particles and connections #2 (General)

by David Turell , Saturday, February 11, 2017, 15:15 (2841 days ago) @ David Turell

"In 2011 Olson and Ralph showed that much the same thing happens if the detector can be made to accelerate through time. They described a detector that is sensitive to photons of a single frequency at any one time. The detector sweeps through frequencies like a police radio scanner, moving from lower to higher frequencies (or the other way around). If it sweeps at a quickening pace, it will scan right off the end of the radio dial and cease to function altogether. Because the detector works for only a limited period of time, it lacks sensitivity to the full range of field vibrations, creating the same imbalances that Unruh predicted. Only now, the particles it picks up will be entangled with particles in a hidden region of time — namely, the future.

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"These temporal correlations are the ingredients for that quantum time capsule. The original idea for such a contraption goes back to James Franson, a physicist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. (Franson used spacelike correlations; Olson and Ralph say temporal correlations may make it easier.) You write your message, encode each bit in a photon, and use one of your special detectors to measure those photons along with the background field, thus effectively encrypting your bits. You then store the outcome in the capsule and bury it.

"At the designated future time, your descendants measure the field with the paired detector. The two outcomes, together, will reconstitute the original information.

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"Whenever two events are correlated and it’s not a fluke, there are two explanations: One event causes the other, or some third factor causes both. A background assumption to this logic is that events occur in a given order, dictated by their locations in space and time. Since quantum correlations — certainly the spatial kind, possibly the temporal — are too strong to be explained using one of these two explanations, physicists are revisiting their assumptions. “We cannot really explain these correlations,” said Ämin Baumeler, a physicist at the University of Italian Switzerland in Lugano, Switzerland. “There’s no mechanism for how these correlations appear. So, they don’t really fit into our notion of space-time.”

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"The researchers beamed a stream of photons at a partially silvered mirror, so that half the photons took one path and half another. (It was impossible to tell, without measuring, which path each individual photon went down; in a sense, it took both paths at once.) On the first path, the photons passed through Alice’s filter first, followed by Bob’s. On the second path, the photons navigated them in reverse order. The experiment took quantum indeterminacy to a whole new level. Not only did the particles not possess definite properties in advance of measurement, the operations performed on them were not even conducted in a definite sequence.

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"In Brukner’s original experiment, the path of each individual photon is placed into a “superposition” — the photon goes down a quantum combination of the Alice-first path and the Bob-first path. There is no definite answer to the question, “Which filter did the photon go through first?”— until a measurement is carried out and the ambiguity is resolved. If, instead of a photon, a gravitating object could be put into such a temporal superposition, the apparatus would put space-time itself into a superposition. In such a case, the sequence of Alice and Bob would remain ambiguous. Cause and effect would blur together, and you would be unable to give a step-by-step account of what happened.

"Only when these indeterminate causal relations between events are pruned away — so that nature realizes only some of the possibilities available to it — do space and time become meaningful. Quantum correlations come first, space-time later. Exactly how does space-time emerge out of the quantum world? Brukner said he is still unsure. As with the time capsule, the answer will come only when the time is right."

Comment: The entire article needs to be read, and even hen you will be confused. It can only be understood if one presumes the quantum connections and even particles may be on the other side of a semipermeable wall separating us from the quantum realm. In that way they can be closely connected, but there, not 'here'. God resides at the quantum level of reality, in my view. Space time is made from and based on that level.