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Politics : Foreign Policy Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Haim R. Branisteanu who wrote (8754)	8/15/2008 8:05:32 AM
From: dvdw©	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15987

meanwhile; Spooky Action At A Distance Proven - Red Letter Day For Physics Physicists at the University of Geneva achieved the weird result by creating a pair of 'entangled' photons, separating them, then sending them down a fibre optic cable to the Swiss villages of Satigny and Jussy, some 18 kilometres apart. The researchers found that when each photon reached its destination, it could instantly sense its twin's behaviour without any direct communication. The finding does not violate the laws of quantum mechanics, the theory that physicists use to describe the behaviour of very small systems. Rather, it shows just how quantum mechanics can defy everyday expectation, says Nicolas Gisin, the researcher who led the study. "Our experiment just puts the finger where it hurts," he says. The study is published in Nature. But the new experiment shows that direct communication between the photons (at least as we know it) is simply impossible. The team simultaneously measured several properties of both photons, such as phase, when they arrived at their villages and found that they did indeed have a spooky awareness of each other's behaviour. On the basis of their measurements, the team concluded that if the photons had communicated, they must have done so at least 100,000 times faster than the speed of light -- something nearly all physicists thought would be impossible. In other words, these photons cannot know about each other through any sort of normal exchange of information.