(#10): Quantum Entanglement Faster Than The Speed of Light

Spooky Action on Distance

Quantum Entanglement is one of the most confusing aspects of quantum mechanics — a field of physics that do not appear to be common sense or easy-to-understand. 

Lets do a simple experiment in classical physics: tossing a coin.

If you and I each have a fair coin and toss it, there would be a 50/50 chance of each of us getting heads or tails. Your results and my results are not only random, but also independent and uncorrelated.

But if we conduct this experiment in the quantum world instead, it's possible that your coin and my coin will be entangled. We might each still have a 50/50 chance of getting heads or tails, but if you flip your coin and measure heads, you'll instantly be able to statistically predict to better than 50/50 accuracy whether my coin was likely to land on heads or tails.¹

How is this possible?

Quantum Entanglement

Quantum entanglement at its heart is a simple idea.

In quantum physics, there exists a phenomenon where you create more than one quantum particle — each with their own individual quantum state — where you know something important about the sum of both states together.

If two electrons are prepared together in the lab so that they have zero total spin, then the principle of conservation of angular momentum means that if one of the electrons has its spin axis up, the other electron’s axis must be down. So we can determine the spin of second electron without measuring (but we did measured the spin of the first electron though). Such a pair of electrons are said to be entangled.

Now imagine these two electrons placed at the two ends of a galaxy - and measuring the spin of one would immediately reveal the information about the spin of the other electron at the end of the galaxy. This information traveled faster than the speed of light - in fact 1000’s of times faster. Greater the distance between two electrons greater the speed at which the information traveled.

This is what Einstein called as Spooky Action at Distance.

theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/02/spooky-action-at-a-distance/516201

This phenomena is no more theoretical. Scientists have created pairs of entangled photons, carried them far away from each other and then carried out independent measurements of the quantum state of each photon. And found out that the two results are correlated!

We've separated two photons by distances of hundreds of kilometers before making those measurements, and then measuring their quantum states within nanoseconds of one another. If one of those photons has spin +1, the other one's state can be predicted to about a 75% accuracy, rather than the standard 50%.

It seems that we can know some information about what's going on at the other end of the entangled experiment not only faster than light, but tens of thousands of times faster than the speed of light could ever transmit information.

Time and Gravity as emergent properties of Quantum Entanglement

There have been suggestions to look at the concept of time and gravity both as the emergent phenomenon that is a side effect of quantum entanglement.

²

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/01/02/no-we-still-cant-use-quantum-entanglement-to-communicate-faster-than-light/?sh=34cabc254d5d

2. https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/physics/einstein-bohr-and-the-origins-of-entanglement/

(#9) A Universe that is disappearing faster than the speed of light

An expanding universe going farther away from us

Is Universe finite or Infinite

For thousands of years, physicists, philosophers and astronomers grappled with questions about the size and age of the universe. Is the universe infinite or does it have an edge somewhere?

source: quantamagazine.org/why-is-the-universe-expanding-so-fast-20200427

You would wonder - the universe had to be either finite or infinite, but both of these alternatives presented problems.

Lets assume universe is infinite:

In the early 1800s, German astronomer Heinrich Olbers argued if the Universe was infinite and contained stars throughout then if you looked in any particular direction, your line-of-sight would eventually fall on the surface of a star. Therefore, if the Universe was infinite, the whole surface of the night sky should be as bright as a star. Obviously, there are dark areas in the sky, so the universe must be finite.

Lets assume universe is finite:

If the universe was finite, and you stuck out your hand at the edge, where would your hand go?

source: nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/100104-isaac-newton-google-doodle-logo-apple

Isaac Newton’s laws of gravity clearly states that gravity is always attractive and every object in the universe attracts every other object. If the universe truly was finite, the attractive forces of all the objects in the universe should have caused the entire universe to collapse on itself. This clearly neither happened nor there is any sign of it happening.

https://www.azquotes.com/quote/348310

When Einstein developed his Theory of General Relativity, he too ran into the same problem that Newton did: his equations said that the universe should be either expanding or collapsing, and yet he assumed that the universe was static. He found it rubbish to have an ever expanding or collapsing universe.

