3 ms·
> A staple of sci-fi has been a pair of boxes with quantum entangled particles inside allowing FTL communications once the boxes travel (sub-FTL) to their desti
by greeneggs 9y ago
> A staple of sci-fi has been a pair of boxes with quantum entangled particles inside allowing FTL communications once the boxes travel (sub-FTL) to their destination.
Of course this is complete nonsense. It's useful for plotting stories, but seems to have imprinted on a large fraction of readers a total falsehood. Do you know where the idea started? I think the first time I saw it was in Orson Scott Card's novel "Ender's Game" (1985).
- MrZongle2 9y agoLooks like it may have started in 1966 with a story by Ursula K. Le Guin. She called the device an ansible, which is what it was also called in OSC's books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible
- dleslie 9y agoFrom the book The Dispossessed. It's a great novel, by the way.
- greeneggs 9y agoAccording to that Wikipedia page, Le Guin's ansible might not be relying on entanglement. It "doesn't involve radio waves, or any form of energy. The principle it works on, the constant of simultaneity, is analogous in some ways to gravity ... One point has to be fixed, on a planet of certain mass, but the other end is portable." About Card's ansible, it says, "Card's description of the ansible's functions in Xenocide involves a fictional subatomic particle, the philote. In the "Enderverse", the two quarks inside a pi meson can be separated by an arbitrary distance while remaining connected by "philotic rays"." So perhaps Card's "Xenocide" (1991) is where the entanglement => FTL communication myth began?