Human Eye Could Detect Spooky Action At a Distance 255
KentuckyFC writes "The human eye is a good photon detector--it's sensitive enough to spot photons in handfuls. So what if you swapped a standard photon detector with a human eye in the ongoing experiments to measure spooky-action-at-a-distance? (That's the ability of entangled photons to influence each other, no matter how far apart they might be.) A team of physicists in Switzerland have worked out the details and say that in principle there is no reason why human eyes couldn't do this kind of experiment. That would be cool because it would ensure that the two human observers involved in the test would become entangled, albeit for a short period time. The team, led by Nic Gisin, a world leader on entanglement, says it is actively pursuing this goal (abstract) so we could have the first humans to experience entanglement within months."
Ah, but once entangled... (Score:1, Interesting)
...is one still an observer?
Re:First humans to experience entanglement? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Frogs (Score:2, Interesting)
I think perhaps we are constantly entangled, but that our "consciousness" (whatever that may be), resolves the entanglement to a specific, given state. The point of the experiment on this interpretation is simply to demonstate entanglement using the human eye, rather than the proxy of a detector mediating between the event and our conscious experience of it. I'm tempted to say "move along, nothing to see here", but (apart from an appalling pun), I'm somewhat intrigued by what the result will be.
not quite a first, guys (Score:4, Interesting)
We live in the physical world and experience entanglement all the time. Physics doesn't stop outside the lab.
That's a cute gimmick, but that's all it is.
Re:What could possibly go wrong? They are just eye (Score:4, Interesting)
They're just chemicals. If they ever did achieve momentary entanglement, chances are that there would be no way of detecting or knowing such a thing had actually occurred. In the grand scheme of things, one person may register as having seen a tiny, dim flash of light that is identical to the tiny, dim flash of light that the other one saw.
Entanglement explainable by holographic universe? (Score:1, Interesting)
Would the principle of entanglement be explainable by the holograhic universe theory?
If a hologram is essentially wavefronts - is it possible that these can become in phase, or sync, or somehow related?
It seems like this might explain:
- Why entanglement is difficult to achieve and not even fully understood how to reproduce consistently.
- Why electrons seemingly at random, or with time, or when we know they are "disturbed", will disentangle. Disturbing one wavefront will cause a knock-on effect (literally) on the wavefront it's in phase with, causing it to take on an opposite property.
- Why there's an inverse relationship between accuracy of measurement of speed and location - the more you interact with the wavefront, the more uncertain it becomes. Also why pinpointing the exact location of a particle makes it seem like its speed is impossible to measure (it seems to be able to move in any direction at any speed, because we're unable to predict how the causality of interaction of the parts of the hologram works). If you pinpoint its exact speed, then knowing its location is really knowing the point it moved away from an instant ago and the point it will move to, and that would also take predicting the interaction of the hologram wavefronts, which we can't do and so seems random.
- The whole 'spooky action at a distance' - because there actually is no distance. Once the waves interact in such a way that disturbing one causes it to take on form X, and the in-phase wave to take on the opposite form, they are really "at the same location" until they are disturbed.
If this IS the case, it should have some interesting implications - it might be possible one day to disturb an electron in such a way that the one on your side ALWAYS takes on property X, leading to transmission of information faster than light.
Yeouch. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is getting closer to a novel by Greg Egan called Quarantine, in which a girl escapes from a mental institution. How she escaped, nobody knows. Cameras show nothing. Security doors show no logs. The plastic sheet used for the window shows no anomalies of breaking and fixing.
Turns out her brain was "broken" in a most unusual sense: she cannot collapse her own view. Instead, her multiple worlds (from the MWI) combine and create a non-collapsed lifeform. All this comes about in finding a created device that selectively prevents the collapse, but allows the user to change it at will.
Re:Frogs (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, your retina is a little more sensible to handfuls of photons than your left butt-cheek, but apart from that, it's no difference. By interacting with an entangled particle you acquire its entanglement.
In this experiment, the entanglement will happen only momentarily in a few cells of the people's retinas. Then the self-interactions of the eye will kill it. So it's not interesting in the consequences, but in the concept of having a micro-macro connection, a human measuring apparatus having quantum mechanical properties.
But what would it mean to people becoming entangled? Technically, their actions would be correlated. Practically, its completely impossible to do it. A person's nervous system is a very slow and noisy system. By the time it would take to the entanglement couple itself all the way from the eyes to the brain it would be long dead. And to spread to rest of the body, pft.
But I can make a car analogy. If those entangled people would be driving cars, the cars would become entangled to. And if Alice turned right, Bob will be turning left at the same time. And vice versa. Not as a result of their actions, just a correlation. But of course this is silly and impossible.
That said, it is one of the funniest articles I've ever read (yes, I RTFA. Sorry;). Filled with subtle jokes, and has some science juice. It appears that the eyes are a quite good detector indeed, very resistant to noise.
Re:Not quite... (Score:4, Interesting)
Bingo. It's saddening how quantum mechanics is made out to be so much more mysterious and spooky than it really is.
A non-quantum version of entanglement is this: I cut a coin through its side, so I have two pieces, one with the head, and one with the tail side. I put each one and in a separate envelope, and give one envelope to Alice, and the other two Bob.
I separate them by a jillion miles.
Now Alice opens her envelope and sees tails. So she knows Bob must have heads. Wow! So awesome and spooky and mysterious and wonderful! Not! They're not sending information to each other or influencing each other. Alice only has access to the information she *brought* with her when they separated.
And after she sees the half-coin, if she polishes the tail image off and inscribes another image ... no more entanglement! That is, by looking at her half-coin, you no longer are capable of learning what Bob had.
Ditto on the quantum level. When the particles are entangled, it simply means that learning one tells you something about the other ... but influence spread is still limited to the speed of light.
***
Now, with that in mind, can anyone clarify what exactly is meant by this paper? What do human eyes add, and what insight is gained by proposing or performing this experiment?
Re:ESP = Quantum entanglement (Score:5, Interesting)
I can propose a real quantum and biological mechanism for people to think along the same lines, simultaneously
Do two different brains operate in the same way, though? What data format do you use for the transmission of information? It's not like we all install the same mental OS when we're born...
I genuinely don't believe that we can "stream" thought from one brain to another in the way you seem to be suggesting. Neurological development isn't fixed, it's highly influenced by environment, culture, genetics, food... That two independent brains would interpret the same information in exactly the same way seems highly unlikely, if not impossible. Hell, I'm honestly amazed that we even manage to communicate as well as we do.
I'm also willing to admit that my viewpoint here has been highly influenced by Wittgenstein :)
Re:Are they for real? Its not April 1st yet... (Score:4, Interesting)
Last time I checked the human eye was incapable of determining anything about a photon except whether it was received or not, and the color if in sufficient quantity for a long enough period of time. Polarization? Not a chance.
Humans are barely capable of detecting polarization. If you're reading this on an LCD monitor, you can probably see the effect if you look at a completely white image.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidinger's_brush
More to the point, yeah, TFA seems like BS.
Re:First humans to experience entanglement? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not quite... (Score:3, Interesting)
Your analogy would be better if stated as follows:
The spooky part is that you separate the (supports of the future) halves, but Alice's observation performs the actual cutting of the state, including choosing how it's done. Your coin halves are still entangled into a single coin before she looks.
Re:uh oh ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Prior art: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte