Got Your Note - Before You Sent It

be a problem. Have you listened to our previous podcast, you probably heard us talk about how we've really kind of cracked the speed nut as far as communication goes here on Earth. It's more of a throughput or bandwidth issue than a speed issue. But when you start looking beyond Earth, we still have that speed problem, don't we,

and cross long enough distances? Yeah. Yeah, And we have a fairly recent example of how this can become a challenge with the the landing of the Curiosity Rover on Mars that happened in right, I was I remember where the night this happened, So do I remember I was covering it live for this Weekend Tech. Yeah. I was just blogging about it on Facebook basically, and uh, and I was watching the live stream and uh, which is

interesting because there were two delays going on. There was the delay between what was happening on Mars and the people at the actually imported at the NASA JPL finding out about it, and then the delay of course between them and then me at my house getting the stream. Um and so. But when you think about that, it's

interesting because those are totally two totally different scales of delay. UM. One is a very small delay based on throughput, like how long does it take the bits of data from their transmission to get to my computer so I can watch them as pixels on my screen? Um? And And that's throughput, like we talked about last time. Yeah, it's nothing. It's is trying to squeeze that data into the wire

fast enough and reconstituted on the other end here. But the other one has a really serious, significant physical limit, yes, um. And what is that limit? Well, it's the speed of light in a vacuum, uh so, which is very fast but quite fair. It's like a thousand miles miles per second basically, and we think of it as the universal speed limit, although more on that later. Yeah, well, well we can say that now, right, that's a good thing

to start with. Actually, um uh Einstein's theory of relativity says that essentially nothing with mask can go the speed of light or faster. It's it's an absolute limit. And the reasons for that are multiple, but basically it would take infinite energy and and and by the time that you worked up to it, you would have infinite mass and everything would be messy. Ye yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. It would be impossible to propel yourself because you anyway, yeah, good,

good way to put that. Um. So uh so we think that's the universal speed limit. Um. Well that and that's what resulted in the fact that it took us so several minutes to learn the right, That's what I

was getting too. So we're here on Earth and the people at I realized, the people of the Jet Propulsion Lab didn't know for about fourteen minutes whether the lander had succeeded or whether it was you know, like Martians had captured it and taken it for their purposes, right, um or what We just had no idea, And so

here it was just an issue of suspense um. Because the transmission traveling at the speed of light at the maximum speed, takes that long to get to us, and we just don't know, but this could actually be a real problem for exploring other planets, right, what if you needed to control something in real time on another planet that the Mars landing was relatively simple, I mean, it's we were pretty sure that we weren't crashing it and attending any mountains, you know, and that they were we

were pretty sure there were no giant space lugs out

there ready to eat it, so it was okay. But you know, but if there have been space lugs, or if there the planet's surface had been treacherous enough where for some reason we thought a human being would be more capable of piloting that ship rather than a very sophisticated computer than obviously, that would have been an issue because there would have been a very long delay from the time when the the lander would be able to relay that information to you, and then just as long

for your commands to go back to the land there so that it could adjust in any way. And by that time conditions will have changed dramatically. I mean you're talking half an hour almost, right. So this is a weird case where it's not really a problem here on Earth, but when you start exploring the galaxy, the speed of light just isn't fast enough, so we need something faster we do. Is there a way to talk to the curiosity lander faster than light can get from one place

to another. Well, before I give my answer, I think we should probably talk about some some potential ways that according to give my answer at the end, According to star Trek, there these there, there's the subspace that's kind of like a parallel dimension that these are these particles called called tetrians are floating around, and these these are really really random momentum particles, and when they bleed over into real space, all kinds of wacky stuff happens that

makes for really compelling television hopefully. Um right, but but but but as far as I can tell, this is not this is not one of those things. It's really a plot device more so, right, It's than any kind of physics. It's say, how do we get around this fundamental problem. Let's explain it away with something that doesn't really particles, and then we just say, oh, they were discovered in two so that way no one can complain about the fact that these things don't seem to exist. Well,

the Vulcans have been using them since Earth Year. The vulcans. Are they universes hipsters? We have established that, you know, they were. They were using tetrion particles before it was cool. They even have the little hipster bangs like they They however, have already moved beyond the ironic mustache. Yes, yes, clearly.

