Boyajian's star (alien megastructure star) is dimming again right now

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

3 hours ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

Aliens not having contacted us yet is a good argument for quantum entanglement not breaking FTL barriers.

Otherwise we would have seen this alien megastructure keep emitting 'left-handed' particles (or whatever quantum state you prefer) and laugh at us pitiful fools still debating EPR and Bell rather than listen to their coded message.

So what is entanglement?  Are you saying it has no implications to locality or regarding the potential for FTL?

[The Anti-Targ]

6 hours ago, Erik of Hazelfield said:

What I don't understand is why you'd need all that energy in the first place. I mean, the sunlight that hits the Earth every day is more than enough for our needs. Are those guys building a Death Star and need electricity for welding it or what's the deal here?

 

4 hours ago, Altherion said:

Depending on how you do it, stuff like interstellar travel may require that kind of energy. Also, all of the things that we currently do (computing, communication, etc.) benefits from extra power and this might scale up for interplanetary or interstellar civilizations.

Quoting my brother again. If it turns out wormholes are the way of doing interstellar travel...

Quote

The sorts of wormholes we know about that could form star-gates would require energy resources on an unimaginable scale, like an entire star worth of energy to hold them open briefly.  And that's just opening a wormhole.  Getting a spaceship through a wormhole is another altogether separate diabolical challenge, like a sadists version of commodore-64 Aztec Challenge only with no extra lives and no second chances, although mercifully without the adrenalin pumping muzac

But that basically means a Dyson sphere around your home star would not be enough. You basically have to collect a star's mass worth of stuff that you can then extract most .

Perhaps like cold fusion is (was?) a bit of a holy grail for meeting our growing energy needs, "cold" wormholes could be the holy grail of space travel

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

12 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

 

Quoting my brother again. If it turns out wormholes are the way of doing interstellar travel...

But that basically means a Dyson sphere around your home star would not be enough. You basically have to collect a star's mass worth of stuff that you can then extract most .

Perhaps like cold fusion is (was?) a bit of a holy grail for meeting our growing energy needs, "cold" wormholes could be the holy grail of space travel

How can we speculate as to what would be needed to power a wormhole?

[The Anti-Targ]

3 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

How can we speculate as to what would be needed to power a wormhole?

"The sorts of wormholes we know about", current hypotheses include the energy needs to briefly open a wormhole, is how I read that phrase. I can ask my brother if you like, he's the physics genius in the family. I'm just a lowly applied life sciences guy...science for non-scientists as my son calls it.

[AndrewJ]

4 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Quoting my brother again...

Aztec Challenge ... mercifully without the adrenalin pumping muzac

 

Wait... what? What sort of person would advocate a version of Aztec Challenge without the music? I suddenly don't believe your brother is quite so smart after all. I think you need to have serious words with him.

 

[Loge]

5 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

So what is entanglement?  Are you saying it has no implications to locality or regarding the potential for FTL?

Quantum entanglement can't be used to transmit information faster than light. From Wikipedia:

Quote

Certain phenomena in quantum mechanics, such as quantum entanglement, might give the superficial impression of allowing communication of information faster than light. According to the no-communication theorem these phenomena do not allow true communication; they only let two observers in different locations see the same system simultaneously, without any way of controlling what either sees.

 

[Altherion]

5 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

How can we speculate as to what would be needed to power a wormhole?

Speculating is easy -- there's a multitude of science fiction stories based on the concept. The problem is making it look at least semi-plausible. We don't have any plausible methods to construct traversable wormholes: even if you could somehow come up with the required energy, we lack the exotic matter with negative mass (or its equivalent) that is generally needed to stabilize the wormhole.

If one really needs energies on the order of stellar masses to be used during short time scales... well, then it's not obvious what we could use as a power source. There exist stars which are millions of times more luminous than our Sun, but this still does not reach the needed energy output. A sufficiently large supernova would probably do it, but they're very rare and good luck "harvesting" one.

[Free Northman Reborn]

3 hours ago, Altherion said:

Speculating is easy -- there's a multitude of science fiction stories based on the concept. The problem is making it look at least semi-plausible. We don't have any plausible methods to construct traversable wormholes: even if you could somehow come up with the required energy, we lack the exotic matter with negative mass (or its equivalent) that is generally needed to stabilize the wormhole.

If one really needs energies on the order of stellar masses to be used during short time scales... well, then it's not obvious what we could use as a power source. There exist stars which are millions of times more luminous than our Sun, but this still does not reach the needed energy output. A sufficiently large supernova would probably do it, but they're very rare and good luck "harvesting" one.

The Woodward-Mach Effect theoretically allows the generation of sufficient energy to open wormholes. But, should that theory be proven correct, you won't really need Dyson spheres anymore. And you could achieve interstellar travel without wormholes then, at a speed of 99% the speed of light or so.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

5 hours ago, Loge said:

Quantum entanglement can't be used to transmit information faster than light. From Wikipedia:

 

That's fine but doesn't that imply that locality is an illusion if entanglement happens  instantaneously without lightspeed lag?

