Rants from the Silver Fox

Welcome to the sporadic rants of the Silver Fox.

Monday, October 7, 2013

Not forgetting Ted and Carol

This post is about quantum entanglement and related matters. But it may not appear to be at first. We begin with a diversion, allowing us to view the topic from a different angle.

To those familiar with Unix/Linux (Ixux) computing, the use of an aliased folder is almost second nature. Yes, I do know that Windows has shortcuts that are at least similar but I'll stay with the Ixux setting.

Now any folder, alias or not, has properties. These include contents and location, e.g. in a folder structured hierarchy.

The base folder and its alias have the same contents, different location - putting it crudely.

And so I read with interest in a recent issue of New Scientist how Alice had (putting it into a crude summary) a beam of light and another entangled beam, which she gave to Bob, thereby providing for secure quantum entangled communication. Then the entanglement was apparently 'broken' yet it was found that the two (shall we now call them 'separate') beams still mirrored each other with higher than classical probability. A puzzle.

Not so, I thought, because I use the Ixux alias folder analogy. (See ... it WAS related).

Let's suppose that we detect crudely and so we are sometimes dealing with a particle and sometimes with an 'alias' and because we are focussing on some of the properties (like folder contents) we view things incorrectly. Let's suppose that aliases are created under some situations. Say the classic dual gate where we get either two-particle interference or one particle measurement at one gate. What if our set-up results is an alias being formed. Here we have an opportunity to say it is the 'same' particle (the folder contents are the same) with differences between its 'instances' (the folder location is different). Our actions trigger the alias formation so I am happy to let complementarity stay if you like.

So we do not have two entangled particles at all. We have some mixture of zero to 1 particles with 0 to many aliases.

So Alice and Bob, in their particular setup, possibly created TWO aliases. No matter which of the three - actual particle and 2 aliases - you take, entanglement is demonstrated. Now the glitch comes when they think they have destroyed the entanglement but have in fact only decommissioned ONE of the aliases. As there remains the original and one alias, entanglement properties are still detected.

Simple.

The challenge then would be to work out how we (a) distinguish a particle from its alias and (b) determine the rules that lead to the creation and destruction of one or more aliases. The philosophers can have another set of field days...

I look forward to seeing the results.