Madsen Pirie

There’s a rather interesting story from NTT, the Japanese telecommun-ications company.  A team led by Takahiro Inagaki at Kanagawa has successfully tested quantum entanglement at a distance of over 300km.  Quantum entanglement’s wiki page tells us that it occurs “when pairs (or groups) of particles are generated or interact in ways such that the quantum state of each member must subsequently be described relative to each other.”  To oversimplify, it means that when something is done to one entangled particle, its counterpart’s reaction is determined even if separated by a great distance.  The important thing is that the information does not travel through space, nor does it obey the cosmic speed limit.  The outcome is established in a shorter time than it would take electromagnetic radiation to convey the information that determines it.  We know it is more than 10,000 times faster than light would take to cross the distance between the entangled particles, and some think it has to be instantaneous.

Why does this matter?  Well, to the world it might bring quantum computing closer to reality.  What interests me, however, is that it bears on the next science fiction book for young adults that I am planning to write.  In it our young protagonist, plucked from the streets to become adept in mechanical mental communication (MMC), finally encounters the ultimate – a quantum entanglement communicator.  It can affect a similar communicator at great distances, even across the depths of interstellar space, and instantaneously.  All right, that’s a long way ahead of where we are now, and some think it will never be possible to modulate entangled particles.  I think otherwise, knowing that people are clever, especially in fiction…

Filed under: Updates |