You know. Well, it's funny that the difference essentially between science fiction and fantasy is that the magic things in fantasy are designed to sound like religious items, and the magic things in sci fire design to sound like things from a science text book. Well, and of course, and and tetrion is really close like obelisks of you know, like it's just yeah, well but tetrians is a really

close word to take on. Yeahh there we go. Well, so some people do think that maybe take eons could help us talk faster than light, get information from one place to another at a superliminal speeds. So so what what is a tack eon? Well, attack eon is partically Oh yeah, I want to emphasize this, a hypothetical particle

that means and that's different from a theoretical particle. Um theoretical would be one that that's integral, like to some theory that yeah, Higgs integral to some theory that we have good evidence for hypothetical just means like we can posit it and we can sort of talk about it,

but there's no evidence for it. You can justify it in the sense of creating a mathematical expression that that where it makes sense, but there's no other evidence whatsoever, right, um, And and even the first thing you said, the making sense math mathematically is questionable, but we can talk about that in a second. So tacons are super liminal particles, and that means that they always go faster than the

speedy We cannot approach the speed of light. They cannot slow down that much because it would take again an infinite amount of energy, right to slow them down. So you sort of imagine, imagine a big X shape, and we and all the matter that we know about are

in the bottom triangle of that X. Right. We live down there, and as we and the where the exes where the triangles intersect, basically the cross of the X, that's the speed of light, alright, So it's the center of the X, right, And as we approach that, going up towards the top of our little triangle, things start getting wonky. Of course, you know that we have time dilation and and crazy stuff, and we can't get to the apex of that triangle. Um. They live in the

top triangle. Tachyons are up there, and they're basically an inverse of everything that we experience in the bottom half. As they approach the speed of light going down towards that cross, things get wonky. It stops making sense. But they travel faster than light. If they exist, it's possible. Some people think that, well, could we harness them to communicate faster than light? And there are some serious objections

I think to this hypothesis. UM. One of them, of course, is, as we said, we have no proof that these things even exist, so we're talking hypothetically anyway, and that should always be noted as a major objection. UM. But number two, Uh, you would bring on causality paradoxes if you could really use what some some physicists described this device as the

tachyonic anti telephone. Right. It's a device that allows you to call the past as the person who receives your message would get it before you had actually sent it, right, And and that's actually what Einstein's theory relativity says. Right, If if you go faster than the speed of light. What it seems to imply is that you would start going backward in time, which doesn't make any sense at all, at least as far as we can understand, right, And

so that's another major objection. Uh. Also from what I've read, if you if you look at tach eons um, the math is really strange to to justify them. So again using relativistic equations, what it looks like is that in order for attack on to have actual real energy, it has to have imaginary mass. Right. I remember seeing an example being it would have a mass of the square root of negative one. That's exactly right. Imaginary, an imaginary

number hurt my brain. I'll tell you what's hurting my brain. So Joe was talking about this x where all of our matters on the bottom and all the tachyon stuffs on the top. Who lives on the left and right? I think that was the new Trinos from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon series. Okay, all right, well, and the street Sharks they're over on the right. I'm back up. I'm back up to speed now, but I've been lost since then, so sorry. Yeah, relativistic street sharks carry our

data faster than light, and then we've done it. No. But so basically the tachy on business is really complex and definitely above my head. But from everything I've read, uh, people who know what they're talking about don't seem to

give this much credibility. They don't think you can do it. Um. And one major problem is again you mentioned the two different parts of the X. Well, they're two different parts of the X. So even if these things exist up there, there's no way to know that we can mess with them. There may be no way to interact with that at all. They could be um what what physicists would call free particles, meaning that they just don't interact with our type of matter. Right. Well, uh,

I have another I have another little hypothetical thing. This one's this one, This one's very goofy. Yeah, alright, So let's say that Lauren, that you are in a you're living in a space station, like yeah, you know what You're you're building robots to eventually take over the planet around which your space station orbits. I've asked you not to talk about this in public. I'm sorry which planet it would be for the for this argument's sake, we'll say Earth, this is all a certain ringed planet. It

was all documented in the movie Determinators. Um. And then let's say that I'm on a space station that's five d light years away. Good okay, and and so no, that's not what I mean. This show is going to have one less host, one fewer host in a minute. Um. So let's say that that I want to send I want to get Lauren's attention, but I'm five hundred light years away. If I were to send a message uh from our respective points of view, that would take five hundred years at light speed to go from my my

station to her station. And in five dred years, Lauren might not care so much that I found her old cell phone that left in the station. That that that that Facebook status update would not be critical. So let's say that I've devised an ingenious plan. I have a bell installed in Lauren's space station, and attached to that bell is a string that's five hundred light years long, and the end of that string is inside my space station.

