006: Phone
I was reading an inspiring article recently. It was about the creation of a Quantum Internet prototype being created between Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory. It’s being promoted as an unhackable network that can send information faster than the speed of light.¹ The principles are a little difficult to understand, but I will try to explain it based on my limited understanding.
So basically, a laser shoots out a blue high-energy photon that hits a crystal, that creates a pair of two red low-energy photons that are quantumly entangled. On a practical level, that means that if you tickle one of the pair, the other particle will giggle. Moving on. Next, one particle is then sent far away using a fiber-optic cable, while the other is kept. The retained particle is slowed down by a room temperature tube full of rubidium fog, so that the two entangled particles reach their destinations at the same time.¹
Now a new photon is sent through a polarizer to turn it into a qubit (a quantum bit of information). The retained photon of the entangled pair and the qubit photon are both shot into a beam splitter. The result is some weird quantum three-way, whereby all the photons are entangled. The byproduct of the threesome is that the qubit data mixed with the retained photon is now magically teleported to the photon that was sent away.¹ At least that’s how I understand it.
“The basic idea of quantum entanglement is that two particles can be intimately linked to each other even if separated by billions of light-years of space; a change induced in one will affect the other.”² So what if at a time in the future, you could make the particles you need from quantum foam in two different locations at the same time, such that they’re already entangled. Imagine if the characteristics that describe how to make an entangled particle could be written out as a long numerical sequence. This would now become your cosmic phone number. It’s likely that there are multiple ways to create an entangled particle, thus there could be multiple unique phone numbers.
If you could simply “just make particles” with the amount of difficulty it takes to say microwave a burrito, then this would be mechanically realistic. The duration of the particles would not be particularly important. On demand entanglement could facilitate the ability to place a call from anywhere in the known universe to anywhere else, instantaneously.
Today’s communications at near the speed of light allow us to send and receive information from the other side of the globe, nearly instantaneously. However, when communicating with another planet, like a rover on the surface of Mars, the limits of the speed of light become more obvious. In the Star Wars universe, it’s routine for there to be two-way holographic communications from the core of the galaxy to say its outer rim. If you observe the speed of light as the cosmic speed limit, then such communications would take many, many thousands of years, one-way. On demand entanglement would allow for the creation of a “Star Wars” space phone.
References:
Hurley, Dan. (2020). The Quantum Internet will blow your mind. Here’s what it will look like. Discover Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/the-quantum-internet-will-blow-your-mind-heres-what-it-will-look-like?
Emspak, Jesse. (2016). Quantum Entanglement: Love on a Subatomic Scale. Space.com. Retrieved from http://www.space.com/31933-quantum-entanglement-action-at-a-distance.html.