we just haven't measured some property of the electron, which determines forces one to be up and the other one to be down? Now, the answer is a bit frustrating. The answer is not a smoking gun. It's a much more subtle experiment.

It's invented by a guy named Bell, and it's about measuring the correlation between A and B. You can't prove that there's no hidden variable for one experiment, But if you do this over and over again and you sort of rotate the spin in the electrons, you can prove that there is no local hidden variable. It's really one of the most beautiful and subtle pieces of physics I've ever learned. So to show that there's no way for the two electrons to have been determined in advance, which one would be up and which one would be down,

that's what we technically call the no local hidden variable. What Bell did was use a second weird aspect of quantum mechanics to help pin down this first weird aspect. On the episode about spin, remember, we talked about how you can't know the spin in two directions at the same time. It's just like how you can't know a particle's momentum and position at the same time because of the uncertainty principle. In the same way, measuring the spin in one direction like X will re-randomize the spin in the other directions like Y. So Bell used this to his advantage to show that the spin really is randomized before it's measured. His experiment says you should separate the particles, but then measure the spin in other. directions, not the one that you have this quantum mechanical entanglement constraint on.

And he showed that if there is a local hidden variable, it will affect not just the constraint direction, but also the spins you measure in other directions. If there isn't a local hidden variable, if the electrons really are undetermined until you measure them, then you will not affect the randomness in the other directions. So he was able to come up with an experiment that gives different predictions if there's randomness and if there's local hidden variables. And then they did the experiment and boom, it showed that there really is randomness. But we should dig into it further on a whole separate podcast episode because it's really fascinating. They have proven that there is no local bit of information that could be

hiding inside those boxes to determine that one electron actually is up and the other one actually is down. We know that there that there really is uncertainty there, that the electron could really be up or down when you've entangled them and when you've separated them. And that that collapses, moment you measure one of them, even if they're really far apart. Yeah, it's kind of like if you do the experiment a bunch of times, and you sort of know for sure that the two prisoners couldn't have possibly gotten their story straight ahead of time. There's something weird going on. There is something weird going on.

Even just doing it a lot of times doesn't satisfactorily resolve that question because there could be a hidden variable in each case. And so doing it many, many times just reinforces that. It has to do with measuring these spins along different axes and then rowing. rotating that axis, and you can show that as a function of that rotation, things would act differently if there is a hidden variable than if there isn't a hidden variable. But again, it's a bit too subtle to get into, I think, on today's podcast. It involves spinning prisoners, which we can't get into. That's right. We tried to file for a research allowance to do that, and they said, no,

that's not, that's violent human rights, is inhumane, exactly. And then I tried to say, but it's for black matter quantum foam telephones faxes. And we're just, and we're just, and we're Doing it in a Stanford basement. It's all right. No, they said. No, it wasn't approved. All right. So that's where this idea that you could use this for faster than light communication is that there's something, something's going on faster than light.

And so could we use that to communicate faster than light? Right? That's where the idea came from. Yes, something here is happening faster than light. And so people thought, ooh, maybe we could communicate faster than light. That's the genesis of the idea. All right. Let's get into whether it is possible to use this for faster than light.

communication, but first, let's take a quick break. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and

inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I had this overwhelming sensation that I had to call her right then. And I just hit call. I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation. And I just want to call on and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things

you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, season two, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide. in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide.

One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. Don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head.

Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hola, it's Honey German. And my podcast, Grasias Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years.

Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing vibras you've come to expect.

And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching. I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. Yeah.

But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasas Come Again as part of my Cultura podcast network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

All right. So we talked about quantum entanglement and how there is something going on with it that's faster than light, but the question is, can we use that to talk to aliens faster than light or to, you know, Daniel, who's in Alpha Centauri, faster than light? And so what's the answer here, Daniel? How could we use quantum entanglement to violate the fundamental speed limit of the universe? Well, first, I want to say that I think this is a totally good idea to investigate, because there's often loopholes. You know, we talked about on the warp drive episode,

like, yeah, you can't travel faster than light through space, but just change your definition of what you want to do. And don't say, I want to go through space. Say you want to squeeze space so you can get somewhere faster than light would have gotten. So it's a great sort of avenue for exploration to look for loopholes and try to find ways to accomplish what you want to do without breaking the laws of physics. But in this case, it's not going to work. And the reason is to go back to what you were saying before.

Like, say you have these two electrons. Let's try to dot the lines and say, say, say you have these two electrons, quantum entangled between here and Alpha Centauri. How would you actually use that to send information? Why would you build a communication system? Say you want to send me a bit, right? You want to send me a zero or a one? You know, you want to tell me whether or not the apple pie is ready to eat.

One is apple pie is ready. Zero is, oops, I burned the apple pie or something. You want to send me some information. I want to give you a thumbs up or thumbs down. Yeah. How would you do that? Well, in order to do that. One lamp, if the British are coming, two lamps if they're coming by.

by spaceship. In order to do that, you have to sort of control the information. You might be tempted to say, okay, what I'm going to do is I'm going to force my electron to be spin up in one case. I'm going to force it to be spin down in the other case because that determines what happens to Daniel's electron. And so I can sort of like twiddle Daniel's electron from really far away by twiddling mine. That's the tempting way to go.

Right. Entanglement connects the two electrons. and you're saying, like, if I see the British coming by sea, I'll turn my electron down, which makes your electron turn up, and somehow I talk to you faster than light. That's the idea, but that doesn't work, right? That fundamentally doesn't work.

And the reason is pretty simple, is that you can ask the electron, what state is it, but you can't force it to be in a particular state, because if you do, it breaks the entanglement, right? The rules of the entanglement are that the two have to be in opposite, It states because you're preserving the angular momentum of the system that created them. There's this law of physics that requires them to still tally up in the end to have the same angular momentum as the original system.

But if you interact with one of them, then you break that because you're adding momentum or adding angular momentum to the system. You've broken that quantum system. You've made a new quantum system, and that doesn't have to follow the same rules as the original. Oh, I see. So there's communication going on, but there's no – it's like there's communication going on, but there's no talking going on. The two electrons somehow are coordinating, right? There's definitely collusion happening there, but you can't force one electron to be in a certain state,

which is what you would need to do to send information from one to the other. No, no, Daniel, no collusion. It's which hunt? No, these electrons really do collude. It's quantum collusion. See, look, I invented a phrase also. All right. Quantum collusion.

Good luck with that one. You both did it and are somehow not guilty of it at the same time. Anyway, no, the frustrating is the problem is that this quantum entanglement thing is real, and it really does happen, and there is something weird and fast in light happening, but we can't use it to send information because you touch one of them, you basically break the magic. Right. It's like we can both learn what each other has faster than light, but I can't tell you about what, I can't tell you anything. We just both learn faster than light. Precisely. We learn about each other, but what we have, but we can't tell each other something.

Yeah, you're like, okay, I sent Daniel to Alpha Centari. He spent five years of his life getting there. And now I know which electron he has. Okay, what does that do for us? Nothing. Yeah. It's like I opened my electron. It's like, oh, it's pointing up.

That means Daniels is pointing down. And that doesn't help us at all, talk. That doesn't help us at all. And so I spent 10 years of my life on an experiment we already knew was doomed. That's what we've learned. And we just spent 40 minutes on a podcast that's also tuned. Yeah. And so, you know, there are fascinating ideas there.

There's amazing quantum magic-seeming stuff happening. It seems like maybe quantum mechanics could evade relativity somehow. But in the end, relativity is hard and fast. There's no way to send information through space faster than light. I mean, if you did, you could break causality. And we're going to have a whole podcast episode about what it means to have things happening simultaneously and causality and all that fun stuff maybe next week

or so. But the short version is that relativity is a law we're pretty sure cannot be broken. It can be evaded. You can squeeze space instead of moving through it, but you cannot break it. So the only way I think to get messages to Alpha Centauri faster than light would get there would basically be to warp there and warp back.

Oh, well, there you go. Can I make a warmhole telephone? Like open a wormhole to you that somehow I can, you know, transmit information through it? That is totally theoretically allowed, yes. So that doesn't require quantum entanglement.

It requires negative mass particles, which we're not sure actually exist in this universe. But theoretically, there's nothing that prevents you from opening a wormhole. It might also require as much energy as is stored in the planet Jupiter. But, hey, that's an engineering problem, not a physics problem. That's a small price to pay to tell you if the pie is burned or not. You could just send me a new pie for that price. I can just eat the pie and forget about you. I'm never going to see you again, Daniel.

Dan, we'll be back for years. He's stuck on Alpha Centauri on some wild quantum goose chase. He's not going to eat his pie. This pie will be rotten and moldy by the timing. That's right, unless, of course, it's a quantum pie. There we go. We're inventing phrases all over the place. All right.

Well, it sounds like the answer to the question is not really. You can't use quantum entanglement to talk to aliens faster than light. All those science fiction novels, they're just fiction. They are just fiction after all. And I want to get props to science fiction authors for trying, for actually thinking, how could you do this, and for getting a little bit into the science, not just sort of brushing over, like, I don't know,

we just have some sort of ancible that lets us talk magically across the universe. I like that they dug into it a little bit. And, you know, so kudos to them. And science fiction often leads the way in research and creates things which then scientists actually be. build. So we certainly don't mean to criticize science fiction authors. But in this case, that idea, as far as I understand, will not work. Which is a bummer. But hey, you know, if you're writing a science fiction novel right now and this episode frustrated you, just remember that

scientists have not technically disproven quantum faxing, which is a new field. Yeah, not yet. Which you can use for your science fiction novel. So there you go. Send me the royalties. That's right. If you are writing a science fiction novel and struggling a little bit with the science of it, hey, send me an email. I am happy to give you consultation on how to devise your science fiction universe. Daniel and Jorge fixed your science fiction novel, a new podcast. That's right.

All right. Well, thank you for joining us. We hope you found that interesting and didn't get too entangled in your head there. That's right. We hope we didn't entangle your neurons any further than they already were. Or that we gave it unnecessary spin to the topic. As usual, Jorge spun it up and I spun it down. Well, thanks for joining us.

See you next time. Thanks for tuning in. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line we'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge. That's one word. Or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio.

For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a little. better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials easier. Complex problem solving takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be

identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people, an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show. And we had a blast. Take a listen.

Sue and I were, like, riding the lime bikes the other day. And we're like, we're like, people ride bikes because it's fun. We got more incredible guests like Megan in store, plus news of the day and more. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of Oz. I Heart Women's Sports Network. This is an IHeart podcast.