Quantum Leap: Patty and Cathy

December 4th, 2009 by Thomas Kennedy

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Guest author, Thomas Kennedy, features a twice-monthly series, Quantum Leap, wherein he guides readers through the fascinating world of quantum mechanics.  This is issue 003.

We’ve Broken the Law Regarding the Speed of Light

One of the constants that has governed the universe until fairly recently is that the speed of light is constant, that there is no way that anyone or anything can travel any faster.  And that the famous Einsteinian formula of E=MC2 defined that any object as it approached what was defined as the maximum limit of speed would have to be nearly infinitely large.  So no matter how much you wanted to play Captain Kirk on the USS Enterprise, you could never gain the speed that would take you to Warp 1, traveling beyond the speed of light (a reference for you geeky types like me.)

As a result, using any sort of normal approach, we’ve always had an upper limit regarding both Mass and Energy needed to traipse beyond the limit of the speed of light, to travel from one point to another faster than this supposedly upper limit.

Until now.

Entanglement, the ability to communicate information over vast distances, at greater than the speed of light, has become a proven fact.  And this communication happens instantaneously, irrespective of the distances involved.  The hypothesis itself was developed and then tested using the spin of paired electrons, but I have a much easier way to describe the test and results, The Patty Duke Show(For those of you too young to remember the show nor having seen it on Nick@Nite, Patty and Cathy Duke are identical cousins.  They are Paired as we say in the language of particle physics.)

Now, in a recently discovered Hollywood Vault of old-time TV shows, we have found an episode that clearly demonstrates how information is passed from one of the two paired electrons, Patty, to the other paired electron, Cathy, instantaneously.

The show opens and we see Patty and Cathy standing in their living room in Brooklyn and the father pulls out four berets, two black and two white, highly fashionable in the 1960s. (Models shown are not from the Patty Duke show.)

Dad gives one black and white pair to his daughter, Patty, and the other black and white pair to his niece, Cathy.  “Now girls,” Dad says, “You can keep these as long as you promise to wear the color your cousin isn’t wearing and switch-out which color you are wearing when I tell you to, immediately, when I tell you.”  Patty and Cathy agree and then put on the berets, Patty the black beret, and Cathy the white.

So now Dad tests to see if Patty and Cathy understand.  “Ok girls, Switch Berets!”

Immediately Patty switches the white beret with the black one she is wearing, and Cathy replaces the white one she is wearing with the black one.  “Alright girls, have fun with your berets,” Dad says and leaves the room.

A few days pass, and Patty falls in love with a surfer dude in California and boards a propeller airplane and flies to Malibu where they hook up.  Dad finds out about this and wants to make sure that Patty and Cathy are still paired so he calls out, “Switch berets,” which both Patty and Cathy hear simultaneously, and immediately both girls switch their beret colors.  Now Patty is wearing the black one, while Cathy the white.

A few years pass by and nothing, not even the surfer dude, interrupts the pairing between Patty and Cathy.  Cathy, being the bright one, gets enrolled in the NASA astronaut program and flies to the moon on Apollo 11.  (This is actually Cathy and not Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.)

Now, again, Dad calls out, “Switch Berets,” and Cathy inside the moon lander, and Patty with the surfer dude, immediately switch berets – at the same exact moment, instantaneously, despite the distance between them.

A couple of years after Cathy returns, she is watching TV one night and is suddenly transported to a Strange New Reality.

Even though the technology doesn’t yet exist, magically, at Warp 100, Cathy finds herself 13.8 billion light years away from Patty, at the point of the Big Bang.  And then she hears her uncle call out “Switch berets,” and she and Patty again swap-out colors.

Now this narrative seems terribly fanciful I know, but we have determined experimentally that information status will cross locations at unlimited distances instantaneously, to reverse-spin two paired particles, doing to them what we have done with Patty and Cathy’s hats.  The speed of light does not limit the speed of the transmission for the change in status.

We have just proven multiple dimensionality.  More about that in the future.  Well, maybe the past?  Well, maybe…

Watch for Issue #4, here, on December 18.

You can access all previous issues of “Quantum Leap”, here.

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