6 ms·

Forgive my ignorance as I'm a software engineer and not a physicist. But does this means that in the future FTL communication will be possible. Every time I wo

Forgive my ignorance as I'm a software engineer and not a physicist. But does this means that in the future FTL communication will be possible. Every time I work with networking one thing always springs to mind. That is that the speed of light is a limiting factor. Will this mean that in the future latency issues will be a thing of the past? http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/latency.html http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/latency.html

daeken 10y ago
Quantum teleportation can't be used to send data faster than the speed of light, more accurately understood here as the speed of causality. As far as I'm aware, there's really no hypothetical way to violate the speed of causality.
roywiggins 10y ago
You can't use entanglement to communicate. Quantum teleportation needs a classical channel to work. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem If you have superluminal communication, signals can travel into your subjective past, which means causality pretty much breaks down entirely. There's no theoretical reason why causality has to hold, but it would make life extremely "interesting"
- pqhwan 10y ago
  There was a webcomic (or something like it) I saw a while ago that was about a single-buttoned gadget that could always predict whether you will press the button or not (don't remember the exact mechanism, but that was the jist). The story then went on about how the gadget would bring about humanity's collective philosophical collapse, because of its implications on the subject of free will. I imagine that what you're describing about superluminal communication could be used to make a gadget like this. I'm also wondering if anybody knows which webcomic I'm referring to. It'd be embarrassing if this turned out to be an XKCD number...
  - roywiggins 10y ago
    Sounds like a Ted Chiang story: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/full/436150a.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/full/436150a... It sounds more like an SMBC comic than an XKCD one, societal collapse for unexpected reasons is an ongoing theme.

daeken 10y ago

Quantum teleportation can't be used to send data faster than the speed of light, more accurately understood here as the speed of causality. As far as I'm aware, there's really no hypothetical way to violate the speed of causality.

roywiggins 10y ago

You can't use entanglement to communicate. Quantum teleportation needs a classical channel to work. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem If you have superluminal communication, signals can travel into your subjective past, which means causality pretty much breaks down entirely. There's no theoretical reason why causality has to hold, but it would make life extremely "interesting"

pqhwan 10y ago
There was a webcomic (or something like it) I saw a while ago that was about a single-buttoned gadget that could always predict whether you will press the button or not (don't remember the exact mechanism, but that was the jist). The story then went on about how the gadget would bring about humanity's collective philosophical collapse, because of its implications on the subject of free will. I imagine that what you're describing about superluminal communication could be used to make a gadget like this. I'm also wondering if anybody knows which webcomic I'm referring to. It'd be embarrassing if this turned out to be an XKCD number...
- roywiggins 10y ago
  Sounds like a Ted Chiang story: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/full/436150a.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/full/436150a... It sounds more like an SMBC comic than an XKCD one, societal collapse for unexpected reasons is an ongoing theme.