Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Entanglement, the Link to Forever


Pray, my dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?
Laurence Sterne: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Volume I (1760), Chapter I

Here we find our author/narrator, after six weeks of composition, fourteen chapters into the affair of a character who has however not yet been born. Tongue securely in cheek, Sterne, through the voice of Tristram, supplies his impatient reader a kind of apology -- or better to say, perhaps, an apology of a very curious yet, already by this stage of the proceedings, familiar and characteristic kind.

I quote Tonm Clark's excellent analysis of Tristram Sandy vis a vis the time equation as segue into the dark heart of Quantum Physics, the issue of entanglement and what it means to time, space and non-locality, issues physicists and mathematicians have wrestled with for more then 100 years and still have not come up with a definitive answer as to why two entangled particles, atoms or even molecules, can be separated millions (or billions) of light years apart yet their shared state remains inviolate. i.e. If entangled electron is "spinning" up, the partner's spin will be "spinning" down or in scientific terms...

When a measurement is made and it causes one member of such a pair to take on a definite value (e.g., clockwise spin), the other member of this entangled pair will at any subsequent time[7] be found to have taken the appropriately correlated value (e.g., counterclockwise spin). Thus, there is a correlation between the results of measurements performed on entangled pairs, and this correlation is observed even though the entangled pair may have been separated by arbitrarily large distances.[8]

So, what could cause this connect to be able to link two objects together instantaneously without regard to distance? As a total lay person not versed in math or physics in anyway, the take yours truly will take may be laughable but it's not totally crazed when one thinks about the quantum foam, a construct conceived by physicist John Wheeler to explain what space time would look like at the Planck length of 10-20 of a diameter of a proton. Seems the foam would not have space or time assigned to it as the foam is conjectured to consist of miniscule black holes winking in and out of existence at about 10-43 seconds, the time it takes for light to traverse the Planck distance of 10-20 of a diameter of a proton.


If this is the case, the question to ask is, does time exist in the quantum foam where only virtual particles issue forth and disappear according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, thus precluding any chance of time happening in the foam as "real" protons, neutrons and all the rest of the subatomic zoo appear, AFAIK, to be temporary arrangements of the quantum foam subject to varying rates of decay, thus creating the illusion of time as seen in this part of the multiverse. If this is true, then, could the act of entanglement create a link consisting of, in some weird way, a "thread" akin to a wormhole of the quantum foam, forever separate from the constraints of time or the speed of light in enabling two (or more) linked particles to instantly "talk" to one another no matter how far apart they may be.


Addendum: Physicist Discovers How To Make Quantum Foam In A Test Tube
Metamaterials should allow scientists recreate and study the properties of space time on the smallest scale

A metamaterial is stuff that has been engineered to manipulate and steer electromagnetic waves in ways that cannot be reproduced in naturally occurring materials.


These materials are periodic structures built out of tiny electronic components such as split-ring capacitors and wires. Individually, these components have a mild interaction with passing em waves. But assembled into a repeating structure, they have a powerful influence on light.


There is no shortage of exotic things metamaterials can do: everything from invisibility cloaks to power transmission lines. But one of their most exciting applications is in cosmology because, believe or not, they can mimic the structure of spacetime.

Hey, maybe folks smarter then me will figure it out. Whoever does, a Nobel prize awaits,


Just one more question, could the Calibi Yau manifold, beloved by M Theory, explain how the Quantum Foam works?

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