Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking, paything everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks at the future and says, don't I
Speaker 1: know you from somewhere? I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Vocalban,
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick. And today we wanted to talk about
Speaker 1: the speed of communication and how that might one day
Speaker 1: be a problem. Have you listened to our previous podcast,
Speaker 1: you probably heard us talk about how we've really kind
Speaker 1: of cracked the speed nut as far as communication goes
Speaker 1: here on Earth. It's more of a throughput or bandwidth
Speaker 1: issue than a speed issue. But when you start looking
Speaker 1: beyond Earth, we still have that speed problem, don't we,
Speaker 1: and cross long enough distances? Yeah. Yeah, And we have
Speaker 1: a fairly recent example of how this can become a
Speaker 1: challenge with the the landing of the Curiosity Rover on
Speaker 1: Mars that happened in right, I was I remember where
Speaker 1: the night this happened, So do I remember I was
Speaker 1: covering it live for this Weekend Tech. Yeah. I was
Speaker 1: just blogging about it on Facebook basically, and uh, and
Speaker 1: I was watching the live stream and uh, which is
Speaker 1: interesting because there were two delays going on. There was
Speaker 1: the delay between what was happening on Mars and the
Speaker 1: people at the actually imported at the NASA JPL finding
Speaker 1: out about it, and then the delay of course between
Speaker 1: them and then me at my house getting the stream.
Speaker 1: Um and so. But when you think about that, it's
Speaker 1: interesting because those are totally two totally different scales of delay. UM.
Speaker 1: One is a very small delay based on throughput, like
Speaker 1: how long does it take the bits of data from
Speaker 1: their transmission to get to my computer so I can
Speaker 1: watch them as pixels on my screen? Um? And And
Speaker 1: that's throughput, like we talked about last time. Yeah, it's nothing.
Speaker 1: It's is trying to squeeze that data into the wire
Speaker 1: fast enough and reconstituted on the other end here. But
Speaker 1: the other one has a really serious, significant physical limit, yes, um.
Speaker 1: And what is that limit? Well, it's the speed of
Speaker 1: light in a vacuum, uh so, which is very fast
Speaker 1: but quite fair. It's like a thousand miles miles per
Speaker 1: second basically, and we think of it as the universal
Speaker 1: speed limit, although more on that later. Yeah, well, well
Speaker 1: we can say that now, right, that's a good thing
Speaker 1: to start with. Actually, um uh Einstein's theory of relativity
Speaker 1: says that essentially nothing with mask can go the speed
Speaker 1: of light or faster. It's it's an absolute limit. And
Speaker 1: the reasons for that are multiple, but basically it would
Speaker 1: take infinite energy and and and by the time that
Speaker 1: you worked up to it, you would have infinite mass
Speaker 1: and everything would be messy. Ye yeah, yeah, that's exactly it.
Speaker 1: It would be impossible to propel yourself because you anyway, yeah, good,
Speaker 1: good way to put that. Um. So uh so we
Speaker 1: think that's the universal speed limit. Um. Well that and
Speaker 1: that's what resulted in the fact that it took us
Speaker 1: so several minutes to learn the right, That's what I
Speaker 1: was getting too. So we're here on Earth and the
Speaker 1: people at I realized, the people of the Jet Propulsion
Speaker 1: Lab didn't know for about fourteen minutes whether the lander
Speaker 1: had succeeded or whether it was you know, like Martians
Speaker 1: had captured it and taken it for their purposes, right,
Speaker 1: um or what We just had no idea, And so
Speaker 1: here it was just an issue of suspense um. Because
Speaker 1: the transmission traveling at the speed of light at the
Speaker 1: maximum speed, takes that long to get to us, and
Speaker 1: we just don't know, but this could actually be a
Speaker 1: real problem for exploring other planets, right, what if you
Speaker 1: needed to control something in real time on another planet
Speaker 1: that the Mars landing was relatively simple, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: we were pretty sure that we weren't crashing it and
Speaker 1: attending any mountains, you know, and that they were we
Speaker 1: were pretty sure there were no giant space lugs out
Speaker 1: there ready to eat it, so it was okay. But
Speaker 1: you know, but if there have been space lugs, or
Speaker 1: if there the planet's surface had been treacherous enough where
Speaker 1: for some reason we thought a human being would be
Speaker 1: more capable of piloting that ship rather than a very
Speaker 1: sophisticated computer than obviously, that would have been an issue
