Last night I had a dream about finding my Doberman that was stolen from me over 8 years ago (yes, stolen Doberman, talk about a pseudo-paradox). At the time I was devastated by the loss but managed to get over it eventually. Eight years later, I wake up with a feeling of distress as if I had lost Diesel yesterday. Have I really gotten over that loss then? This incident supported further my suspicion that we, humans, never really get over our significant losses. But is it just a case of strong memory and/or the reawakening of subconscious thoughts? Perhaps, but I think there is more to it than just that. To attack this subject properly, one has to understand the nature of time (yea, right. Like that’s possible).
So what is time? Einstein contended (and proved) that time is a 4th dimension. What’s a dimension? you may ask. Well, it’s something you should really know by the time you can read this blog. Ok, back to the question of time. Since time is a dimension one might imagine that it might be possible to move back and forth on it. Well, Einstein seemed to have conflicting viewpoints on this issue. He proved that one can, indeed, travel into the future by moving at a speed close to the speed of light (twin dilemma anyone?). His theories, however, argue that to travel back in time one will have to move faster than the speed of light, which he proved is not possible. Likewise, he argued that transfer of information at a speed higher than c (c = speed of light) is also impossible. Well, there is a pretty good chance Mr. Einstein was wrong on that count, argues the quantum entanglement theory. Now, what the hell is that?! you may, again, ask.
Quantum entanglement theory sloppily explained:
Ok, imagine 2 electrons or ping pong balls for that matter. I put each in a closed box and tell you that they both are spinning but one has the opposite spin direction of the other. At this point each ping pong ball has a 50% chance of spinning clockwise and 50% chance of spinning counter clockwise. In quantum physics terms, each ball is spinning in both directions at the same time (remember schrodinger’s cat?). I then give you one box and send you to one end of the universe, leaving the other box behind. There, you get curious, and without anyone around to stop you, you open the box. Now what happens? You see a spinning ping pong ball, duh. But here is the not-so-trivial implication. By opening that box and observing the spin direction of your ping pong ball, now you have changed the spin direction of the other ping pong ball all the way across the universe instantaneously, from spinning in both directions to spinning in one direction (opposite of the ball you’re carrying). Basically you have transferred information instantaneously (but please don’t try this at home). I don’t know about you Mr. Einstein, but that’s a teeny tiny bit faster than your c. But who frikin cares and what does all this ping pong crap have to do with a stolen dog?!
Well, it may be impossible for one to physically travel through time (and stay in one piece that is). However, what if it were possible for information and thoughts to be transferred through time? What if, all memories are not equal? In other words, if our present self is receiving information and thoughts from a different point in time, namely the past, would this information count as a memory? Not in my books (99.99% valid personal opinion). The implications here are massive but the assumption is outrageous. In the series of blogs to follow I will show you evidence that it may not actually be that crazy. Yes, seeing into the future is possible and yes, seeing into the past is too. Any doubts? You better have many. It will, however, be my pleasure to shred them to pieces as we go along. Until then, stay safe and don’t operate any time machines.
Interesting theory Mr. Hussein,
ReplyDeleteBUT, in the spooky action at a distance, or quantum entanglement, there is no information transfer =) there is a wave function collapse, which is very, very different.
Man, am proud of you, despite the fact that I only knew you for a short period of time. I wish you all the good luck in your pursuit =)
Hey Haitham, Thanks man, you are too kind.
ReplyDeleteAs for action at a distance I am going to have to disagree. I think what you are getting at is that in the EPR there can not be a useful transfer of information since the information that is transferred is random. In other words, it can not be used a system of communication.
However, I do think information transfer through entanglement exists and that is what caused Einstein to incorrectly disagree with quantum mechanics.
Here is an example to illustrate my point. While transfer of information may be unclear in one entangled system, it becomes clearer if we entangle two systems. Imagine the following thought experiment:
Let's take Schrodinger's cat out of the box. I give it to you and with it I give you one of the boxes that contains a spinning ping pong ball. Additionally, we both have synchronized watches that will, for the sake of this argument, not change their synchronicity as we travel. I then tell to open the box at a certain time xx:xx and depending on the spin direction of the ping ball to either spare or kill the cat. I then carry the other box and go to the end of the universe with it. When the time is xx:xx I open the box. Instantaneously I will know what happened to the cat light years away. This is transfer of information. Granted it's not too useful for purposes of communication since it's random (50% chance of each possibility) but it does violate Einstein's postulate that information can not travel faster than light. Of course you can argue that what really happened is that the cat's wave function collapsed/decohered but then one can make the argument that all information transfer is a form of decoherence. I personally think that to be true and don't feel that both are "very, very different"
thoughts?