[Loge]

23 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

That's fine but doesn't that imply that locality is an illusion if entanglement happens  instantaneously without lightspeed lag?

Well, what's instantaneous is a bit more complicated in relativity than in classical physics. On the other hand, quantum mechanics is strictly about observables. And you can't observe both particles / whatever instantaneously once there is a certain distance betwen them, so I'm not sure what the point is. I haven't really thought this through but I don't really see the problem right now. What you usually care or worry about in the context of relativity is causality, and that's preserved. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

21 minutes ago, Loge said:

Well, what's instantaneous is a bit more complicated in relativity than in classical physics. On the other hand, quantum mechanics is strictly about observables. And you can't observe both particles / whatever instantaneously once there is a certain distance betwen them, so I'm not sure what the point is. I haven't really thought this through but I don't really see the problem right now. What you usually care or worry about in the context of relativity is causality, and that's preserved. 

If we have synchronized clocks and show entangled particles do their things on the opposite side of the planet without any lightspeed lag.  How the hell are they doing if not by going FTL or if we don't have a fundamental misunderstanding of what locality is?

[Pebble thats Stubby]

how are you going to grantee that both clocks are exactly synchronized?

 If my understanding of space time is correct the faster they travel the less time has passed relative to a stationary or slower moving object.      Which means that if you sync the clocks next to each other, then move one to the other side of the world  they will no longer be exactly synced.      and you can't sync them when they are apart due to not being able to see both at the same time.

[Ded As Ned]

24 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

If we have synchronized clocks and show entangled particles do their things on the opposite side of the planet without any lightspeed lag.  How the hell are they doing if not by going FTL or if we don't have a fundamental misunderstanding of what locality is?

Source please (for the bolded)?  I am not aware of any such experiment or advancement.  It was proposed in theory a few years ago from what I see on the interwebs, but it doesn't seem anything has been done with the idea since then.

As to locality... non-locality is a thing, and has been verified experimentally. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

DaN,

Einstein called Quantum Entanglement "Spooky Action at a Distance" for a reason.  He speculated that it wasn't really instantaneous changes to the states of the entangled particles but that the states were always the same.  He analogized it to finding a right handed glove in Princeton then finding it's matching left handed glove in Antarctica.  You would always know what the other glove was without any information being exchanged.  John Bell developed an experiment that tested Einstein's hypothesis and falsified it, his experiment was followed by a bunch of others:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test_experiments

The point is this... something really funky is going on with quantum entanglement and it appears that most, if not all, particles have entangled partners.  If entangled particles and their distant partners change there states without regard to distance or light speed lag then (even if no information is passed that we can perceive) then either the light speed barrier doesn't apply to entangled particles or somehow locality is violated with regard to entangled particles.  

It is "spooky action at a distance".  

[IheartIheartTesla]

13 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

So what is entanglement?  Are you saying it has no implications to locality or regarding the potential for FTL?

What? How did you get there from aliens?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Here's another interesting article about quantum entanglement:

http://www.space.com/31562-weird-universe-revealed-in-quantum-entanglement-breakthrough.html

From the article:

TKF: And yet they're connected. 

R.H.: Yes, when we do experiments, they seem connected. But maybe we should qualify that. They are connected in the sense that if we take a measurement of one, it correlates with a measurement on the other, even though the measurements can be done so fast that there's no time for communication between the particles.

TKF: This suggests we could communicate at faster-than-light speeds, right? The galaxy is 100 thousand light years wide but this happens instantaneously. So, is something moving faster than light?

R.R.: No. Nothing is moving faster than light. Of course, the first explanation we would come up with is that it takes something moving faster than light to explain that behavior. But then when you think more deeply, you realize that there may be other explanations.

For example, we just said that entangled particles lose their individual properties. But let's momentarily assume they still have their properties. Then the only explanation would indeed be that something is moving faster than light.

But let's think of it in a different way, and say they simply don't have these properties. These properties only come into existence when we observe them. Then there is no reason to think of a physical mechanism that communicates information about one particle's property to the other particle, because neither particle has that property to communicate. The property appears only at the time we observe it.

TKF: So if this is not a matter of communication, does it suggest something about the structure of the universe? In other words, what makes this behavior possible? Do we have any clue? Do we even know where to look? 

R.H.: This is a very good and deep question, I think. It boils down to what Einstein was trying to do, find a theory underneath quantum mechanics that is more intuitive in our world.

I think it's fair to say that people are still debating about the implications of Bell's inequality, the equations that define whether the behavior of entangled particles reflects quantum or classical physics. That is what we were testing in our experiment. But there are different ways of arriving at Bell's inequality, and different premises that go into it. You can come at it from different angles.