Speaker 1: because there would have been a very long delay from
Speaker 1: the time when the the lander would be able to
Speaker 1: relay that information to you, and then just as long
Speaker 1: for your commands to go back to the land there
Speaker 1: so that it could adjust in any way. And by
Speaker 1: that time conditions will have changed dramatically. I mean you're
Speaker 1: talking half an hour almost, right. So this is a
Speaker 1: weird case where it's not really a problem here on Earth,
Speaker 1: but when you start exploring the galaxy, the speed of
Speaker 1: light just isn't fast enough, so we need something faster
Speaker 1: we do. Is there a way to talk to the
Speaker 1: curiosity lander faster than light can get from one place
Speaker 1: to another. Well, before I give my answer, I think
Speaker 1: we should probably talk about some some potential ways that
Speaker 1: according to give my answer at the end, According to
Speaker 1: star Trek, there these there, there's the subspace that's kind
Speaker 1: of like a parallel dimension that these are these particles
Speaker 1: called called tetrians are floating around, and these these are
Speaker 1: really really random momentum particles, and when they bleed over
Speaker 1: into real space, all kinds of wacky stuff happens that
Speaker 1: makes for really compelling television hopefully. Um right, but but
Speaker 1: but but as far as I can tell, this is
Speaker 1: not this is not one of those things. It's really
Speaker 1: a plot device more so, right, It's than any kind
Speaker 1: of physics. It's say, how do we get around this
Speaker 1: fundamental problem. Let's explain it away with something that doesn't
Speaker 1: really particles, and then we just say, oh, they were
Speaker 1: discovered in two so that way no one can complain
Speaker 1: about the fact that these things don't seem to exist. Well,
Speaker 1: the Vulcans have been using them since Earth Year. The vulcans.
Speaker 1: Are they universes hipsters? We have established that, you know,
Speaker 1: they were. They were using tetrion particles before it was cool.
Speaker 1: They even have the little hipster bangs like they They however,
Speaker 1: have already moved beyond the ironic mustache. Yes, yes, clearly.
Speaker 1: You know. Well, it's funny that the difference essentially between
Speaker 1: science fiction and fantasy is that the magic things in
Speaker 1: fantasy are designed to sound like religious items, and the
Speaker 1: magic things in sci fire design to sound like things
Speaker 1: from a science text book. Well, and of course, and
Speaker 1: and tetrion is really close like obelisks of you know,
Speaker 1: like it's just yeah, well but tetrians is a really
Speaker 1: close word to take on. Yeahh there we go. Well,
Speaker 1: so some people do think that maybe take eons could
Speaker 1: help us talk faster than light, get information from one
Speaker 1: place to another at a superliminal speeds. So so what
Speaker 1: what is a tack eon? Well, attack eon is partically
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I want to emphasize this, a hypothetical particle
Speaker 1: that means and that's different from a theoretical particle. Um
Speaker 1: theoretical would be one that that's integral, like to some
Speaker 1: theory that yeah, Higgs integral to some theory that we
Speaker 1: have good evidence for hypothetical just means like we can
Speaker 1: posit it and we can sort of talk about it,
Speaker 1: but there's no evidence for it. You can justify it
Speaker 1: in the sense of creating a mathematical expression that that
Speaker 1: where it makes sense, but there's no other evidence whatsoever, right, um,
Speaker 1: And and even the first thing you said, the making
Speaker 1: sense math mathematically is questionable, but we can talk about
Speaker 1: that in a second. So tacons are super liminal particles,
Speaker 1: and that means that they always go faster than the
Speaker 1: speedy We cannot approach the speed of light. They cannot
Speaker 1: slow down that much because it would take again an
Speaker 1: infinite amount of energy, right to slow them down. So
Speaker 1: you sort of imagine, imagine a big X shape, and
Speaker 1: we and all the matter that we know about are
Speaker 1: in the bottom triangle of that X. Right. We live
Speaker 1: down there, and as we and the where the exes
Speaker 1: where the triangles intersect, basically the cross of the X,
Speaker 1: that's the speed of light, alright, So it's the center
Speaker 1: of the X, right, And as we approach that, going
Speaker 1: up towards the top of our little triangle, things start
Speaker 1: getting wonky. Of course, you know that we have time
Speaker 1: dilation and and crazy stuff, and we can't get to
Speaker 1: the apex of that triangle. Um. They live in the
Speaker 1: top triangle. Tachyons are up there, and they're basically an
Speaker 1: inverse of everything that we experience in the bottom half.
