Quantum decision affects results of measurements taken earlier in time, page 1

As if entangled particles and spooky action at a distance is not already weird enough, it now turns out they can see the future also!

Article on Ars technica

I don't know what to say other than the universe will never stop to amaze me

Maybe this will lead to some way to predict the future and also to explain how some people say they can already see what is going to happen (although they are mostly wrong).

reply to post by scarystuff

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Ok, I love quantum physics, but that article gave me a headache.

From what I can gather......

They are saying that the results of TestA are determined by the future position of the particles. TestA works as long as the particles are entangled.

Quantum entanglement has always bothered me because there has to be SOME mechanism that communicates the information between the two particles. We know that nothing can travel faster than light, yet the communication is instant, regardless of distance.

Some piece of the puzzle is simply missing.

I'm starting to think string theory can solve some of this stuff, but this is just out there.

side note, if you think the results of a test being dependent on a future state is silly, according to Arizona, pregnancy begins 2 weeks BEFORE conception.

So if you ask your wife if she's pregnant on march 1st and she says no, until march 15, she's a damn liar is what she is.

reply to post by smyleegrl

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I always thought physics followed behind philosphy in part. First we wondered about our place in the universe, discovered it and it became science. Then we wondered about the nature of the brain and it became psychology. Now we question our creation and a possible creator, hopefully, science will nail that down as well in time.

reply to post by scarystuff

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So people who can foresee the future may have a trick to cause entanglement ?

It seems that this article would be showing that the future can effect the past so someday maybe we could actually change what is, and what has come to be, so that we are totally different then we have become due to the path we followed..

reply to post by underduck

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It's been staring us in the face this whole time... Literally.

reply to post by neoholographic

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Einstein did not say nothing can travel FTL, and mainstream physics does not say nothing travels FTL. Einstein's theory limits objects with Mass going faster than light (or accellerating past light speed I believe).

Here's a quick link I found.

www.dailytech.com...

Stop regurgitating that tired dogma. Do some research and find out some actual facts.

Here is a thought experiment from Einstein himself that closely resembles this actual experiment.

math.ucr.edu...

The experiment details that Photon 1 will have an instantaneous effect on Photon 2 even though they are lightyears apart.

this has more of the last video I posted. didn't realize it cut off

This is not something unexpected or shocking. It is how these particles are expected to behave, given the rules of quantum mechanics. I will try to explain.

First of all, let's get rid of any faster-than-light ideas. Nothing that we know of can travel faster than light. Anything that did would have far stranger properties than merely that of communicating information at implausible speeds. There is no communication between the measured particles, far less between the measuring devices (or people) Alice, Bob and Victor. Please hold that thought.

Now then. These apparent temporal paradoxes are the result of

1. thinking of the particles as objects, like marbles or bullets;
   
   
2. considering the particles individually, as if they exist in isolation.

In actuality, what is happening is that a series of partial measurements is being made on a quantum system over a period of time. The system consists of all four particles and their histories, as well as the measuring devices and even, in some sense, the rest of the universe.

Each measurement partially 'collapses' the probability function (a mathematical relationship that fully describes the system), leading to a specific result for the function at a certain time and place. This measurement can't tell us everything about the system; according to Heisenberg's famous uncertainly principle, full information about the system can never be recovered. But we can still learn something about the particle and the system from our measurements.

Now obviously these measurements, since they being made on the same system, must correlate with one other. There is no choice in the matter. This necessity lies at the heart of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen 'paradox', which suggests that information is flying between particles or measuring devices faster than light. It isn't.

When Alice or Bob measure one of their particle pairs, this does not immediately give the other half of the pair any definite values at all; as long as that second particle remains unmeasured, it is not a particle, a material entity occupying a single place at a particular time; it is merely a set of probabilities. When Victor 'entangles' the two previously unmeasured members of the particle pairs produced by Alice and Bob, they become part of a single system with a history that is the sum of their individual histories (this is the wave function of the system). This system is entangled with the particles previously measured by Alice and Bob. In fact, those particles are part of the new system, a four-particle system on which Victor makes a fourth measurement.

Remember, a quantum state contains information about its own history. It is therefore no surprise that the histories of all four particles are correlated. Really, it would be bizarre if they weren't.

What is this experiment telling us? Some of you are reading it as a signal sent backwards in time from a measurement made by Victor to the particles measured by Alice and Bob, telling those particles what states to have when measured! On the contrary, it is far more reasonable to suppose that the quantum state measured by Alice, Bob and Victor has correlated values at all points in space and time, as you would expect it to. Only those particles that fulfil the conditions of entanglement are entangled. Remember, most particles don't make it all the way through the measurement process. Their outcomes are not recorded; we don't know whether Victor entangled them or not. Perhaps these are the ones on which Victor did not make the correct decision.

You mentioned that very few photons would make it through the entire apparatus. How do we know that Victor's sampling wasn't inherently biasing the results to pairs of entangled photons? Sou rce: reader comment on OP linked article

Even the experimenters themselves do not rule out this possibility:

Note that in a conspiratorial fashion, Victor’s choice might not be free but always such that he chooses a separable-state measurement whenever Alice and Bob’s pair is in a separable-state, and he chooses a Bell-state measurement whenever their pair is in an entangled state. Original paper on Arxiv (PDF)

To me, the results of this experiment seem to confirm that the apparent randomness and indeterminacy that seem to affect physical systems at quantum scales are something of an illusion. Reality, as we see from this experiment as well as the evidence that lies all around us, is deterministic in spite of quantum uncertainty. The book of the future is already written.