Einstein's angle was that there are "local" factors that act on both entangled particles, and that these particles have "real" properties even before we observe them. If we see a blue marble, for example, we believe intuitively that the marble was already blue before we looked at it.

If you start with Einstein's concepts of locality (local forces) and realism (real properties)­ you end up at Bell's inequality. And Bell's inequality was violated in our experiment. So we have to drop either locality or realism to make it work.

TKF: If I understand you properly, researchers use Bell's inequality to test whether Einstein was right or wrong about local factors and realism. Bell's inequality says what? Is there a simple way to explain it?

R.R.: Building on what Ronald said, I would explain it in the following way: You make certain assumptions. One assumption is that particles have real properties. Another assumption is that nothing travels faster than light. These are your two starting assumptions.

Now if you combine them and do the mathematics, you arrive at Bell's inequality, which tells you that certain things that you can measure are smaller than a certain number.

What Ronald did is that he measured these things, and he found out that they are not smaller than this particular number. They are actually larger. So we conclude that one of the two assumptions has to be wrong.

Both of these assumptions are things that we would naturally think are clearly true. Ronald's experiment proves one of them has to be wrong. We still have a choice as to which one we think is wrong, but one of them has to be wrong.

TKF: While we've been talking, several listeners have sent in questions. One wants to know whether higher dimensions could account for the linkage that connects entangled objects. Is this a possibility? Is this something we even know?

R.R.: People often ask about higher dimensions when they try to find a mechanism to explain entanglement. However, as I said before and what Ronald's experiment essentially shows, is that we have to give up one of our assumptions about local forces or realism. If we give up the assumption of realism — that things have properties — then higher dimensions is a valid explanation.

We could also explain Ronald's experiment if we give up the assumption that there is nothing faster than light. If we do that, however, and this is an important point I try to stress all the time,­ then we are in trouble with our assumption that we have free choice.

For example, in Ronald's experiment, he has to choose what he measures. He has to choose between different measurements. Now, if you give up the assumption that nothing is faster than light and you assume there is some higher dimension in which things can propagate much faster, then we can no longer hold onto our belief that we have free choices. But that's something we probably don't want to give up.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

10 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

What? How did you get there from aliens?

Because, from what I've read (and my very limited understanding) quantum entanglement either shows that the light speed barrier is not universal or entanglement has very serious implications about our ideas of what "locality" means.  Otherwise how do you have instantaneous changes to the states of entangled particles without delay when the entangled particles have been seperated by distance?

Even given the fact that you need to transmit information classically to interpret the information conveyed by the entangled particles something happened to the entangled particles that didn't require the time lag involved in light speed.  How is that quantum information conveyed between the entangled particles without either light speed being surpassed or locality being violated?

[IheartIheartTesla]

And you didn't get my thought experiment. If the aliens were really smart, they would have had their megastructure release something like pairs of electrons, and do measurements on one half of each pair. According to the FTL theory of quantum entanglement this should instantaneously collapse the wave function of the other half of the pair, right? If the measurement on the alien planet was done in the right way ( a way yet to be described), we should see a coded message in the spins (say) of the electrons we collect on Earth 

So my argument is sort of a Fermi argument against the existence of FTL communcation (or maybe against the existence of aliens). An intelligent alien civilization could easily cook up an experiment (similar to what Altherion described) where they emit entangled particles and make measurements on one part of those particles, and we havent seen anything like that (or maybe we havent looked) 

[The Anti-Targ]

8 hours ago, AndrewJ said:

 

Wait... what? What sort of person would advocate a version of Aztec Challenge without the music? I suddenly don't believe your brother is quite so smart after all. I think you need to have serious words with him.

 

Of course it would have been Egyptian challenge, but the graphics back in the day were too crap to make smooth walled pyramids, so luckily the Aztecs made stepped pyramids.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

9 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

And you didn't get my thought experiment. If the aliens were really smart, they would have had their megastructure release something like pairs of electrons, and do measurements on one half of each pair. According to the FTL theory of quantum entanglement this should instantaneously collapse the wave function of the other half of the pair, right? If the measurement on the alien planet was done in the right way ( a way yet to be described), we should see a coded message in the spins (say) of the electrons we collect on Earth 

So my argument is sort of a Fermi argument against the existence of FTL communcation (or maybe against the existence of aliens). An intelligent alien civilization could easily cook up an experiment (similar to what Altherion described) where they emit entangled particles and make measurements on one part of those particles, and we havent seen anything like that (or maybe we havent looked) 

I got it.  But if quantum communication means we have to send a classical signal to interpret the quantum information it's pretty much useless as a means of communication.  That doesn't make it any less bizarre that encrypted information is passing instantaneously between the two particles or that the two particles, despite being physically seperated, behave as though they are not physically separated.  

It's weird weird stuff.