Speaker 1: As they approach the speed of light going down towards
Speaker 1: that cross, things get wonky. It stops making sense. But
Speaker 1: they travel faster than light. If they exist, it's possible.
Speaker 1: Some people think that, well, could we harness them to
Speaker 1: communicate faster than light? And there are some serious objections
Speaker 1: I think to this hypothesis. UM. One of them, of course, is,
Speaker 1: as we said, we have no proof that these things
Speaker 1: even exist, so we're talking hypothetically anyway, and that should
Speaker 1: always be noted as a major objection. UM. But number two, Uh,
Speaker 1: you would bring on causality paradoxes if you could really
Speaker 1: use what some some physicists described this device as the
Speaker 1: tachyonic anti telephone. Right. It's a device that allows you
Speaker 1: to call the past as the person who receives your
Speaker 1: message would get it before you had actually sent it, right,
Speaker 1: And and that's actually what Einstein's theory relativity says. Right,
Speaker 1: If if you go faster than the speed of light.
Speaker 1: What it seems to imply is that you would start
Speaker 1: going backward in time, which doesn't make any sense at all,
Speaker 1: at least as far as we can understand, right, And
Speaker 1: so that's another major objection. Uh. Also from what I've read,
Speaker 1: if you if you look at tach eons um, the
Speaker 1: math is really strange to to justify them. So again
Speaker 1: using relativistic equations, what it looks like is that in
Speaker 1: order for attack on to have actual real energy, it
Speaker 1: has to have imaginary mass. Right. I remember seeing an
Speaker 1: example being it would have a mass of the square
Speaker 1: root of negative one. That's exactly right. Imaginary, an imaginary
Speaker 1: number hurt my brain. I'll tell you what's hurting my brain.
Speaker 1: So Joe was talking about this x where all of
Speaker 1: our matters on the bottom and all the tachyon stuffs
Speaker 1: on the top. Who lives on the left and right?
Speaker 1: I think that was the new Trinos from the Teenage
Speaker 1: Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon series. Okay, all right, well, and
Speaker 1: the street Sharks they're over on the right. I'm back up.
Speaker 1: I'm back up to speed now, but I've been lost
Speaker 1: since then, so sorry. Yeah, relativistic street sharks carry our
Speaker 1: data faster than light, and then we've done it. No.
Speaker 1: But so basically the tachy on business is really complex
Speaker 1: and definitely above my head. But from everything I've read, uh,
Speaker 1: people who know what they're talking about don't seem to
Speaker 1: give this much credibility. They don't think you can do it. Um.
Speaker 1: And one major problem is again you mentioned the two
Speaker 1: different parts of the X. Well, they're two different parts
Speaker 1: of the X. So even if these things exist up there,
Speaker 1: there's no way to know that we can mess with them.
Speaker 1: There may be no way to interact with that at all.
Speaker 1: They could be um what what physicists would call free particles,
Speaker 1: meaning that they just don't interact with our type of matter. Right. Well, uh,
Speaker 1: I have another I have another little hypothetical thing. This
Speaker 1: one's this one, This one's very goofy. Yeah, alright, So
Speaker 1: let's say that Lauren, that you are in a you're
Speaker 1: living in a space station, like yeah, you know what
Speaker 1: You're you're building robots to eventually take over the planet
Speaker 1: around which your space station orbits. I've asked you not
Speaker 1: to talk about this in public. I'm sorry which planet
Speaker 1: it would be for the for this argument's sake, we'll
Speaker 1: say Earth, this is all a certain ringed planet. It
Speaker 1: was all documented in the movie Determinators. Um. And then
Speaker 1: let's say that I'm on a space station that's five
Speaker 1: d light years away. Good okay, and and so no,
Speaker 1: that's not what I mean. This show is going to
Speaker 1: have one less host, one fewer host in a minute. Um.
