Scientific American turned down my original article, so I posted it to Helium as the first article in the section under the title: “How to Create a Faster than Light Communications System between Earth and Mars”. Helium later changed the title of this section to: “After Einstein: Faster than the speed of light”. But I am now proud to say my initial hypothesis has been experimentally proven. And in a twist of fate, Scientific American picked up the story where scientists at Geneva in Switzerland performed my experiment and it worked. I suppose Scientific American didn’t like to publish thought experiments.
The speed of light has a long tradition of thought experiments, which first started with Einstein himself at the age of 16, in which he devises one entitled “chasing a beam of light”. In my original article, I use a thought experiment to build a telegraph system between Earth and Mars, to illustrate both “how to” overcome the speed of light and explain why we could.
In 1935, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen again used a thought experiment in their EPR paper to illustrate that quantum mechanics wasn’t a complete theory. The EPR paper was intended to be a major set-back to quantum mechanics, because they illustrated a paradox in quantum mechanics which allowed information to travel faster than the speed of light.
Then in 1964, John Bell expounded upon the EPR paradox in yet another thought experiment to prove that either quantum mechanics or local realism is wrong. And a series of experiments over the next 43 years tested Bell’s inequality proving that local realism was in fact wrong, thus opening the door to faster than light communications.
In 1978, John Archibald Wheeler pushed that door opened a little wider, when he devised a version of the double slit experiment known as the delayed choice. In the delayed choice experiment, something really strange happens, something that looked like faster than light communications. Wheeler found that when he moved his detector far away; so far in fact, that light should have already behaved like a wave; the photons knew it and behaved like particles, and for that to happen local realism was violated.
The basis of my original thought experiment used dual Wheeler apparatus as sender and receiver for a faster than light communications system. It had one technical problem called the No Communications Theorem which shows that information cannot be sent faster than light.
However, the key breakthrough that led to my hypothesis was realizing that the No Communications Theorem is not violated, because a single quantum state spans the distance from one end of the apparatus to the other. This is why John Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment worked in the first place, both entangled particles at both ends of his apparatus share the same quantum state, it is as if both ends are in the same macroscopic locality. This is why the Geneva scientist’s experiment worked as well, the entangled particles at both ends of their communications systems are also in the same macroscopic locality.
In my original thought experiment I employed a technique that Einstein also used called, “pushing it to the ridiculous”. By expanding the distance of John Wheelers’ screen and detector to occupy the distance between Earth and Mars I highlight my hypothesis that when entangled particles share the same macroscopic locality the distance between them doesn’t matter.
