Science
In reply to the discussion: Quantum Entanglement, Dark Counts, Coincidence Detection [View all]mindwalker_i
(4,407 posts)For A:
Einstein showed the possibility of entanglement to show that quantum mechanics couldn't be complete, so he already thought it could be use for communication. I think most physicists believe entanglement can't be used for communications. Their arguments make sense but don't address using the property of superposition itself for the communication. It will be interesting to see how this turns out, and what gets broken.
For B:
Could be. Cramer wasn't silent about it though, which means that either people hadn't thought of it or he has a bigger mouth than them I don't have any connection to Cramer, like having been a student or anything, except that he's a science fiction fan and author, so I met him at Norwescon. He came up with the transactional interpretation of QM, so I'm inclined to believe he knows some stuff.
As for the NSA aspect of all of this, keep in mind that quantum encryption exists. So it's possible to make communications between computers pretty safe, aside from bugs in the protocol. I think this would be even harder to implement in that two fibers would need to connect both ends - one for each of the "ways" after the first beam splitter. Beaming it in free space would be just about impossible.
There is, however, another aspect to be concerned with. If sending information retrocausally (backwards in time) even by microseconds is possible, and there are several experiments that have already been done that kind of show it, the potential to f*** things up is huge. I'm hoping to be able to write temporal while-wend loops, and that could break encryption in literally zero time.
Even with a single bit being transmitted, creating a paradox would be easy. I wonder what we would measure as the final result - received interference or not - or whether there's any way to get one value or the other. Bad as it might be to never have a result, what if one connected it to cause a macroscopic event, such as triggering Sendmail to e-mail Boehner and call him an asshole?
So, yeah, you're probably right that the NSA or some part of government would be interested if this succeeds.