Speaker 1: So let's say that that I want to send I
Speaker 1: want to get Lauren's attention, but I'm five hundred light
Speaker 1: years away. If I were to send a message uh
Speaker 1: from our respective points of view, that would take five
Speaker 1: hundred years at light speed to go from my my
Speaker 1: station to her station. And in five dred years, Lauren
Speaker 1: might not care so much that I found her old
Speaker 1: cell phone that left in the station. That that that
Speaker 1: that Facebook status update would not be critical. So let's
Speaker 1: say that I've devised an ingenious plan. I have a
Speaker 1: bell installed in Lauren's space station, and attached to that
Speaker 1: bell is a string that's five hundred light years long,
Speaker 1: and the end of that string is inside my space station.
Speaker 1: And so I just grabbed the end of that string
Speaker 1: and I give it a really good tug, so they
Speaker 1: will ring the bell inside Lawrence space Station. Now, wouldn't
Speaker 1: that bell ring the instant I pull that string. Thus
Speaker 1: I am able to communicate. I'm able to get some
Speaker 1: form of information across instantaneously across five hundred light years
Speaker 1: without having to send a message all the way through. No,
Speaker 1: And that would actually be way way slower than a
Speaker 1: normal and light speed because we're talking about sound speed, right.
Speaker 1: A radio transmission travels at the speed of light. A
Speaker 1: wave propagation along a string travels at the speed of sound. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're talking about the same thing. Might even be slower
Speaker 1: than the SPEEDI that's essentially string speed of sound, speed
Speaker 1: of push or speed of poll is the way a
Speaker 1: lot of people say it. But it's the speed of
Speaker 1: sound through that particular medium. So in other words, uh, like,
Speaker 1: if we were to change that and instead of it
Speaker 1: being a string, it's it's a pole. So it's like
Speaker 1: a metal pole that stretches five hundred light years and
Speaker 1: I start to move my end of the metal pole,
Speaker 1: it would actually take longer than five years for that
Speaker 1: to propagate across the entire length of the pole, so
Speaker 1: that the end that's in Lawrence Space Station would start
Speaker 1: to wiggle. This seems counterintuitive, but it's completely true. It's
Speaker 1: depending completely upon that that that vibration propagating across, that
Speaker 1: wave propagating across and you can see this. There's some
Speaker 1: great videos on YouTube where people have a slinky and
Speaker 1: they're holding one end of the slinky up vertically like
Speaker 1: you know, so that the bottom of the slinky is
Speaker 1: off the ground, and then they let go of the
Speaker 1: top of the slinky and you you watch it in
Speaker 1: slow motion. You can actually watch the wave propagate across
Speaker 1: the length of the slinky. Now, the top of the
Speaker 1: slinky starts falling towards the ground according to gravity, pulling
Speaker 1: it down. It's accelerating at at the speed of gravity,
Speaker 1: but the bottom of the slinky remains in place until
Speaker 1: that wave propagates acrocess. So yeah, you'll actually see like
Speaker 1: the top of the slinky is falling to the ground
Speaker 1: and the bottom of the slinky is still there until
Speaker 1: that wave propagates, and then the bottom of the slinky
Speaker 1: starts to fall. So this is now on on Earth.
Speaker 1: This is so quick that we barely notice it. Right,
Speaker 1: You're going an incredibly long slinky for us to notice
Speaker 1: this when it's not slowed down to super slow speeds,
Speaker 1: but when you're talking about light years. That's a huge distance,
Speaker 1: and it that at that scale this stuff really matters.
Speaker 1: And so that's why you could not just have, you know,
Speaker 1: two cans and a piece of string and and just
Speaker 1: chat across the emptiness of space that way. Expect an
Speaker 1: answer anytime soon. Anyway, So we've established that Tachian is
Speaker 1: probably a no go treehouse telephone, not as good as
Speaker 1: what NASA uses. I tried really hard. So what else
Speaker 1: is left? Are there other ways people might think we
Speaker 1: might be able to go faster than what we've got, Well,
Speaker 1: there's there's here's another theoretical sort of well hypothetical sort
Speaker 1: of thing, but it falls apart once you do the math.