Hussain,
ReplyDeleteYou are a smart guy =)
Anyways, in Physics, the term "information" is used differently from our everyday life use. And actually I think we can write a book about your paradox which I will call Al-Ramini paradox ;)
First, information transfer is very different from communications. Communications imply the exploitation and manipulation of information transfer. It is open for cheating. Now there is no way of telling if I will really kill the cat, even if the spin told me to kill it ("the cat was not killed" is an information as much as "the cat was killed"). There is no way of quantifying and factoring the human factor into the laws of physics, unless when they are observers, and I am afraid that Physicists still don't trust psychology enough to do a leap of faith and believe that I will or will not do it.
Sometimes for the sake of clarity and because we are dump human beings, we might be told to push something in a thought experiment, but physically speaking, it is something that exerted a force to push it, and all you have to do was observing (any variant of this is correct, as long as it treats the action of pushing and observing as two independent events, and if we needed to make use of two interdependent events, then we at least should know in what ways they are so).
However, your point is still valid if we integrated the human nature into physics, that is if we could model human beings mathematically; deterministically or stochastically. I think that each and everyone one of us is a black box that has its own dynamics. So now, if Hussain was the one to kill the cat, we can tell if he will or will not. Notice that this implies the lack of freewill, and that we should chose our observers carefully and not arbitrary.
This might challenge physicist at the first glance, but knowing how stubborn they are, they will tell you that adding the human factor is not purely physical. They will tell you that thoughts are a materialistic part of a human being existence (unless you believe that we are spiritual beings and our thoughts are metaphysical in nature, which is something out of the domain of physics, and hence we can not blame physicists for not guessing it right), so when I and you decided to do our experiment we had to communicate by acoustic waves or electrodynamic ones or any other mean (all can not move faster than the speed of light). After we communicated, the information became part of my brain and yours (and even if we did not communicate, it still existed physically in the brain of one of us, and it was produced by thinking which is limited by the speed of electrochemical pathways in our brains... etc)
Now when we traveled far away from each others, the information in our brains traveled as well. The information were embedded in our brains all the time in the connections of our neural networks or whatever really is the basis for these ideas in the brain; (I think we need to sum the time for each traveler independently even if they traveled simultaneously, so Einstein’s theory still holds true.)
So when you knew that the cat was killed or not, there wasn’t information transfer, but a collapse of the superstructure you built on the wave function (the collapse in the superstructure is a function of the collapse in the wave function, and the information you deduced from this collapse traveled before from the point where I was to where you were and then to where you went).
But at the end of the day, science is only the map our brains use to navigate around in the complex universe, it should not be mistaken for the territory you know =)
Haitham, the whole point of a thought experiment is that it circumvents all the practical issues that would make it otherwise impossible. In other words, in a thought experiment all other variables are considered non-existent unless it is stated otherwise. In the thought experiment I proposed you may as well have been a machine programed to kill/spare a cat or even type a 1 or a 0. The idea is there are no other possibilities and that's for simplicities sake. If it is possible for information to travel in the most simplistic of models/experiments faster than the speed of light then that is enough to invalidate the hypothesis that information can not travel faster than the speed of light.
ReplyDeleteThe other point I wanted to make is that information and its transfer is the same as wave function collapse and decoherence. Any piece of information one can receive is one possibility out of many other possibilities. Before that piece of information is realized it is merely a possibility and it has a probability just as the spin direction does in the EPR. once you realize that piece of information it has already decohered from all other possibilities.
Hussain,
ReplyDeleteWhat you said about thought experiments is correct, but still the universe you imagine should be related to that of ours, usually it only contains what is relevant to the experiment. if there was a machine, then somebody must have programed it and sent it away, or sent it away and programmed it via electodynamic transmission, or even heat.
The point about information transfer: so information in physics describe the possible states of a system? When two systems are entangled, this means they contain the same information from the moment of entanglement. So even though the information embedded in the system were +1/2 or -1/2, they were actually kill or don't kill, and the measurement carried out by the machine caused the decoherence.
Anyways, information transfer is wider than a wave function collapse, if not different. The heat we get from the sun contains information, the waves of an earthquake contain information, light, and so many other things that are not necessarily subject to decoherence.
Actually decoherence is the direct outcome of measurement, which leads me to ask: in your paradox, if no measurements were done, does this mean that there was no information transfer? Or lets think about a particle in the space, is it void of information until some machine measure one of its properties?
Yes, information/decoherence is the result of measurement. A particle in space exists in a state of superposition. It only exists when it's measured.
ReplyDeleteI also think that all information coming from the sun is the subject of decoherence since before any measurement it had a certain probability of being what it is, among many other possibilities