73 réponses à ce sujet

[skywalker993]

Okay, so when I was playing through MassEffect2 and had EDI explain the QEC (Quantum Entanglement Communicator) to me, I thought, "Sweet, that's a freaking cool idea. That would be amazing. I love how well thought-out the science fiction of Mass Effect is."
Then today I was watching an episode of ABC's show FlashFoward. One of the scientists trying to figure out why everyone's consciousnesses suddenly jumped into the future was using an equation that dealt with creating a QED (Quantum Entanglement Device). I was like, "Hey, that's the same term from Mass Effect 2. I'm gonna Wiki that ****." And BAM, apparently it's not science fiction, but science real, and the theory and observations surrounding it have been around since 1935. People like Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen carried out experiments in which a particle's quantum properties were altered by manipulating a corresponding (or 'entangled') particle. This alteration was unaffected by the distance between particles or the time required for other phenomena (such as gravity, energy transfer, light emission) to travel; it was called a non-local correlation. Einstein suggested that future mathematicians would discover there was a simple error in these calculations, but apparently the theory has been proven multiple times since then.
My dad (who majored in physics before going to med school) used to get frustrated when I would watch/read Star Wars or Stargate SG-1 or play KOTOR. He would say to me, "You're wasting your time on poorly-written fantasy. Science-real is so much more amazing and beautiful than science-fiction." I don't know about poorly-written, but I guess he was more right than I gave him credit for. Oops, prepositions aren't things I usually end sentences with.
I'm going to have to read more about this stuff, but it sounds amazing!

[Rajorn]

It just goes to show how much thought, effort and research goes into Biowares games.

[Sigma Tauri]

Heh, I doubt that.

[vhatever]

QE is wierd stuff. I remember reading about it in one ofthe margins of a physics text way back when. But we never touched on it in class in over 2 years of physics courses. I think it factors heavily into many variations of the big bang theory, where one of the pairs of photons essentially formed a different unvierse, and we formed our current one. It's also where the multi universe concept comes from.

[kalliba]

QE reminds me of the ansible device in some of Ursula K McGuinn's stories, where you could write on a tablet device on one planet and the ansible on another planet would receive instantaneously.

[WhiteRobes]

Actually,

Quantum Entanglement as stated in Mass Effect is wrong.

Quantum Entanglement cannot transmit information faster than the speed of light. That would be a violation of the theory of relativity. All we know that the states of the two particles are entangled.

It's sort of like you cut a coin in the middle, giving you a side with heads and a side with tails. Then you separate them, without knowing what they are.

Sort of like pack them into a box each, and then separate the boxes. When someone opens the box, when they see a tails, they know the other box contains a heads. But you cannot influence the fact that the other person will have heads or tails, that is a random occurrence.

For Further reading.

http://plato.stanfor...entries/qt-epr/

http://plato.stanfor...es/qt-entangle/



Also, to clear up a few issues,

Einstein, Poldosky and Rosen did NOT do experiments, they presented the EPR argument [about entanglement] as a proof of the incompleteness of Quantum Theory. In 1962, John Stewart Bell showed that if Quantum Mechanics is true, then the EPR argument has some fundamentally counterintuitive consequences, which can be experimentally determined. This experiment was first done by Alain Aspect in circa. 1970, and showed that Quantum Mechanics is right.

Secondly, No Entanglement has nothing to do with multiple universes or anything of that sort. It is a simple fact of quantum mechanics, which does not require nor is better explained by calling upon Everett's interpretation. [Which is, to most physicist, quite useless]

[ImperialOperative]

Science fiction sparks the imagination, and imagination is very important for "science real."

[ccconda]

Ryanratto wrote...

It just goes to show how much thought, effort and research goes into Biowares games.

i wish there was a bj emoticon 

[Wildecker]

WhiteRobes wrote...

Actually,
Quantum Entanglement as stated in Mass Effect is wrong.
Quantum Entanglement cannot transmit information faster than the speed of light. That would be a violation of the theory of relativity. All we know that the states of the two particles are entangled.
It's sort of like you cut a coin in the middle, giving you a side with heads and a side with tails. Then you separate them, without knowing what they are.
Sort of like pack them into a box each, and then separate the boxes. When someone opens the box, when they see a tails, they know the other box contains a heads. But you cannot influence the fact that the other person will have heads or tails, that is a random occurrence.
For Further reading.
http://plato.stanfor...entries/qt-epr/
http://plato.stanfor...es/qt-entangle/

Well, Bioware do  not seem to be the only ones who misunderstand.
http://www.nature.co...ll/454831a.html
http://www.nature.co...ature07121.html

[Chaoswind]

WhiteRobes wrote...