Speaker 1: I don't have a whole lot of detail on it,
Speaker 1: but I just want to kind of give a quick
Speaker 1: shout out to the Casimir effect, which is a small
Speaker 1: but measurable force that exists between two uncharged conducting plates
Speaker 1: when they are incredibly close together, and photons that travel
Speaker 1: across the gap between these two uncharged conducting plates go
Speaker 1: faster than the speed of light by a very very
Speaker 1: very small amount. Yeah, so from based upon measurements, the
Speaker 1: photons are actually moving faster than what photons can move. However,
Speaker 1: once and this is all theory, by the way, but
Speaker 1: but theoretical investigations into this effect to see if this
Speaker 1: would be a way to scale this in any form
Speaker 1: of communication have turned out to show that there's nothing there.
Speaker 1: You can't you can't communicate this way um. Then there's
Speaker 1: quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement. Speaking of photons, yeah, this photons
Speaker 1: are are one thing you could do. You could do
Speaker 1: with polarization of photons. But quantum entanglement. This is the
Speaker 1: idea that before we get into this, we should say
Speaker 1: that this is the big one, right, this is the
Speaker 1: big kuna. This is the one that people think, they
Speaker 1: really do think maybe there's this one, this one in
Speaker 1: quantum tunneling. These are the two big ones. They're they're
Speaker 1: they're actually talking about setting up a setting up a
Speaker 1: quantum entanglement experiment on the International Space Station. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: let's let's get into ye. So, so quantum entanglement brings
Speaker 1: in some problems with quantum theory, I say problems, Einstein
Speaker 1: said problems. Einstein found this idea of quantum entanglement to
Speaker 1: be really problematic and scary, spooky, yeah, you actually call
Speaker 1: it spooky action at a distance. Well, so, quantum entanglement
Speaker 1: is this concept where you get these two sub atomic
Speaker 1: particles and they are entangled in such a way that
Speaker 1: the behavior of one will tell you something about the
Speaker 1: behavior of the other. So necessarily, like you definitely know
Speaker 1: when they're entangled. Yeah, well, not definitely, notily um, because
Speaker 1: it gets a little complicated. Uh, because Heisenberg's uncertainty principle
Speaker 1: tells us that we cannot know everything about we can
Speaker 1: we can draw a conclusion about something about the other
Speaker 1: particle's behavior. So, for example, we might talk about the
Speaker 1: spin of a subatomic particle. Now, spin can be across
Speaker 1: different axis. It's not just across one axis. But for
Speaker 1: the purposes of this, I'm just going to say we're
Speaker 1: just gonna look at one axis of spin to make
Speaker 1: this a simple example. But please keep in mind that
Speaker 1: this is just as simplified example. It's not how the work. Right. So,
Speaker 1: let's say that you've got two subatomic particles that are entangled,
Speaker 1: and one of them is spinning along an axis in
Speaker 1: a clockwise direction relative to your position. So when you
Speaker 1: observe it, it looks like it's moving in a clockwise position.
Speaker 1: Remember everything's relative. Well, then the other particle, even though
Speaker 1: you haven't even looked at it, you will know that
Speaker 1: because the two are entangled, the other particle is going
Speaker 1: to spin in the opposite direction of the first one.
Speaker 1: So it's spinning in a counterclockwise or witter Shan's direction
Speaker 1: based upon your uh, your perspective, read your Shakespeare Joe
Speaker 1: uh so, so yeah, it's it's clockwise and and and counterclockwise.