He rather developed a novel idea to counteract this notion - he added a positive cosmological constant to his equations of general relativity to neutralize the attractive effects of gravity. This cosmological constant cancelled the effects of gravity on very large scales, and led to a static universe also termed as Einstein’s static universe

Edwin Hubble looked outside Milky Way Galaxy

In the 1920s, Hubble was among the first to recognize that there is a universe of galaxies beyond the boundaries of our Milky Way.

A truly mind-blowing realization!

Edwin Hubble observed stars in a hazy patch of light that at the time was known as the Andromeda nebula.

• Hubble observed variable stars, those that change in brightness.

• He measured the period of how long a star took to dim and brighten.

• From the period of brightening, he calculated the star’s intrinsic brightness.

• From that, he could calculate the distance.

That’s when he realized that the stars in this nebula were so far away that it couldn’t exist within our own galaxy.

This was a revelation. As soon as astronomers learned that spiral nebulae like the one in Andromeda are separate galaxies, the known universe got much bigger.

source: vox.com/2016/11/20/13677046/edwin-hubble-andromeda-galaxy

Hubble expands the idea of Universe

But was this huge universe stationary? Or was it expanding? Or contracting?

The answer involved the light of galaxies as a whole. Astronomers observed shifts toward the red end of the spectrum in distant galaxies’ light. They interpreted this red shift as a sign that the galaxies are moving away from us. Hubble and his colleagues compared the distance estimates to other galaxies’ with their red shifts.

On March 15, 1929 – Hubble published his observation that the farthest galaxies are moving away faster than the closest ones.

After Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding, Einstein called the cosmological constant his "greatest blunder."

A Universe expanding faster than speed of light

The expansion of space is calculated by measuring how light from faraway galaxies stretches as it moves away from Earth, to determine how fast the universe is expanding — a value known as the Hubble constant.

The value for the Hubble constant is nearly 73.2 kilometers per second per megaparsec.

One megaparsec is equivalent to 3.26 million light-years.

It means that if you look at a galaxy 1 megaparsec away, it will appear to be receding away from us at 73.2 km/s.

If you look at a galaxy 2 megaparsec away, it recedes at 146.4 km/s.

Three megaparsec away? You get it - 219.6 km/s.

And on and on: for every megaparsec, you can add 73.2 km/s to the velocity of the far-away galaxy.

So it's easy enough to compute: At some point, at some distance, the speed tips over the scales and exceeds the speed of light, all from the natural, regular expansion of space.

It means that any object beyond about 4.5 Gigaparsecs (or 14-to-15 billion light years) will never be reachable by us, or anything we do, from this point forward. All of those objects — objects making up 97% of the observable Universe by volume — are all presently beyond our reach.

A Universe that is disappearing at the speed of light

As time goes on, all the objects that are caught up in the expansion of the Universe will accelerate away from us, faster and faster. Let enough time go by, and all of them will eventually wind up receding faster than the speed of light, unreachable by us in principle, no matter how fast of a rocket we build or how many signals we launch at the speed of light itself.

The Universe we have today is disappearing thanks to the accelerated expansion of space. Although no object ever moves through the fabric of space itself faster than the speed of light, there is no speed limit on the expansion of the fabric itself.

How can expansion of Universe break through the light speed barrier?

Just like raisins in a leavening loaf of raisin bread dough, every galaxy in the Universe see all the other galaxies moving away from them, with the more distant raisins (or galaxies) appearing to move away at faster rates.

It isn't because the raisins are moving relative to the dough that they're embedded in. Rather, it's owing to the fact that the dough itself — just like the fabric of space itself — is expanding, and the raisins (or galaxies) are just along for the ride.

source: forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/06/12/ask-ethan-how-does-the-fabric-of-spacetime-expand-faster-than-the-speed-of-light/?sh=3872a0153b5f.

