SortaScience with Flim Jannery No reference materials or common sense were used in the creation of this article. Reader consumes this information at their own risk. Let’s get weird. Einstein coined the phrase “spooky action at a distance” to describe a phenomena today known as quantum entanglement. Einstein was bothered when his infamous equations showed that light can transmit information at speeds greater than the speed of light. He didn’t believe his own work. More recently, experiments have proven this phenomenon and left many scientists questioning the universe they used to know. For the sake of keeping this article on quantum mechanics digestible, I’ll refer to light as being a “particle.” This is for convenience and isn’t quite accurate. Light is not a particle, but it often behaves like one so, out of convenience, we pretend
it is a particle when doing certain calculations. Similarly, when I awake in the middle of the night lacking coordination, balance, or short-term memory, I pretend to be a woman and pee sitting down. This does not make me both a man and a woman; I’m simply pretending to be a woman out of convenience. The reality is, nobody truly understands what light is the best we can do is make educated guesses and models. This part is a little complicated. Oops. When referring to particles of light, scientists talk about a property of each particle which they have termed “spin.” The word “spin” has nothing to do with anything physically rotating, it’s just a label. The scientists involved in this discovery, though creative enough to uncover the mysteries of the universe, were simply not creative enough to string together a few Latin syllables to come up with a novel word. I digress. To make life easier, just consider spin to be the color of the particle, with two options: black or white (representing spin up and spin down). Now for the magic. When light particles A and B collide, they
become entangled. According to Yoda, there must be balance in the universe. When a future collision occurs (say between B and C) and the color of these particles change, then A will also change its color to maintain balance in the universe (and Yoda says “Good, it is”). Why is this worth writing about? First off… it’s cool—you have information being transmitted over long distance (they’ve done this over 90 miles so far) without any wires. The first high speed wireless communication system was built by nature, not IBM. That should be enough to satisfy a reader’s interest. But I’ve left the best ingredient for last, the ingredient that made Einstein so uneasy with his calculations. This information transfer occurs at speeds up to 10,000 times the speed of light. So traveling faster the speed of light is not only theoretically possible—it’s been done. Tune in next month when I further extinguish my scientific integrity and credibility by applying these unfounded principles of physics to telepathic communication.
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