Slicing it Right Into the Entanglement Hazard
ZapperZ has a takedown of an article that purports to apply QM to golf; the critique is Quantum Physics And ….. Golf?!
He addresses each point but I think he misses one important aspect of the first issue, on entanglement. Creating and maintaining entanglement isn’t easy, but more importantly, there’s the ol’ bugaboo
Entanglement might one day allow us to communicate instantaneously across the light-years of distance between stars. But for golfers, entanglement offers a more practical benefit.
I have watched golfers tee off and then twist and bend their bodies as they follow the flight of their ball, trying to influence the ball’s course through the air. It doesn’t work, of course.
But if the golfer and the ball could somehow be entangled, then every movement the golfer makes would instantly have an effect on the golf ball. The golfer could literally steer the ball in midair.
…
The body English would work!
No, no, no; a thousand times no. Entanglement does not allow for instantaneous communication and does not allow you to influence distant objects. Entanglement allows you to do one measurement and determine the states of two particles, with one particle possibly being far away — it does not enable you to change that state.
What if I teed off and then quickly measured, er, marked my score down as 1? Would the ball then roll into the cup?
Entanglement generates data. When data at the two ends are later compared – limited to to no more than lightspeed propagation – the data becomes information: the universe remains consistent. Having one dataset tells you nothing you did not already know, for you cannot compare what you received to what the other side sent to make sense of it. Note that the Bell Inequality is statistical. There is no fruitful way to cheat.
Superluminal signal tunneling has the same problem. Raising the barrier high enough to be interesting, drops signal throughput probability into noise. Diddling phase and group velocity is not a useful cheat. Evanescent wave and near-field diddles do classically “forbidden” things, but not superluminal information transfer, and certainly not scalable
Wall Street microtrading depends upon microsecond advantages in obaining then acting upon information. Copper and fiberoptic have about the same propagation speeds, dielectric constant being tied to refractive index, giving about 2/3 lightspeed either way. Either physically snug the trading center or use microwave communication. A real cheat for Special Relativity would not remain Ivory Tower for long.