Speaker 1: Or as one of my uh one of my my
Speaker 1: directions once said for a fan that I was trying
Speaker 1: to build anti counter clockwise would be the first one,
Speaker 1: and clockwise would be whatever. So we have one starring clockwise,
Speaker 1: the other one string counterclockwise. By observing one, you know
Speaker 1: what the other one is doing. But at that point
Speaker 1: that entanglement breaks down. They are no the behavior of
Speaker 1: one is no longer dependent or entangled with the behavior
Speaker 1: of the other. They're not to be right because you've
Speaker 1: observed it. That system is broken down. That's one of
Speaker 1: the big challenges, or really the big barrier to quantum
Speaker 1: entanglement is that you cannot actually pass information through entanglement. Well,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, I don't know if we said for sure,
Speaker 1: why this would be faster than the speed of light,
Speaker 1: And that would be because you can take these things
Speaker 1: really far apart, right, you can. You could take one
Speaker 1: sub atomic particle to the other end of the universe,
Speaker 1: you know, in theory, and once once even tangled them,
Speaker 1: they're they're entangled, right, It's non localized. It's the locality
Speaker 1: is not an issue at least well locality as we
Speaker 1: understand it in the sense of space. In the quantum world,
Speaker 1: locality means lots of different stuff. So that's it's one
Speaker 1: of those things where part of the problem is just
Speaker 1: the vocabulary and the way that the quantum physicists use
Speaker 1: it as opposed to people like me. It could be
Speaker 1: that these two quanta are actually right next to each
Speaker 1: other in a dimension that we can't even see. That.
Speaker 1: That's one way of looking at it. Yes, so in
Speaker 1: the in the dimension of space, they could be very
Speaker 1: far apart. You could have one on the other side
Speaker 1: of Alpha Centauri, one here on Earth, and by observing
Speaker 1: the one here on Earth, you know what the one
Speaker 1: on Alpha Centauri, what what that one behavior of the
Speaker 1: one in Alpha Centauri was doing. So that's positing the
Speaker 1: transfer of information uh, instantaneous lee or Another thing I
Speaker 1: read was that they think maybe it goes at like
Speaker 1: ten thousand times the speed of lighters. Yeah, that's what
Speaker 1: that's what one professor has come up with. Well recently,
Speaker 1: the Einstein Boris Podolski and Nathan Rosen all thought that
Speaker 1: this was that this was a terrible idea, that that
Speaker 1: it was clearly that the problem was that we just
Speaker 1: didn't understand enough about quantum theory and that this could
Speaker 1: not be possible. They raised what was called well, now
Speaker 1: we do know different things, we do know more, but
Speaker 1: we know we know it's impossible for different reason, for
Speaker 1: a different reason than what they They came up with
Speaker 1: what was called the EPR paradox, which is essentially what
Speaker 1: I was saying, that you know, you cannot transmit information
Speaker 1: faster than the speed of light. And in fact I
Speaker 1: saw a great example Karen Masters that Cornell has a
Speaker 1: has a little uh web page where she was answering
Speaker 1: questions about this sort of stuff, and she said, all right, now,
Speaker 1: imagine this scenario. You've got two friends and they are
Speaker 1: an equal distance away from you on the other side
Speaker 1: of the galaxy, So ones on one direction, ones in
Speaker 1: the other direction, And before they left, you told them
Speaker 1: that you would send a beam of light uh to
Speaker 1: each of them, and the beam for one of them
Speaker 1: would be read and the beam for the other one
Speaker 1: would be blue, and you would send them both at
Speaker 1: the exact same time. So you send those beams, and
Speaker 1: the one on one end of the galaxy ss red,
Speaker 1: so they know that the one on the other end
Speaker 1: of the galaxy is blue. Does that mean that they
Speaker 1: have received information faster than the speed of light in
Speaker 1: the answer is no, because they actually already had the
Speaker 1: information subluminally, because they learned about it before they even
Speaker 1: left Earth. That they haven't gained anything new here, and
Speaker 1: that there is no way to actually communicate real information
Speaker 1: using this method. You all you can do is draw conclusions.
