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PapaverOneirium t1_j9n07t7 wrote

Reply to comment by Pappa_Alpha in Physicists Use Quantum Mechanics to Pull Energy out of Nothing by Vailhem

It does. It’s actually about energy teleportation across quantum entangled particles rather than pulling it straight from nothing. That is, a certain amount of energy is input to a particle at one location, and released from an entangled particle at another.

edit: no this doesn’t allow for FTL energy transfer or anything like that. It’s a bit more complicated, because you need a “message” from the initial location to be received at the second location to know what to look for so to speak and that message will be limited by the speed of light. Article does an alright job of explaining it.

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SuperSpread t1_j9n3jvl wrote

So when the power plant sends electricity to my house for me to plug my appliances into, that transported energy I pull out of nothing!

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analog_panopticon t1_j9ncx2f wrote

I. Drink. Your. Milkshake.

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iloveFjords t1_j9nxkvo wrote

It’s a probability milkshake. Probably.

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NocturnalPermission t1_j9ort8a wrote

Will bring all the boys to the yard. Or not.

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Creeptone t1_j9nrne3 wrote

This sounds like one day it will be crazy and totally useful for an entire set of things we can barely imagine, but until then- it’s just the basic science of making it happen at all

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iloveFjords t1_j9nxr0d wrote

Captain the quantum energy sucking matrix is brrreaking up!

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theman1119 t1_j9obxfp wrote

Have you tried realigning it or creating an inversion field?

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PsychVol t1_j9op3bl wrote

The dilithium crystals couldna handle it!

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Chris77123 t1_j9q3ytz wrote

Would be funny if we created huge facilities to draw energy from nothing and we get a visit from aliens saying stop stealing our energy.

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[deleted] t1_j9qi9i4 wrote

Or we just end up creating pocket universes to siphon the energy out of like the Forerunners did in Halo

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moon_then_mars t1_j9o0nb0 wrote

I didn’t realize it worked like that. I (incorrectly) thought it was like a read-only signal on both sides, and doing so destroyed the link

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Plzbanmebrony t1_j9o10j1 wrote

So they also sent data faster than the speed of light? My understanding with the whole limit of entangled partials is that while yes they remained sync you can't touch them without desyncing them. My understanding is that IS impossible based on our understanding of the universe.

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NZGumboot t1_j9o5cvl wrote

No. Part of the process to extract energy involves the experimenters sending information from one entangled particle to the other (presumably along a wire). Thus it doesn't matter if the energy transfer itself is instantaneous, information still can't be transferred faster than the speed of light.

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Plzbanmebrony t1_j9o8ouo wrote

If you can tell it happen right away that is data right? So if you could sync two from any distance you could send data in binary.

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NZGumboot t1_j9ocwzl wrote

The energy fluctuations appear random, just like if the particle was not entangled. It's only with the information you got from the other entangled particles that the fluctuations become non-random.

Here's an analogy. You roll a die repeatedly and you need to guess when the die rolls six. But the die rolls are perfectly random, so with lots of rolls you can't guess right more than (on average) 1/6 of the time.

But this is a quantum die and your friend has another die that is linked to yours and rolls the exact same sequence of numbers as your one (though in isolation it's still perfectly random, just like your die). Now you can guess the six consistently; your friend just has to tell you what they rolled.

But even though the die are linked by some spooky method that travels faster than light, you cannot use this to transfer information faster than light. Because there's no way to influence what the sequence of numbers will be.

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Plzbanmebrony t1_j9od78q wrote

Ok. Thank I truly just didn't understand how you might use this.

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Iapetus_Industrial t1_j9ovpy3 wrote

> The energy fluctuations appear random, just like if the particle was not entangled. It's only with the information you got from the other entangled particles that the fluctuations become non-random.

Well that's fucking useless then. What's the point if you still need a light-speed channel? We want FTL!

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apple-pie2020 t1_j9p0v8m wrote

This is a nice explanation that I did not understand prior. Thank you.

Now how about this 26 entangled particles. That don’t roll 1-6 but are either up or down. Your friend in isolation flips all particles down except one for A and so forth. Now could a message be sent faster than light?

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Kantrh t1_j9r4n1f wrote

No, you'll need to compare measurements to see what the other did.

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NZGumboot t1_j9q0ivr wrote

The entanglement is very delicate, so much so that the act of "flipping" destroys the entanglement.

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HolyPommeDeTerre t1_j9pcfo8 wrote

Just trying to understand.

If the other part sends 1 continuously and you know that (communication initialisation). You send 1 to ack "alignment". Then do the same with 0.

The question is. If I send 1 continuously, will the resulting behaviour in the entangle particule be the same or similar in anyway? Or will it change randomly and so we can't "align" on something without another communication method before?

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NZGumboot t1_j9q2gh0 wrote

The information you send over a wire doesn't change the entangled particles in any way (or do you mean sending a 1 using the entangled pair? That's not possible, the entanglement breaks). What does change the particles is any attempt to measure or change the particle's properties. (With regard to OPs article I believe they are measuring the environment around the particle, not the particle itself, in order to maintain the entanglement.)

