Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: Lt. Spanks on September 03, 2015, 09:47:39 pm
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INFORMATION
I was wondering if the use of quantum entanglement in communication systems has ever been discussed.
It always perplexes me to think that orders from High Command (in Beta Aquilae) can so quickly reach You (Say in Vega) which is 22.7 lyrs away.
Read this http://www.livescience.com/28550-how-quantum-entanglement-works-infographic.html (http://www.livescience.com/28550-how-quantum-entanglement-works-infographic.html) if you want some context.
Basically, how I think it would work is these particles are entangled, and you observe a down spin... the other particle immediately has an up spin... because math :pimp:
Now consider that if it has a down spin... it is a 0 and if it has an up spin... it is a 1... based on those observations... you can create a message with billions of these photons with different spins
because audio is a bunch of 0's and 1's in a sequence just like a program and the text you are reading now. :D
I don't know if its possible to record whether it has a down spin or up spin but I must make an a** out of you and I and assume that it is...
So some guy talks into a mic... and using SUPER FUTURISTIC SPACE TECHNOLERGIES!!!! (i swear i'm a scientist) these particles are given particular spins that coincide with the message being sent... and therefore instantly relay an opposite to the other end
which of course must be de-oppositted (go ahead... spell check me) by a computer in the ship and then relayed into the pilots headset. :yes:
Boom... INFORMATION
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If the Terrans and Vasudans used quantum entanglement technology, the GTVA could instantly communicate with Earth. Also, such transmissions couldn't be jammed without technobabble, and FS communication is clearly jammable (as shown in that one SOC mission with the NTF transport and the AWACS.)
I think it's just another form of subspace tech.
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Yeah, everything we see in-game suggests that communications are sent via subspace signals. It explains how Command is able to stay in contact with you even when the speaker is necessarily a few different systems away.
(Plus you can't use quantum entanglement to send any sort of coherent information, because you have no way of telling your particle's state until you measure it. In fact, it's the act of measuring that locks it down into a randomly-picked state in the first place!)
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Is there any canon info about where Command is actually located, though? I don't think there is.
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Yeah, alas, quantum entanglement can only be used to send information if paired with a classical (slower than light) signal. It's mostly useful for encryption.
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I see... how it was explained to me was that the particle is at first in all states at once... and then once it is observed to have an up/down spin the other particle that is entangled will form the opposite spin due to the previous particles observation.
How is a subspace signal any more jammable than a quantum message anyways? And wouldnt it have at least some kind of lag factor? Communication is just so... instant it seems in the game...
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The key is that when the particle's observed it randomly assumes spin up or spin down. The other particle then takes on the opposite spin.
But when you observe the second particle, you don't know if the first particle's been observed yet. If your particle's spin up, sure, the other must be spin down...but what does that tell you? They assumed these states randomly.
Thus you can't be sure if someone collapsed the entanglement to send you a message, or if you're the one collapsing the entanglement.
You could call up whoever has the first particle and say 'hey, did you observe this yet', but then you need a classical channel.
Subspace 'radio' presumably involves some kind of message propagating through subspace, like light or waves in water. Thus it can apparently be interfered with. Quantum entanglement doesn't involve anything going anywhere, so it can't be jammed directly.
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Battuta is right, Quantum Entanglement really only works if you have a preciecly attuned sender-reciever duo and know when they are active ... think of it like in the early days of radio, before broadcasts could be automated, you needed to know exaclty on what frequency and at what time a message was broadcast, otherwise you would miss it
Canonically there is zero information about how big or small a subspace vortex can be, only that the power consumption seems to be high and quite possibly relative to a physical quality of the object being moved; Both together I always found make it quite possible that a technology could exist that uses microscopic subspace vortexes or even enduring tunnels between two points for transmitting messages (light and radio waves don't really take up space relative to a starship, so if the power consumtion is relative to say the volume of the object that makes the transition from a to b, the power consumption would likewise drop down)
(But then again I once tried to figure out -for the purposes of the scrapped campaign- how to get from point-to-point-subspace flight to free flying in the subspace continuum)
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Just thinking about it, the only real canon glimpse we get of intersystem communications was in FS1's "A Failure to Communicate," where you have to protect a Faustus comm station in Beta Aquilae. This seems to suggest that dedicated comm relay stations were required to make intersystem communications work.