Speaker 1: So there's there's this barrier. It's it's an interesting phenomenon
Speaker 1: and phenomenon, I should say, and it would be really
Speaker 1: cool to learn are about it, but it does not
Speaker 1: look like there's any way to harness it to actually
Speaker 1: communicate any information, right right right. It's it's not like
Speaker 1: a like a Morse code kind of thing where you write, no,
Speaker 1: you can you can look at a photon to learn
Speaker 1: a fact, but you can't send information for one thing,
Speaker 1: you cannot even manipulate those those quanta to do what
Speaker 1: you want. They what's happening is the quanta are in
Speaker 1: an unknown state and then you observe it, you learn
Speaker 1: the state. But at the same time that breaks down
Speaker 1: that entanglement. So you can't manipulate the state of the quanta.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can manipulate the state like crazy if
Speaker 1: you're a politician. I mean, essentially, what you're saying is
Speaker 1: that the problem with quantum entanglement is you may be
Speaker 1: able to know things across a great distance really fast,
Speaker 1: even faster than light, but all you can do is
Speaker 1: just no a random outcome far away and you can't
Speaker 1: know everything. Yeah, so that's the other thing is that
Speaker 1: you're you're learning that it's changed. You can you can
Speaker 1: you know random outcome, but you can't get messages back
Speaker 1: and forth exactly. And so yeah, it's not it's not communication, right.
Speaker 1: Maybe someday we'll learn some way of harnessing that. But
Speaker 1: it looks like it's a fundamental element of the universe.
Speaker 1: It's something that is just beyond our ability to to manipulate.
Speaker 1: Can I tell you, I'm really excited about all the
Speaker 1: email we're going to get about how we're totally misunderstanding this. Well,
Speaker 1: i'll be sure to afford it to you. Actually you're
Speaker 1: on that list, so you'll be able to see it yourself.
Speaker 1: Let's move on to quantum tunneling. Excellent, because the tunneling,
Speaker 1: it's a quantum tunneling. Have you heard about that? What
Speaker 1: is that? What quantum dwarves do know? Is that what
Speaker 1: those quantum the quantum worms from tremors, you know, Oh,
Speaker 1: I know what you're talking about. But those were not
Speaker 1: quantum No, no, they were on far too great a
Speaker 1: scale to be on the quantum scale. Well, okay, just
Speaker 1: tell me about your boring quantum tunneling. Sure will, so,
Speaker 1: all right, Now, when you get down to really super
Speaker 1: super super tiny scales like the nano scale, all right,
Speaker 1: and or the atomic scale, that's that's even better. So
Speaker 1: you get to the atomic scale, let's say you've got
Speaker 1: an electron traveling down a pathway. You don't really know
Speaker 1: exactly where the position of that electron is at any
Speaker 1: given moment. You really can just create sort of a
Speaker 1: sphere around the potential places where that electron could be
Speaker 1: given its momentum. So you don't. You don't really know
Speaker 1: exactly where that electron is. That's my point, all right.
Speaker 1: So that sphere is a certain size, you have like
Speaker 1: a probability, a probability, there's a probability that could be
Speaker 1: at any on any point in that sphere. Now that
Speaker 1: sphere is approaching an electronic gate, so a transistor. So
Speaker 1: this is something that we'd see in a microprocessor, and
Speaker 1: in fact, quantum tunneling is something that microprocessor manufacturers have
Speaker 1: to actually worry about. So it gets towards this gate.
Speaker 1: The gate is closed, which means that the electron should
Speaker 1: not pass through it. But if the gate is thin enough,
Speaker 1: so we're talking about a microprocessor that's got very very
Speaker 1: very tiny connections in order to pack as many transistors
Speaker 1: in there as possible. If the gate is thin enough,
Speaker 1: then that field where the electron possibly could be could
Speaker 1: overlap that gate and actually pass on to the other side.
Speaker 1: And because the probability is there that the electron might
Speaker 1: be on the other side, sometimes it is on the
Speaker 1: other side, so it it's as if it has passed
Speaker 1: through the gate without actually passing through it. On one moment,
Speaker 1: it's on one side. On the next the next moments
Speaker 1: on the other side. Now, with microprocessors, this is a
Speaker 1: problem because if the gate is supposed to be closed
Speaker 1: and blocking off the electrons, and the electrons are passing
Speaker 1: through any then we don't want tron electron to be
Speaker 1: on the other side. Yeah we've got you can get
Speaker 1: computer errors, you know, things that it's just not working
Speaker 1: properly because it cannot control the flow of electrons the
Speaker 1: way it needs to in order to run processes. So
Speaker 1: this is a real problem when it comes to micro architecture.
