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Quantum Weirdness !? (geek warning)
Tobes' "Spooky action at a distance quantum weirdness headbands" got me thinking. Some of you guys seem (I say seem) to know something about this.
Maybe you can help me.

As I understand it "action at a distance" is a phenomenon predicted by quantum mechanics and verified by experiment. It involves a pair of particles (say photons) produced by the same event (say a proton clobbers a neutron) and fly apart at light speed. They are said to be "entangled particles". If one of the photons is interacted with its "probability wave collapses" and it declares itself as a particle with a few fundamental properties any one of which (and only one) can be measured. At the same instant it's entangled pair particle will experience a similar "probability wave collapse" and declare itself in a complementary condition to its pair. The spooky thing about it (Albert Einstein's word) is that there is no way for one particle to communicate with the other. Relativity says instantaneous communication over any distance is impossible.

However Relativity also tells us that as anything approaches the speed of light it's time slows and at the speed of light time stands still. A implication of this is that photons do not experience the passage of time. if you hold your hand out and catch a photon from the sun every geek knows that that photon has taken eight and a quarter minutes to get here so the photon is eight and a quarter minutes old. To the photon however no time has passed. It experiences its whole life path as an instant. Its beginning is the same moment as its end. If you could ask a photon what it is it would not say it was a point it would say it was a line, or rather in fact I think it would experience space as two dimensional and it would say it was a point in a two dimensional picture that includes all space. The point is that the photon IS a point smeared along its life path.

So those two entangled particles in their (equally valid) view of the situation are in fact still touching when their probability wave collapses so communication IS possible.

What's wrong with that notion? Don't all speak at once.
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'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss, AAI 2009

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