The restriction that "nothing can move faster than light" only applies to the motion of objects through space. The rate at which space itself expands — this speed-per-unit-distance — has no physical bounds on its upper limit.

¹²³⁴⁵⁶

1. https://earthsky.org/space/this-date-in-science-edwin-hubble-and-the-expanding-universe/

2. https://skyserver.sdss.org/dr1/en/astro/universe/universe.asp

3. https://www.space.com/33306-how-does-the-universe-expand-faster-than-light.html

4. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/06/10/can-the-universe-expand-faster-than-the-speed-of-light/?sh=1bf004783605

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_universe#cite_note-2

6. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/06/12/ask-ethan-how-does-the-fabric-of-spacetime-expand-faster-than-the-speed-of-light/?sh=3872a0153b5f

(#8) Faster Than Speed of Light

Expansion of the Universe; Quantum Entanglement and Speed of Darkness

In one of my previous articles mentioned below, I wrote about how Speed of Light is universal constant and the maximum attainable speed of any object.

(#5) Why the velocity of light is a universal constant

However, Universe is stranger than fiction - and so far there have been at least three phenomenas that have been either hypothesized or proved which travel faster than the speed of light.

In the next few articles, I will expand on each one of the above phenomenas.

Stay tuned.

(#7) Why Blackhole is one of the most beautiful celestial objects

Understand the physical appearance of Black hole

If you have seen the depiction of a Blackhole in the 2014 Hollywood film Interstellar or any recent visualizations of Black hole, that would have appeared something like below:

In this post I am going to explain this visualization.

But before we proceed further lets have a quick blackhole 101:

Black hole 101

A black hole is called black because it does not give off any light.

A black hole’s gravity is so strong that it can bend the path of lights. A black hole is a region where spacetime is so curved that every possible path which light could take eventually curves and leads back inside the black hole. As a result, once a ray of light enters a black hole, it can never exit. For this reason, a black hole is truly black and never emits light.

However, matter that is near a black hole can give off light in response to the black hole's gravity.

It might be surprising to you to hear that gravity can affect light even though light has no mass (light is composed of massless particles called photons - surprisingly light still has momentum and energy without having any mass - a topic of discussion for some other time).

If gravity obeyed Newton's law of universal gravitation, then gravity would indeed have no effect on light.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity:

However, gravity obeys a more modern set of laws given by Einstein's general theory of relativity. According to general relativity, gravity is actually caused by curving of space and time. Since light travels in a straight line through straight spacetime, the curving of spacetime causes light to follow a curved path.

The gravitational curvature of light's path is a weak enough effect that we don't notice it much on earth but with some carefully designed experiments the bending of distant Star light can be observed around Sun during eclipse (this is how Einstein’s theory of relativity was proved in early 1920’s).

Seeing a Black hole

Light that is near a black hole, but not actually inside it, can escape away to the rest of the universe. This effect is in fact what enables us to indirectly "see" black holes.

For instance, there is a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

If you point a high-power telescope exactly at the center of our galaxy and zoom way in, you don't see anything. A black hole by itself is truly black. However, the black hole's gravity is so strong that it causes several nearby stars to orbit the black hole. Since these stars are actually outside of the black hole, the light from these stars can reach earth just fine. When scientists pointed a high-power telescope at the center of our galaxy for several years, what they saw was several bright stars orbiting around the same blank spot. This result indicated that the spot is the location of a supermassive black hole.

Understanding the physical appearance of Blackhole

So there are essentially 4 parts to explain here as it relates to the image of a black hole which are:

• Photon sphere (a slim circular outline that you see near the center of the blackhole in the image below)

• Accretion disk (the massive disk / ring around, over and below the black hole)

• Doppler beaming (the brighter left side than the right side of the accretion disk)

• The apparent curving of the accretion disk around black hole

1. Photon sphere:

A photon sphere is a location where gravity is so strong that light can travel in circles. Photons orbit the black hole at the distance of the photon sphere. A photon could leave the back of your head, go once around the black hole, and be seen by your eye - you can see the back of your head.