Originally posted by phishyblankwaters
reply to post by scarystuff

---

Ok, I love quantum physics, but that article gave me a headache.

From what I can gather......

They are saying that the results of TestA are determined by the future position of the particles. TestA works as long as the particles are entangled.

Quantum entanglement has always bothered me because there has to be SOME mechanism that communicates the information between the two particles. We know that nothing can travel faster than light, yet the communication is instant, regardless of distance.

Some piece of the puzzle is simply missing.

I'm starting to think string theory can solve some of this stuff, but this is just out there.

side note, if you think the results of a test being dependent on a future state is silly, according to Arizona, pregnancy begins 2 weeks BEFORE conception.

So if you ask your wife if she's pregnant on march 1st and she says no, until march 15, she's a damn liar is what she is.

Quote: "We know that nothing can travel faster than light"....No we don't.

We only 'know' that nothing can be 'perceived' as travelling faster than light.
That is the KEY.

Once we rid ourselves of that perception, we may begin to understand the phenomenon of instant 'Quantum Entanglement', just as Gravitation is also instant....non-reliant on the speed of light.

reply to post by Astyanax

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You're reading the experiment wrong and it's based on a comment on the article not the actual article. You said:

On the contrary, it is far more reasonable to suppose that the quantum state measured by Alice, Bob and Victor has correlated values at all points in space and time, as you would expect it to. Only those particles that fulfil the conditions of entanglement are entangled. Remember, most particles don't make it all the way through the measurement process. Their outcomes are not recorded; we don't know whether Victor entangled them or not. Perhaps these are the ones on which Victor did not make the correct decision.

You then quoted a comment on the article as evidence to support your claim.

You mentioned that very few photons would make it through the entire apparatus. How do we know that Victor's sampling wasn't inherently biasing the results to pairs of entangled photons? Sou rce: reader comment on OP linked article

This is a comment from a reader and this questioned was answered by the experimenter.The article said this:

Due to the 104-meter fiber-optic cable, Victor's measurements occurred at least 14 billionths of a second after those of Alice and Bob, precluding the idea that the setting of the BiSA caused the polarization results to change. While comparatively few photons made it all the way through every step of the experiment, this is due to the difficulty of measurements with so few photons, rather than a problem with the results.

Ma et al. found to a high degree of confidence that when Victor selected entanglement, Alice and Bob found correlated photon polarizations. This didn't happen when Victor left the photons alone.

This had nothing to do with whether Victor made the correct decision and this has everything to do with the difficulty of measuring photons this way which the experimenter took into a count. Again this had nothing to do with the results but the difficulty of measurement.

Here's the key point from the article.

(Similarly, if you think that all the photons come from a single laser source, they must be correlated from the start, and you must answer how they "know" what Victor is going to do before he does it.)

Let's look at a example from a macroscopic point of view.

Let's say Alice and Bob are throwing a baseball over a brick wall. Victor is on the other side of the brick wall with a baseball glove on each hand. After Alice and Bob throw the baseball's over the wall they start spinning around in a circle. Everytime Victor catches both baseball's Alice and Bob stop spinning around in a circle and they're facing each other. Everytime Victor drops the baseball's Alice and Bob keep spinning. How does Alice and Bob "know" when Victor catches or drops the baseball's?

This is what's happening in this experiment but Victor is in the future and Alice and Bob are in the past.Think about what the experiment is saying. Alice and Bob knows whether Victor selected entanglement or not. It's like saying I saw my sisters license plate number and even though I don't play the lottery, I decide to play her license plate and I hit the number. Was it a coincidence or on a microscopic level was I entangled with winning the lottery in the future and it played out in the past by me having the urge to play the number?

I think this result and results like it will begin to explain a lot of things that we call coincidence and it could also begin to explain things like psychic phenomenon and ESP.

I often say that we're in a microscopic movie being played out on a macroscopic screen (space-time). On a microscopic level FTL communication is possible and microstates are not bound by a forward direction of time. On a macroscopic level this occurs because of entropy. So this would also explain things that we see as destiny or someone meeting a soulmate. Maybe their entangled in the future on a microscopic level which plays out as something happening forward in time on a macroscopic level.

I will give you an example. Not long ago, I was watching TV and out of the blue I thought about a high school friend and something we laughed about in class together. I haven't thought about this friend or seen this friend since graduation.

About 3 days later I'm walking down the aisle at Rite Aid and I bump into this friend and they actually bring up the moment in the high school classroom that flashed in my mind 3 days earlier. I graduated high school over 15 years ago. Was this just coincidence or were we entangled on a microscopic level and this entanglement played itself out on a macroscopic level in Rite Aid?

I think when we become more advanced in things like quantum computing and nanotechnology we will begin to build and control things on a microscopic level which will reduce uncertainty on the macroscopic screen.

Originally posted by scarystuff
As if entangled particles and spooky action at a distance is not already weird enough, it now turns out they can see the future also!

Article on Ars technica

I don't know what to say other than the universe will never stop to amaze me

Maybe this will lead to some way to predict the future and also to explain how some people say they can already see what is going to happen (although they are mostly wrong).

What is 'Deja Vu', and under what circumstances do we experience it?
Is this phenomenon related to what you're presenting here?

When a series of events has already taken place, yet it unfolds in our real-time perception, in a continuous thread that is reminiscent of a past enactment that has installed itself in our memory,.....was one recording events that would take place in the future?
Did we procur a future entanglement?

This is very hard to describe!

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