And so I just grabbed the end of that string and I give it a really good tug, so they will ring the bell inside Lawrence space Station. Now, wouldn't that bell ring the instant I pull that string. Thus I am able to communicate. I'm able to get some form of information across instantaneously across five hundred light years

without having to send a message all the way through. No, And that would actually be way way slower than a normal and light speed because we're talking about sound speed, right. A radio transmission travels at the speed of light. A wave propagation along a string travels at the speed of sound. Right, Yeah, you're talking about the same thing. Might even be slower than the SPEEDI that's essentially string speed of sound, speed of push or speed of poll is the way a

lot of people say it. But it's the speed of sound through that particular medium. So in other words, uh, like, if we were to change that and instead of it being a string, it's it's a pole. So it's like a metal pole that stretches five hundred light years and I start to move my end of the metal pole, it would actually take longer than five years for that to propagate across the entire length of the pole, so that the end that's in Lawrence Space Station would start

to wiggle. This seems counterintuitive, but it's completely true. It's depending completely upon that that that vibration propagating across, that wave propagating across and you can see this. There's some great videos on YouTube where people have a slinky and they're holding one end of the slinky up vertically like you know, so that the bottom of the slinky is off the ground, and then they let go of the top of the slinky and you you watch it in

slow motion. You can actually watch the wave propagate across the length of the slinky. Now, the top of the slinky starts falling towards the ground according to gravity, pulling it down. It's accelerating at at the speed of gravity, but the bottom of the slinky remains in place until

that wave propagates acrocess. So yeah, you'll actually see like the top of the slinky is falling to the ground and the bottom of the slinky is still there until that wave propagates, and then the bottom of the slinky starts to fall. So this is now on on Earth. This is so quick that we barely notice it. Right, You're going an incredibly long slinky for us to notice this when it's not slowed down to super slow speeds,

but when you're talking about light years. That's a huge distance, and it that at that scale this stuff really matters. And so that's why you could not just have, you know, two cans and a piece of string and and just chat across the emptiness of space that way. Expect an answer anytime soon. Anyway, So we've established that Tachian is probably a no go treehouse telephone, not as good as what NASA uses. I tried really hard. So what else

is left? Are there other ways people might think we might be able to go faster than what we've got, Well, there's there's here's another theoretical sort of well hypothetical sort of thing, but it falls apart once you do the math.

I don't have a whole lot of detail on it, but I just want to kind of give a quick shout out to the Casimir effect, which is a small but measurable force that exists between two uncharged conducting plates when they are incredibly close together, and photons that travel across the gap between these two uncharged conducting plates go faster than the speed of light by a very very very small amount. Yeah, so from based upon measurements, the

photons are actually moving faster than what photons can move. However, once and this is all theory, by the way, but but theoretical investigations into this effect to see if this would be a way to scale this in any form of communication have turned out to show that there's nothing there. You can't you can't communicate this way um. Then there's quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement. Speaking of photons, yeah, this photons are are one thing you could do. You could do

with polarization of photons. But quantum entanglement. This is the idea that before we get into this, we should say that this is the big one, right, this is the big kuna. This is the one that people think, they really do think maybe there's this one, this one in quantum tunneling. These are the two big ones. They're they're they're actually talking about setting up a setting up a quantum entanglement experiment on the International Space Station. Yeah, so

let's let's get into ye. So, so quantum entanglement brings in some problems with quantum theory, I say problems, Einstein said problems. Einstein found this idea of quantum entanglement to be really problematic and scary, spooky, yeah, you actually call it spooky action at a distance. Well, so, quantum entanglement is this concept where you get these two sub atomic particles and they are entangled in such a way that the behavior of one will tell you something about the

behavior of the other. So necessarily, like you definitely know when they're entangled. Yeah, well, not definitely, notily um, because it gets a little complicated. Uh, because Heisenberg's uncertainty principle tells us that we cannot know everything about we can we can draw a conclusion about something about the other particle's behavior. So, for example, we might talk about the spin of a subatomic particle. Now, spin can be across

different axis. It's not just across one axis. But for the purposes of this, I'm just going to say we're just gonna look at one axis of spin to make this a simple example. But please keep in mind that this is just as simplified example. It's not how the work. Right. So, let's say that you've got two subatomic particles that are entangled, and one of them is spinning along an axis in

a clockwise direction relative to your position. So when you observe it, it looks like it's moving in a clockwise position. Remember everything's relative. Well, then the other particle, even though you haven't even looked at it, you will know that because the two are entangled, the other particle is going to spin in the opposite direction of the first one.

