Quantum speed limit measured: 4 orders of magnitude higher thanspeed of light!

On Thursday, July 3, 2014 12:47:38 AM UTC-6, Yousuf Khan wrote:

Some Chinese scientists have measured the speed of quantum
entanglements, and it's at least 10,000 times faster than lightspeed!

Theoretically, it should be infinite, and it's already been seen by experiment
to be significantly faster than the speed of light.

So this experiment, in itself, doesn't challenge the theory of relativity any
more than it has *already* been challenged since the first time the EPR
experiment was done.

Does quantum entanglement mean that relativity is dead?

No, for two reasons.

The effects predicted by special relativity (and for that matter, general
relativity) still do in fact take place in nature.

Quantum entanglement can't be used to transmit any information that we would
like to transmit - although it certainly appears to transmit information that
Nature needs for its own bookkeeping - so although it works faster than light,
it can't be used to undermine causality and send back tomorrow's winning
lottery numbers.

The preferred explanation for this is that reality is "nonlocal". Personally, I
have a hard time wrapping my head around that; I don't know what that means.

But there's an alternative way to explain this. Maybe Nature is using an X
mechanism to transmit information faster than light that we will someday learn
to exploit. But when we do, all our FTL journeys or messages will travel
forwards in time, as viewed from one special reference frame.

Ordinary physics is relative - but the extra FTL layer defines an absolute
reference frame.

That seems strange and contrived, which is why physicists will tend to say it's
not proper to consider it until evidence comes up - but it's available to
science-fiction writers, and it's also available to those of us with a
pedestrian mentality who are uncomfortable with a Nature that seems to be
"stranger than we can imagine", in the words of J. B. S. Haldane.

John Savard