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HolyPommeDeTerre t1_j9q4m9k wrote

Yes my intuition was "input 1 in one of the particle" (change it's state in a expected way) to observe the behaviour of the other entangled particle. But as you state that, influencing the state of the particle will break entanglement.

But, from there, how are we sure the particles are entangled if we can't act on any of them and reflect a resulting change in the other particle.

I guess we can observe both particles surrounding environment and see that there are similitudes ?

Anyway thank you for your time helping me understand :)

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NZGumboot t1_j9q7l51 wrote

Basically what they do is create a huge number of entangled particles, separate each pair into locations A and B, then measure each the state of all of the particles at both locations (this breaks the entanglement, but that's okay.)

The measurements at A and B appear perfectly random according to all the tests of randomness that we have. But when you bring the measurements from A and B together, you find that they are correlated -- each pair might be e.g. in the same state, or the opposite state, depending on how the entanglement was created. A and B can be arbitrarily far apart.

You might think, well that's easy to explain, when you created the entanglement it set the state of each at that point. But no, you can prove that isn't the case, and that it must be the case that the entangled particles both have an indefinite state until they're measured, and the measurement of one affects the state of the other across any distance. (The proof is called Bell's inequality, see this video for more: https://youtu.be/ZuvK-od647c)

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HolyPommeDeTerre t1_j9q94lp wrote

Thank you very much. You are gluing multiple things I have in my head together. It's a very clear explanation.

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Montgomery0 t1_j9p52r4 wrote

So this is more wormhole than FTL? Somehow entanglement causes wormhole like behavior and not faster than light travel?

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NZGumboot t1_j9q5n5w wrote

You could argue it's not really like a wormhole since nothing physical is moving (energy is a property of matter, it is not itself physical). And that it is FTL because even though the thing being transferred is non-physical it is still in some sense transferring from one place to another faster than light. But the laws of physics conspire in such a way that you can't send a message using entanglement. Which perhaps makes sense as faster-than-light messaging would appear to enable sending messages back in time, which opens a huge can of worms 😀

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Adventurous_Stage979 t1_j9oo1l8 wrote

From what I understand, the particles must be close to each other to be entangled. You then have a single use bit that can be used to communicate, but you still have to physically ship your particles to their remote locations which doesn’t happen at the speed of light. The communication can be instant but the material must travel. If we wanted to communicate with a Mars base, for example, we’d still have to pre ship the entangled particles which would still take months.

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powercrazy76 t1_j9oeh7b wrote

Sooooo.... Could I like, entangle a particle I have with a particle that is currently near or on the surface of the sun and something something profit?

/s

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groversnoopyfozzie t1_j9of7j9 wrote

I was under the impression that Tesla invented a machine that could transfer electricity without the use of wires or cables(through the air like radio waves if you will). Am I mistaken or is this new breakthrough a different version of that?

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subjectwonder8 t1_j9p8qa6 wrote

Presuming you are not thinking of Tesla's work on resonant inductive coupling (like a Tesla coil), you are probably thinking of Wardenclyffe tower. That was suppose to be a ground - air conduction system. Many people incorrectly think it is an induction or radio system.

If you think about a classic circuit, electricity flow into one end, round the circuit and returns to the source at a lower voltage.

If you put a button and buzzer into this circuit and stretch to many kilometres / miles you have a telegraph.

The problem with this is your wire has to travel the distance twice. Once when it comes from the source through the button to your buzzer and then it has to go all the way back to complete the circuit.

But people eventually noticed you didn't need to do that. If the wire went into ground after buzzer, telegraph still worked. It was believed the circuit was completed through the Earth. It was also believed that the atmosphere had an extremely good conducting layer that was separated from the Earth. So this is basically two wires.

So the idea was to feed electricity into the ground, it would travel through the Earth, you would put a wire into the ground going through what ever you want to power, and the electricity would flow into the sky and back to Wardenclyffe tower completing the circuit.

This would allow relatively large amounts of energy anywhere on the planet as long as you had a wire. And would have been truly transformational to humanity.

But this doesn't work. We now know that the ground flow rate is extremely limited and drops off fast. But Earth has significant capacitance. So the telegraph lines were just feeding charge into that. The amount that telegraph lines used was low enough that the slow discharge rate didn't impact it that much. That capacitance gets used today with neutral and grounding / earthing lines, they just go into the ground. AC pushes and pulls that capacitance without needing a return path.

So Tesla's idea (and other people who attempted similar) ultimately wouldn't work.

Tesla however did work on resonant inductive coupling which is used on modern wireless power transfer systems, just no where near the scale of what Wardenclyffe tower was meant to achieve. It is extremely short ranged, normally used in lower power embedded circuitry but does have some larger use cases like magnetically levitating vehicles and the Tesla coil.

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kneaders t1_j9owhxc wrote

If this is possible why can't it be used for communication?

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erosram t1_j9qsurq wrote

I doubt it will practically work like that. Ever.

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Leadbaptist t1_j9qtlzp wrote

Could we use this to transfer data faster than the speed of light?

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smartguy05 t1_j9r1z2l wrote

Seems to me that's all you need for instant communication over limitless distance. If you have two of these (1 read, 1 write) you have a duplex wireless communication line that can't (as far as I understand it) be hacked.

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