So it's spinning in a counterclockwise or witter Shan's direction based upon your uh, your perspective, read your Shakespeare Joe uh so, so yeah, it's it's clockwise and and and counterclockwise. Or as one of my uh one of my my directions once said for a fan that I was trying to build anti counter clockwise would be the first one, and clockwise would be whatever. So we have one starring clockwise, the other one string counterclockwise. By observing one, you know

what the other one is doing. But at that point that entanglement breaks down. They are no the behavior of one is no longer dependent or entangled with the behavior of the other. They're not to be right because you've observed it. That system is broken down. That's one of the big challenges, or really the big barrier to quantum

entanglement is that you cannot actually pass information through entanglement. Well, wait a minute, I don't know if we said for sure, why this would be faster than the speed of light, And that would be because you can take these things really far apart, right, you can. You could take one sub atomic particle to the other end of the universe, you know, in theory, and once once even tangled them,

they're they're entangled, right, It's non localized. It's the locality is not an issue at least well locality as we understand it in the sense of space. In the quantum world, locality means lots of different stuff. So that's it's one of those things where part of the problem is just the vocabulary and the way that the quantum physicists use it as opposed to people like me. It could be that these two quanta are actually right next to each other in a dimension that we can't even see. That.

That's one way of looking at it. Yes, so in the in the dimension of space, they could be very far apart. You could have one on the other side of Alpha Centauri, one here on Earth, and by observing the one here on Earth, you know what the one on Alpha Centauri, what what that one behavior of the one in Alpha Centauri was doing. So that's positing the transfer of information uh, instantaneous lee or Another thing I read was that they think maybe it goes at like

ten thousand times the speed of lighters. Yeah, that's what that's what one professor has come up with. Well recently, the Einstein Boris Podolski and Nathan Rosen all thought that this was that this was a terrible idea, that that it was clearly that the problem was that we just didn't understand enough about quantum theory and that this could

not be possible. They raised what was called well, now we do know different things, we do know more, but we know we know it's impossible for different reason, for a different reason than what they They came up with what was called the EPR paradox, which is essentially what I was saying, that you know, you cannot transmit information

faster than the speed of light. And in fact I saw a great example Karen Masters that Cornell has a has a little uh web page where she was answering questions about this sort of stuff, and she said, all right, now,

imagine this scenario. You've got two friends and they are an equal distance away from you on the other side of the galaxy, So ones on one direction, ones in the other direction, And before they left, you told them that you would send a beam of light uh to each of them, and the beam for one of them would be read and the beam for the other one would be blue, and you would send them both at

the exact same time. So you send those beams, and the one on one end of the galaxy ss red, so they know that the one on the other end of the galaxy is blue. Does that mean that they have received information faster than the speed of light in the answer is no, because they actually already had the information subluminally, because they learned about it before they even left Earth. That they haven't gained anything new here, and that there is no way to actually communicate real information

using this method. You all you can do is draw conclusions. So there's there's this barrier. It's it's an interesting phenomenon and phenomenon, I should say, and it would be really cool to learn are about it, but it does not look like there's any way to harness it to actually

communicate any information, right right right. It's it's not like a like a Morse code kind of thing where you write, no, you can you can look at a photon to learn a fact, but you can't send information for one thing, you cannot even manipulate those those quanta to do what you want. They what's happening is the quanta are in an unknown state and then you observe it, you learn the state. But at the same time that breaks down that entanglement. So you can't manipulate the state of the quanta.

I mean, you can manipulate the state like crazy if you're a politician. I mean, essentially, what you're saying is that the problem with quantum entanglement is you may be able to know things across a great distance really fast, even faster than light, but all you can do is just no a random outcome far away and you can't know everything. Yeah, so that's the other thing is that you're you're learning that it's changed. You can you can you know random outcome, but you can't get messages back

and forth exactly. And so yeah, it's not it's not communication, right. Maybe someday we'll learn some way of harnessing that. But it looks like it's a fundamental element of the universe. It's something that is just beyond our ability to to manipulate. Can I tell you, I'm really excited about all the email we're going to get about how we're totally misunderstanding this. Well, i'll be sure to afford it to you. Actually you're on that list, so you'll be able to see it yourself.

