I was thinking recently about a few things:
- The common acceptance of "you can't prove a negative" in academic papers.
- The existence of "no signalling" theorems (attempts to prove negatives.)
- Entanglement doesn't work for signalling because observing the photon for data changes the photon, and currently they have to send the original measurements for comparison.
- Recent quantum/gravitational wave research involves "partially observing" subjects to avoid changing them.
Pardon my lack of a theoretical physics PhD, but doesn't the idea that we can "cheat" the observation rules and look at waves without collapsing them give more credence to the ability that entanglement could be used for signalling? If the problem is that a full observation changes the state on us, yet we can prove other theorems by observing functions
without changing them (as was claimed elsewhere on the board), shouldn't this bring the idea of transferring data in that way back on to the table?
This is how Charles Seife explains it in his book
Decoding the Universe:
"It is impossible to use an EPR pair to transmit information faster than the speed of light...Even though the states of particles A and B are correlated...[because] there isn't a
causal relationship between the two...."A" isn't causing "B"s collapse anymore than "B" is causing "A"s collapse. There is no good explanation for why this is, it just is."
Now I don't agree with Seife on a lot of what he says because he's basically a reductionist/mechanist multiverse proponent with a bias against stuff like psi research. But regardless of whether you buy the explanation or not, this has been born out by experiment. In fact, they have actually breached the speed of light with a signal by as much as 7%, but they have been unsuccessful in sending a causal "message" from A to B or vis-a-versa.
What I think is that entanglement hints at the mechanism for psi, but is not the mechanism itself. Now it could be the mechanism ultimately, its not impossible, because when we think of psi events, they do sometimes take on a "acausal" character and don't always mimic what we understand to be "classical" information exchange. So it could be QE at its source.
However, another possibility is a whole other field lying either outside of, or at the very foundations of, classical space-time. Space-time is often talked about as being imprinted, like a hologram, with information, and as we know the space-time manifold has the capability of traveling (i.e. expand) faster than light. Or it could be something like Bohm's quantum-information potential which doesn't drop off with distance, or the signal is propagating in something similar to a "scalar" field often referred to as the "false vacuum" in mainstream texts (i.e. the region quantum fluctuations tunnel out of).
I can't quite comment on keeping something in a perpetual state of observation as providing a basis for transmitting information faster than light. It might have some relevance, but I can't really wrap my head around why it would matter.
Regards,
John