Actually,
Quantum Entanglement as stated in Mass Effect is wrong.
Quantum Entanglement cannot transmit information faster than the speed of light. That would be a violation of the theory of relativity. All we know that the states of the two particles are entangled.
It's sort of like you cut a coin in the middle, giving you a side with heads and a side with tails. Then you separate them, without knowing what they are.
Sort of like pack them into a box each, and then separate the boxes. When someone opens the box, when they see a tails, they know the other box contains a heads. But you cannot influence the fact that the other person will have heads or tails, that is a random occurrence.
For Further reading.
http://plato.stanfor...entries/qt-epr/
http://plato.stanfor...es/qt-entangle/

Also, to clear up a few issues,
Einstein, Poldosky and Rosen did NOT do experiments, they presented the EPR argument [about entanglement] as a proof of the incompleteness of Quantum Theory. In 1962, John Stewart Bell showed that if Quantum Mechanics is true, then the EPR argument has some fundamentally counterintuitive consequences, which can be experimentally determined. This experiment was first done by Alain Aspect in circa. 1970, and showed that Quantum Mechanics is right.
Secondly, No Entanglement has nothing to do with multiple universes or anything of that sort. It is a simple fact of quantum mechanics, which does not require nor is better explained by calling upon Everett's interpretation. [Which is, to most physicist, quite useless]

Thanks!!! didn't know how to explain this and be coherent... is 1AM here after a day of work... so my brain is fried...

[Phaedra Sanguine]

Well, right or wrong, I think the word "fiction" sort of gives them the right to be wrong.

[Ziggy]

I just finished undergrad with physics and mathematical physics majors and there is nothing weirder or more interesting than quantum physics and relativity. We see the world big and slow - look at stuff that's really small or really fast and things get seriously weird: particles become unlocalized probability waves and can go though walls, parents can be younger than their kids and all sorts of stuff we take for granted just aint so.

Also weird is how the majority of people in the physics department are so boring.

[Ecael]

WhiteRobes explained it pretty well, so I'll just add this:

BioWare's writers are not theoretical physics majors (at least, not all of them anyway). When they write Sci-Fi they take any big, official looking phrase from science or technology and try to mold them into seemingly impossible discoveries and inventions.

The actual understanding of those subjects are shallow, at best - but it's still better than making up entirely new words that require further explanation. It's the reason why things like the Disabled Collector Vessel have over 9000 firewalls - it doesn't make sense, but at least you can relate to it somehow.

If you want to delve into theoretical physics, Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku is a good place to start. He doesn't mention Mass Effect (he uses Star Trek and Star Wars, mostly), but there are several concepts in there that definitely apply to it. He explains each one in layman's terms and uses effective analogies, making it a good read for anyone who has taken at least high school science, but wants to know what the distant future holds.

[Chuvvy]

TL;DR



No **** it's real. It's an Einstein theory if I remember correctly.

[Lord_Tirian]

Wildecker wrote...
Well, Bioware do  not seem to be the only ones who misunderstand.
http://www.nature.co...ll/454831a.html
http://www.nature.co...ature07121.html

Erm... no. They're looking at nonlocality and a possible speed of wave-function collapses. These things do not transmit information in the classical sense and leave causality intact.

The problem with White Robes' explanation is that the image of two boxes or a split coin suggests that the entangled particles knew what the other one was all the time - however, this is not the case.

If you look at one of the entangled particles, it only becomes what it is at the moment of observation and "forces" the other one into the opposite state. They're measuring how fast this "forcing" happens - but the collapse is still random (i.e. you cannot make it go into a specific state to make the other end go into a state you want to transmit information) and can hence transmit no information (as far as we know).

[Phaedra Sanguine]

Paxcorpus wrote...

Well, right or wrong, I think the word "fiction" sort of gives them the right to be wrong.

[sorrowandsadness]

So, Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.

[Lord_Tirian]

sorrowandsadness wrote...

So, Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.

Lame physics jokes? I raise you a:

"What's a physicist's favourite bar?"
"Obvious: h-bar!"

[WhiteRobes]

Lord_Tirian wrote...

Wildecker wrote...
Well,
Bioware do  not seem to be the only ones who misunderstand.
http://www.nature.co...ll/454831a.html
http://www.nature.co...ature07121.html

Erm...
no. They're looking at nonlocality and a possible speed of
wave-function collapses. These things do not transmit information in the
classical sense and leave causality intact.

The problem with
White Robes' explanation is that the image of two boxes or a split coin
suggests that the entangled particles knew what the other one was all
the time - however, this is not the case.

If you look at one of
the entangled particles, it only becomes what it is at the moment of
observation and "forces" the other one into the opposite state. They're
measuring how fast this "forcing" happens - but the collapse is still
random (i.e. you cannot make it go into a specific state to make the
other end go into a state you want to transmit information) and can
hence transmit no information (as far as we know).

Arguably, yes.
But I feel Quantum Entanglement is complicated enough without adding to it the problems with realism.
One could argue that the particles themselves do not exist untill measured, and do not exist after being measured.
And naively, the "particle" does not know anything, it is the oberver which identifies a state as "up" or "down", [if speaking of spin], and I don't think the problem arises at all. The idea that the particle does not have a definite state implies that we do not know what that state is, and whether the particle "knows" or not leads to issues of realism. Ideally one could only say that the state does not exist before measurement, and talking about the particle itself knowing its state is [to me] problematic.

Modifié par WhiteRobes, 10 avril 2010 - 09:34 .

[WhiteRobes]

Lord_Tirian wrote...

sorrowandsadness wrote...

So, Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.

Lame physics jokes? I raise you a:

"What's a physicist's favourite bar?"
"Obvious: h-bar!"

On the subject of bars,

"A neutron walked into a bar and asked, "How much for a drink?" The
bartender replied, "For you, no charge." "

[Shadowomega23]

Just FYI back in 2009 the Quantum Entanglement was actually tested, and they did succed in having one pair of perfectly matching Atoms. When they manipulated one the other which was meters away, instantly took on the same change that occured to the other. Wish I still had the link to the article but no longer have it. But my guess is caused by something that can't be viewed in any way it is likely relativity doesn't effect it. Further more we know there are things that go faster then light when looking at radiation specrums of some black holes. As we know black holes suck in everything including light, so the only thing able to pass out of it would be things with no mass what so ever and at high speeds.

[vhatever]

Whiterobes, I don't think you know what the hell you are talking about.



QE is "faster" than light, sort of. There is no "travel time" involved, however. Think of it more as magnetic field of two things always interracting, when the magnetic sphere is actually more of a "heisenberg uncertainty sphere".

[Lord_Tirian]

vhatever wrote...

QE is "faster" than light, sort of. There is no "travel time" involved, however. Think of it more as magnetic field of two things always interracting, when the magnetic sphere is actually more of a "heisenberg uncertainty sphere".

Huh? He never talked about travel time... and what exactly is a "Heisenberg uncertainty sphere" supposed to be!?

[vhatever]

Lord_Tirian wrote...

vhatever wrote...

QE is "faster" than light, sort of. There is no "travel time" involved, however. Think of it more as magnetic field of two things always interracting, when the magnetic sphere is actually more of a "heisenberg uncertainty sphere".

Huh? He never talked about travel time... and what exactly is a "Heisenberg uncertainty sphere" supposed to be!?

Huh?  how does something move "faster than light" without traveling at all?  He even used it as a argument how the instantaneous nature being described  "is not possible". And I quote: "QE cannot transmit information faster than the speed of light". And it's competely wrong.  Heisenberg is a reference to his uncertainty principle. That should be obvious.

Modifié par vhatever, 10 avril 2010 - 10:59 .

[Nostradamoose]

Lord_Tirian wrote...

sorrowandsadness wrote...

So, Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.

Lame physics jokes? I raise you a:

"What's a physicist's favourite bar?"
"Obvious: h-bar!"

Biochemists may not have jokes, but they have pick-up lines.
"I wish I was DNA-helicase so that I could unzip your genes" Say it out loud and you'll understand it.