Let's move on to quantum tunneling. Excellent, because the tunneling, it's a quantum tunneling. Have you heard about that? What is that? What quantum dwarves do know? Is that what those quantum the quantum worms from tremors, you know, Oh, I know what you're talking about. But those were not quantum No, no, they were on far too great a scale to be on the quantum scale. Well, okay, just

tell me about your boring quantum tunneling. Sure will, so, all right, Now, when you get down to really super super super tiny scales like the nano scale, all right, and or the atomic scale, that's that's even better. So you get to the atomic scale, let's say you've got an electron traveling down a pathway. You don't really know exactly where the position of that electron is at any given moment. You really can just create sort of a sphere around the potential places where that electron could be

given its momentum. So you don't. You don't really know exactly where that electron is. That's my point, all right. So that sphere is a certain size, you have like a probability, a probability, there's a probability that could be at any on any point in that sphere. Now that sphere is approaching an electronic gate, so a transistor. So this is something that we'd see in a microprocessor, and in fact, quantum tunneling is something that microprocessor manufacturers have

to actually worry about. So it gets towards this gate. The gate is closed, which means that the electron should not pass through it. But if the gate is thin enough, so we're talking about a microprocessor that's got very very very tiny connections in order to pack as many transistors in there as possible. If the gate is thin enough, then that field where the electron possibly could be could overlap that gate and actually pass on to the other side.

And because the probability is there that the electron might be on the other side, sometimes it is on the other side, so it it's as if it has passed through the gate without actually passing through it. On one moment, it's on one side. On the next the next moments on the other side. Now, with microprocessors, this is a problem because if the gate is supposed to be closed and blocking off the electrons, and the electrons are passing through any then we don't want tron electron to be

on the other side. Yeah we've got you can get computer errors, you know, things that it's just not working properly because it cannot control the flow of electrons the way it needs to in order to run processes. So this is a real problem when it comes to micro architecture. This gets into a thing about matter, right that solid matter isn't really solid. Yeah there's more empty space, and yeah there's all that as well, but that's that's slightly different,

but an interesting idea. So the part about quantumunneling that gets too faster than light communication is that it appears that the electron can pass over a distance faster than a photon would be able to travel that same distance. So you know this this jump where it would go from one side of the gate to another side of the gate. It could do that at a speed that's faster than the speed of light. How is that possible?

Because an electron has mass. I see, that's a good question, and honestly the answer is really more like we probably it's probably another manifestation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, where to us it appears as if the electron is moving faster than the speed of light, when in reality it's not. But it's really just a probability issue more so than a right, it's more of a probability thing than a

than actual speed thing. But then you know, there are those who have said that you if you calculate it at these incredibly tiny distances. Remember this is we're talking the nano scale here, so very small sto nanometer is one billionth of a meter, so we're talking really really tiny at that scale. Uh, it's essentially that electron might move at what would be equivalent to four point seven times the speed of light. But again it's all this

probability and certainty stuff. It may not have anything to do with speed at all. It has to do with our understanding of of quantum mechanics. Well, yeah, I mean it would have to write because that would posit like we talked about earlier, that the electron would have to have infinite mass and infinite energy, right, So obviously that's not happening. And again most physicists are saying that there's even with this interesting phenomenon, there's no capacity here for

faster than like communication. So you know, we've been shooting down these things left and right. I think ultimately what the conclusion we come to is, as we understand the world to operate, as of right now, there is no faster than like communication opportunity out there. That's not to say that we won't find it later done the line, and that some discovery won't allow us to have this This what to us right now really does seem well,

it does seem impossible based on what we know. But I think we should point out that almost every really really cool innovation has come by people trying to do things that were said to be impossible, right, Yeah, Yeah, And and who knows what we'll know tomorrow? Yeah, who

knows what we'll know by the time this podcast goes live. Yeah, we'll get more of those emails, right, excellent, And if we're lucky, maybe we already received them because they were sent faster than light and they've traveled back in time to before we only they had gotten here just before we recorded, we could have prevented all that attacking on anti email server. Yeah, I think I've got my spam

filter blocking all tacky on messages. So yeah, all right, Well that that's a good discussion on fast and light communication. We're gonna wrap this sucker up. So guys, if you have any suggestions on topics we should tackle in future episodes of Forward Thinking, get in touch with us. Let's know, we've got an email address that's f W Thinking at discovery dot com. Or drop us a line on our website that's fw thinking dot com. You can read our blogs there, you can watch the video series, you can

listen to more episodes of the podcast. You can join us on our social media, and you can tell us how we all need to go attend a quantum mechanics lecture to make sure that we know what we're talking about. I am fairly confident, but then I'm also tired. But we will all talk to you again, maybe in the past. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward Think dot com problem brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places