Blackhole: Photon Sphere

2. Accretion disk:

Accretion disks are a ubiquitous phenomenon in astrophysics - a large cloud of gas and dust revolving around a celestial object. These gas particles constantly smash into each other, thereby converting some of their kinetic energy into heat. With the loss of kinetic energy, the gas particles fall closer to the black hole. In this way, friction causes a large gas cloud to swirl toward a black hole and heat up along the way. Eventually, the cloud of gas falls into the black hole and becomes part of it.

However, before the gas actually enters the black hole, it heats up enough to begin glowing. The light that is emitted consists mostly of x-rays but can also include visible light. Since this light is emitted by the gas before the gas enters the black hole, the light can escape away to the rest of the universe. In this way, light can be emitted from a glowing gas cloud just outside of a black hole even though the black hole itself emits no light. Therefore, we can indirectly "see" a black hole by seeing the glowing gas cloud that surrounds it. This gas cloud is called an accretion disk.

Blackhole: Accretion disk & Photon Sphere

You may ask why this mass collects around black hole in the shape of disk in one single plane (almost) and not sphere around the entire black hole.

Well, the flattened shape of the accretion disk is due to angular momentum.

Imagine a lot of masses rotating around a black hole, on any number of overlapping orbits. Over time they will collide and transfer momentum in a way that causes the many random orbits to coalesce into one orbit which represents the average orbital plane and velocity of all the original masses. BTW this is the same with Saturn's rings, but at a much lower velocity.

3. Doppler beaming:

As the disc is spinning in one direction, the matter moving towards us appears brighter than the matter that is moving away.

Check that the left side of the disk is brighter than the right side.

Blackhole: Photon Sphere, accretion disk with brighter left side

Actual image of a black hole depicting Doppler beaming

4. Image of the disk’s far side and under side:

Looking onto one edge of the disk, the hole's gravity distorts our view. While the nearer side of the disk passes in front of the black hole as you'd expect, the far side gets warped into two mirror-image humps. Light from the top of the disk's far edge arcs over the top of the black hole, while light from the underside of the disk bends underneath the hole. The result is an image that looks more like a fiery silhouette of Saturn.

With a quick switching of the camera angle, the accretion disk bends back into the flat vortex we expect as depicted in video below:

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References:

https://wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2016/03/29/how-does-a-black-hole-give-off-light/

https://socratic.org/questions/why-are-accretion-disks-flat

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13326

(#6) Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - certainly taught wrong

Heisenberg's principle shone new light on the Quantum world and may hold the keys to the mystery of our origins

One of the fundamental principles in the Quantum physics was put forward by German Physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1927. The principle came to be known as ‘Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle’ denoted by below equation:

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle; x=position, p=momentum

(an unrelated trivia: Heisenberg almost failed to defend his PhD thesis before the committee was nudged by his mentor Sommerfeld to grant him PhD; he just managed to get doctorate with the lowest possible grade. Read more here).

Werner Heisenberg

The principle states:

both the position and momentum of an entity cannot be determined precisely simultaneously. The precision in determination of one quantity (position or momentum) will introduce the imprecision (uncertainty) in the determination of another quantity (position or momentum).

This principle is highly non-intuitive and for the most part taught incorrectly in schools and on various social media. So I am going to try my bit to explain it as best as I could.

Before getting ahead of ourselves, lets look at the wave-particle duality principle. Back in nineteenth century Maxwell and others had proved that light is a wave (you can read more about this in my post here). In early twentieth century Einstein built on the work done by Max Planck and proved that light is a particle.

Einstein went on to postulate Photoelectric Theory and was awarded a Nobel Prize for this work.

It was established by 1920’s through experimentations as well that light indeed is both a wave and a particle.

Well so where does this new revelation leaves us.

The boundaries of particle and wave nature of matter was blurring faster than the speed of light in the earlier part of twentieth century.

Werner Heisenberg working closely with Pauli Wolfgang, Max Born, Neils Bohr and others came up with the mathematical formulation of Uncertainty Principle. It was a rather non-intuitive yet a fundamental principle which took sometime for folks to wrap their heads around.