Speaker 1: This gets into a thing about matter, right that solid
Speaker 1: matter isn't really solid. Yeah there's more empty space, and
Speaker 1: yeah there's all that as well, but that's that's slightly different,
Speaker 1: but an interesting idea. So the part about quantumunneling that
Speaker 1: gets too faster than light communication is that it appears
Speaker 1: that the electron can pass over a distance faster than
Speaker 1: a photon would be able to travel that same distance.
Speaker 1: So you know this this jump where it would go
Speaker 1: from one side of the gate to another side of
Speaker 1: the gate. It could do that at a speed that's
Speaker 1: faster than the speed of light. How is that possible?
Speaker 1: Because an electron has mass. I see, that's a good question,
Speaker 1: and honestly the answer is really more like we probably
Speaker 1: it's probably another manifestation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, where to
Speaker 1: us it appears as if the electron is moving faster
Speaker 1: than the speed of light, when in reality it's not.
Speaker 1: But it's really just a probability issue more so than
Speaker 1: a right, it's more of a probability thing than a
Speaker 1: than actual speed thing. But then you know, there are
Speaker 1: those who have said that you if you calculate it
Speaker 1: at these incredibly tiny distances. Remember this is we're talking
Speaker 1: the nano scale here, so very small sto nanometer is
Speaker 1: one billionth of a meter, so we're talking really really
Speaker 1: tiny at that scale. Uh, it's essentially that electron might
Speaker 1: move at what would be equivalent to four point seven
Speaker 1: times the speed of light. But again it's all this
Speaker 1: probability and certainty stuff. It may not have anything to
Speaker 1: do with speed at all. It has to do with
Speaker 1: our understanding of of quantum mechanics. Well, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it would have to write because that would posit like
Speaker 1: we talked about earlier, that the electron would have to
Speaker 1: have infinite mass and infinite energy, right, So obviously that's
Speaker 1: not happening. And again most physicists are saying that there's
Speaker 1: even with this interesting phenomenon, there's no capacity here for
Speaker 1: faster than like communication. So you know, we've been shooting
Speaker 1: down these things left and right. I think ultimately what
Speaker 1: the conclusion we come to is, as we understand the
Speaker 1: world to operate, as of right now, there is no
Speaker 1: faster than like communication opportunity out there. That's not to
Speaker 1: say that we won't find it later done the line,
Speaker 1: and that some discovery won't allow us to have this
Speaker 1: This what to us right now really does seem well,
Speaker 1: it does seem impossible based on what we know. But
Speaker 1: I think we should point out that almost every really
Speaker 1: really cool innovation has come by people trying to do
Speaker 1: things that were said to be impossible, right, Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and who knows what we'll know tomorrow? Yeah, who
Speaker 1: knows what we'll know by the time this podcast goes live. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll get more of those emails, right, excellent, And if
Speaker 1: we're lucky, maybe we already received them because they were
Speaker 1: sent faster than light and they've traveled back in time
Speaker 1: to before we only they had gotten here just before
Speaker 1: we recorded, we could have prevented all that attacking on
Speaker 1: anti email server. Yeah, I think I've got my spam
Speaker 1: filter blocking all tacky on messages. So yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: Well that that's a good discussion on fast and light communication.
Speaker 1: We're gonna wrap this sucker up. So guys, if you
Speaker 1: have any suggestions on topics we should tackle in future
Speaker 1: episodes of Forward Thinking, get in touch with us. Let's know,
Speaker 1: we've got an email address that's f W Thinking at
Speaker 1: discovery dot com. Or drop us a line on our
Speaker 1: website that's fw thinking dot com. You can read our
Speaker 1: blogs there, you can watch the video series, you can
Speaker 1: listen to more episodes of the podcast. You can join
Speaker 1: us on our social media, and you can tell us
Speaker 1: how we all need to go attend a quantum mechanics
Speaker 1: lecture to make sure that we know what we're talking about.
Speaker 1: I am fairly confident, but then I'm also tired. But
Speaker 1: we will all talk to you again, maybe in the past.
Speaker 1: For more on this topic in the future of technology,
Speaker 1: visit forward Think dot com problem brought to you by Toyota.
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