No, humanity has not broken or found a way around a fundamental law of the universe: that nothing, not even information, can travel faster than light. When it comes to information, the rule is called the No-Communication Theorem. If humanity had developed this capability, it would represent a breakthrough on par with the real development of nuclear weapons or the fictional development of warp drive in Star Trek.
Humanity should be thankful, though, that we have not achieved this breakthrough, because it is the No Communication Theorem that maintains an existential space for individuality as opposed to the conformity of a hive mind. Although the science fiction term for instantaneous cross-universe communication, the “Ansible”, is usually portrayed in a positive light, we should all be grateful that it is not actually possible (yet?) because it would constitute the key enabler for a universal hive mind like that of The Borg in Star Trek.
Having the capability to communicate instantaneously even across the universe would offer a short-term competitive advantage and also profoundly affect the future of consciousness and intelligence. This article shows how inaccurate science journalism over the last decade or so has sometimes created the false impression that humanity might have developed instantaneous cross-universe communication using quantum entangled photons, and then calls attention to why it is a good thing that such a capability is still, as far as we know, completely impossible because it would violate fundamental laws of physics.
Short Term Competitive Advantages
One major reason Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service is competitive is that those satellites are in “Low” Earth Orbit close to the planet’s service whereas satellite internet traditionally has been offered from a very high geostationary orbit thousands of miles further from the planet’s surface. The speed of light and radio waves seems fast, but even that distance between high geostationary orbit and the Earth’s surface creates additional sub-second delays that Starlink overcomes by flying its satellites closer.
The light speed delay between the Earth and the Moon, at about one second, is even longer than geostationary orbit. If any one group of sentient beings has the ability to wield coordinated weapons that do not face even a delay of one second, they have the ability to stay within the OODA (Orient, Observe, Decide & Act) Loop of competing groups of sentient beings and therefore defeat them in conflict.
The round-trip lightspeed communications delay between Earth and Mars can sometimes approach around forty minutes! Any technology that can overcome that delay will enable its owners to outcompete others in almost any endeavor imaginable, and that’s when it comes to Earth’s closest neighbor Mars!
Insufficiently Clear Science Journalism
Even so, it does not sufficiently convey the importance of two critical distinctions necessary to understanding why humanity has not yet achieved instantaneous cross-universe communication: (1) the distinction between changing and thereby choosing and determining an electron’s spin, versus merely observing an electron’s spin and perhaps causing it settle from an undetermined state to a specific spin but the observer not actually having chosen the spin, and (2) the difference between a fact existing versus an observer actually knowing about that fact.
A different NASA cartoon on the subject offers a different angle on the subject. It does a good job not implying that the observers are determining, choosing, or “changing” the photon’s state but rather merely measuring and discovering what state it had naturally settled on.
Poor Writing Creates False Impressions of Change
Maybe we should not expect high quality journalism from a publication called Giant Freakin’ Robot, but sure enough, we indeed see some problems. This publication asserted that scientists “changed the spinning speed of one of the electrons, which instantly changed the spin rate of the other to match”. No, those scientists did not “change” the spin of the electron; they measured what spin it had naturally settled onto.
It seems to be older articles that are most prone to implying too much. Take, for example, this 2011 Popular Mechanics article, which states that “If the state of one entangled particle is changed, its faraway twin will be instantaneously affected”. The use of the passive voice conveniently avoids wrongly asserting that observers are changing the spin; however, the passive voice does not explicitly deny the false implication either, leaving it up to the reader to mistakenly conclude that humanity can indeed change the spin of a remote photon across the universe.
Diving into the linguistics of these poor examples of writing shows how they convey inaccurate impressions. “Change” can be either an intransitive verb, or a transitive verb, in English, because unlike some other world languages, English morphology does not explicitly mark transitivity.*
Intransitive means that something changes of its own accord; there is only one required noun, the subject that changed of its own accord. Take, for example, the sentence “The seasons changed”. No one changed the seasons; they changed naturally. There was no actor necessary to be specified.
In reality, in quantum entanglement, the electron’s spin changes naturally in an intransitive way; no actor like a scientist is determining or “changing” anything. However, science journalism often uses “change” in a transitive way, incorrectly implying that scientists are actually determining the spin of the electron!
Take, for example, the sentence “The artist changed the background color” in which there are two nouns: the artist as the subject, and the color as the object. An actor was specified. When Popular Mechanics writes in the passive voice “state…is changed” the author is implying the transitive because if the author had meant intransitive, the Popular Mechanics article could have been written with an active voice intransitive verb “If the state of one entangled particle [changes]…” and that would have been both more scientifically accurate and also better writing by avoiding the passive voice.
Good writing uses the passive voice only rarely and for special effect, so when the Popular Mechanics author uses it, the author is incorrectly suggesting to readers that scientists are changing the entangled spin state.
Now take another example, Business Insider, asserting that quantum entanglement provides “instantaneous communication”. Way to go guys. Way to make lay readers mistakenly conclude that humanity’s scientists have already broken and found ways around fundamental laws of quantum physics.
Changing the Spin Would Mean Communication
If humanity could change the spin of one entangled photon and the other would immediately reflect that change, then humanity would have a communication device. It would constitute communication because at a moment in time when the two photons are separated, even across the universe, the first observer could determine and choose a new state for the electron and know that the second observer could read that new state and know that the first observer chose and determined it.
But the “change” is actually intransitive. The first observer is not determining and choosing the state that the two entangled photons settle onto naturally. Rather, the first observer is merely measuring the random state that the photon settled onto. The first observer did not put any information into the two photons’ state, therefore the first observer did not communicate anything.
Fact Merely Existing versus Observer Knowing
The excellent lifelong learning website Brilliant.org begins its description of the topic with a sentence that conveys the similarly wrong impression by stating that quantum entanglement “send[s] a spin state (qubit) between observers”. This sentence would seem to incorrectly indicate that the receiving observer knows about the new spin state either through the quantum event itself or through the receiving observer’s own measurement, but Brilliant.org does attempt to avoid that implication by stating that the “information must be communicated classically between observers as part of the process”. However, Brilliant.org does not actually clarify what information needs to be transmitted classically, in other words, by methods limited to the speed of light.
The JPL article seems to add some detail about what information needs to be sent by classical sub-light speed methods, but even so it is still not fully clear. It suggests that the first observer informs the second observer about how the first did the measurement; implicitly, for the receiving observer to verify, the receiving observer would need to measure in the same way.
One of humanity’s two premier peer-reviewed science journals, aptly named Science, has an article on the subject that provides more information: The first observer needs to tell the second observer the specific angle of measurement. It would seem then that the second observer can verify the predicted state of their entangled photon by measuring it in the exact same way and obtaining the predicted result.
This article shows how poor science journalism has created the impression that humanity has already broken the laws of physics and developed Star Trek-level technology. A future article will describe why we as individuals, rather than hive minds, should be grateful for this technology not actually existing or being possible.
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*Perhaps this specific miscommunication about science would have avoided if English were to have features of other languages like the Coast Salish Native American languages of North America’s Pacific Northwest coast, in which verbs by default are intransitive and become transitive only with an explicit suffix marking so. Each language has its strengths and weaknesses. English, in this area, is weak.
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