You may ask - how can you not be able to determine both position and momentum of something precisely? We do that on daily basis - e.x. when you are driving in a car, would you not know your position relative to an arbitrary chosen origin, or momentum or the direction of movement. This principle doesn’t make sense when you look around yourself in a non-quantum world.

Precisely why this is a rather non-intuitive principle - well to be fair most of the quantum physics is in fact non-intuitive.

So, how did modern folks taught and explained this non-intuitive principle to incoming generations of physics enthusiasts.

By either dumbing this principle down to a simplistic and incorrect formulation or just by remaining ignorant themselves of the actual meaning and far reaching implications of this principle.

Don’t take my word for it - checkout these two prominent, famous and high quality channels explaining this principle to their audience of millions:

So you ask, what is incorrect with the explanations? Well almost everything!!!

What they described above for majority of time in the video is ‘Observer Effect’

Observer effect is the disturbance of an observed system by the act of observation

Per folks above there is uncertainty in the position and momentum quantities because we cannot ‘measure’ due to the miniature nature of the quantum world and light photons.

Well our inability to not be able to measure do not warrant a law or principle - that warrants more precise instrumentation. Isn’t it?

Lets try to understand this principle by experimenting:

Momentum of a wave is defined in terms of its wavelength given by below formula:

Wavelength is the distance between two crests or troughs on a wave; h is Planck’s constant

Lets try to measure momentum and position both with certainty and see where we land below:

Measuring Momentum with Certainty

• So now armed with information above we can determine the momentum of the below uniform wave accurately:

  

  Remember that the wave is the ‘trajectory’ of a particle. The particle can be anywhere on this entire wave trajectory. So do you know where the particle is at any arbitrary time on this infinite long wave trajectory. NO we don’t - particle has equal probability to be anywhere on this infinite long wave trajectory.

  So we conclude that although we know the momentum with certainty but not the position.

Measuring Position with Certainty

• Lets flip the situation and start from determining the position accurately.

  How do we determine accurately where the particle is?

  Well, by localizing the particle to a small area, by changing the probability density. Instead of being comfortable with the equal probability of finding the particle at any point on this wave - lets try to localize this particle to a smaller and smaller area.

  (analogy: imagine as a parent, instructing your kid to ONLY play in a designated area lets say - park. Essentially what you have done is almost accurately determined the position of your kid in the park when you go out to collect your kid).

  So, we bring in more waves and introduce the interference between the waves in such a way that the resultant wave is more localized increasing the probability of finding the particle at a specific position thereby enabling us to accurately measure the position of the particle.

  

  

  What about momentum? Well, we lost it. Remember we introduced interference in the above picture by bringing in multiple waves - well those waves had different wavelengths, and hence different momentums.

  I do not know now what the resultant wave’s momentum is.

  So we conclude that the accurate determination of position forced us to abandon the pursuit to determine the accurate momentum of particle.

This is how the certainty in the determination of one complimentary variable (position and momentum are complimentary variables as are Energy and time and bunch more) introduce the uncertainty in the determination of another variable.

Well, before I sign off - you may be wondering what is the implication of this principle. A fact such as Quantum Tunneling (a phenomena that a wave can pass through a potential barrier even if the wave has no energy to do so) is well explained by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

Without Quantum Tunneling, life itself and very little else, would exist. Tunneling allows protons in the core of the sun to overcome mutual repulsion caused by their positive charges, a potential barrier that they do not have the kinetic energy to overcome. This allows the formation of Deuterium and begins the nuclear fusion process in the star’s core which leads to the formation of helium from hydrogen. All a star’s energy output is, by extension, a result of aspect of nature described by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Lets go further than this.

This fantastic aspect of nature also allows for the creation of something from almost literally nothing and that may hold the keys to the mystery of our origin in the universe.

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Sources:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/quantum/barr.html

https://sciscomedia.co.uk/heisenberg-uncertainty-principle-a-familiar-concept-misunderstood/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle