Just thought I'd pass this along.....
One of the paradoxes of interest to Cramer is known as "entanglement." It's also known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, named for the three scientists who described its apparent absurdity as an argument against quantum theory.
Basically, the idea is that interacting, or entangled, subatomic particles such as two photons -- the fundamental units of light -- can affect each other no matter how far apart in time or space.
"If you do a measurement on one, it has an immediate effect on the other even if they are separated by light years across the universe," Cramer said. If one of the entangled photon's trajectory tilts up, the other one, no matter how distant, will tilt down to compensate.
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Here's where it gets weird.
Because these two photons are entangled, the act of detecting the second as either a wave or a particle should simultaneously force the other photon to also change into either a wave or a particle. But that would have to happen to the first photon before it hits its detector -- which it will hit 50 microseconds before the second photon is detected.
That is what quantum mechanics predicts should happen. And if it does, signaling would have gone backward in time relative to the first photon.
"There's no obvious explanation why this won't work," Cramer said. But he didn't consider testing this experimentally, he said, until he proposed it in June at a meeting sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
"I thought it would get shot down, but people got excited by it," Cramer said. "People tell me it can't work, but nobody seems to be able to explain why it won't."
If the UW experiment succeeds at demonstrating faster-than-light communication and reverse causation, the implications are enormous. Besides altering our concept of time, the signaling finding alone would almost certainly revolutionize communication technologies.
"A NASA engineer on Earth could put on goggles and steer a Mars rover in real time," said Cramer, offering one example.
Going for a blast into the real past
Science is ever so slowly accepting the observations of quantum physics experiments that demonstrate retrocausality. Not sure if this particular experiment will show "signalling", but we already see entanglement is real and defies causality in the normal sense of that term, although some creative approaches get around this by saying all potentials exist or don't exist, depending on the approach, until observation and various other approaches.
The implications for the evo/creo debate should be self-evident.
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