Friday, August 12, 2011
What is the explanation to Einstein's "faster than light signal" paradox?
Frink is absolutely right, but let me explain. Relativity says that information can not travel faster than the speed of light. Or that is to say, it can not be sent faster than the speed of light. Using your electron setup, there is no way for someone at electron A to use this entanglement to send information from location A to location B. All that is going on is that people at A and B know the same thing simultaneously. But knowing something at the same time is completely different than sending information faster than light. For example, instead of having electrons, let's say person A and B each had an envelope with a secret number that a third person wrote in both envelopes. Then they separate themselves by 10 light years, but agree to open the envelopes at exactly the same time. They will know the number simultaneously, but there is obviously no paradox. You might say, well the information was there all along, so it traveled with the people and never went faster than light. But this is exactly ogous to the electron case. Whatever information both people know simultaneously (namely, that the other person's electron will be of opposite spin to theirs) was information that was known all along. The fact that the electrons were entangled tells us exactly that information and we knew they were entangled from the beginning. The only difference is that in the envelope case, the number was predefined and in the electron case, due to quantum mechanics, the spin was not yet defined. But that does not change the fact that person A knew no more about person B's electron before his measurement than he did after it (at both times, he knew person B's electron was of opposite spin to his). And, as Frink suggests, there is absolutely no way person A could use this entanglement to send any more information to person B. So relativity is not violated.
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