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It's also worth pointing out that in Into the Lion's Den Command is out of contact with you but they aren't in Mystery of the Trinity. That suggests that at least small ships comms are relayed somehow (either that or command is actually aboard the Aquitaine). Although it could simply be that the Terran Mara didn't have a compatible comms system.
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I'm thinking you would need some kind of big, power-hungry transmitter/receiver to do intersystem communication, something that would be unfittable on a fighter, but could be found on destroyers or specialised ships.
Command's exact location is up for debate, but my personnal theory is that we are receiving our orders directly from 3rd Fleet HQ, as I recall command messages coming from there during Dunkerque (although that could have been a MediaVPs thing, I don't remember).
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The key is that when the particle's observed it randomly assumes spin up or spin down. The other particle then takes on the opposite spin.
But when you observe the second particle, you don't know if the first particle's been observed yet. If your particle's spin up, sure, the other must be spin down...but what does that tell you? They assumed these states randomly.
Thus you can't be sure if someone collapsed the entanglement to send you a message, or if you're the one collapsing the entanglement.
I'm pretty sure this is not the full problem here, because this could be overcome with a really good synchronization computed scheme. IOW, it would still be "technically" possible, albeit extremely difficult. I do think that the problem is inherent to the laws of physics, that FTL is indeed impossible even with all the amazing synchronizing schemes you can devise.
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Yeah... I have been thinking of elaborate ways of trying to make this work in my brain because it is so freaking cool... but jamming of communications is definitely canon, and therefore begs a different method.
Perhaps they build small transmitters... as small as a pea or maybe as big as a soccer ball... and slap a subspace drive on the back of it and... using the theory that the lower the volume... the less energy required...
these little "comm probes" (Any modelers wanna try at one of these?) are shot into subspace using relatively low resources, and when they emerge... they immediately start transmitting orders to surrounding ships in the system.
The orders sent by the probes are very general orders from Central HQ... and then are given to the larger ships in system... so those ships would have need to have a time when they jump in close proximity to one of these probes at a predetermined location and pick up their orders. This works both ways... as ships will relay the situation of their fleet or battle-group back to the probe so that Central HQ has some idea of what is going on, and therefore can issue more orders.
After the order pickup... the officers aboard the vessels must decide how to interpret those orders and execute them in the best way possible... because you won't be going back for more orders until the next pickup point, which, in the field of battle, might be days away.
So for this to work... it requires two things
1) Setting up your communication network and sending out comm probes filled with orders...
2) Really good officers... who know how to get **** done off of sometimes very little information or vague orders...
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The key is that when the particle's observed it randomly assumes spin up or spin down. The other particle then takes on the opposite spin.
But when you observe the second particle, you don't know if the first particle's been observed yet. If your particle's spin up, sure, the other must be spin down...but what does that tell you? They assumed these states randomly.
Thus you can't be sure if someone collapsed the entanglement to send you a message, or if you're the one collapsing the entanglement.
I'm pretty sure this is not the full problem here, because this could be overcome with a really good synchronization computed scheme. IOW, it would still be "technically" possible, albeit extremely difficult. I do think that the problem is inherent to the laws of physics, that FTL is indeed impossible even with all the amazing synchronizing schemes you can devise.
Yeah, the problem Battuta describes can be circumvented pretty easily by agreeing beforehand who will observe their particle first (which is simple even in relativistic contexts).
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Huh, I'm not sure I follow. How could Andrew agreeing to observe before Brunhilda possibly communicate any useful information? 'I see a down here, so Andrew must have seen an up, but Andrew had no control over it!' Is that useful in any way? Maybe I'm being dumb, but I don't see how Andrew can use this to signal Brunhilda.
I thought the point of no-communication was that there's nothing Andrew can do to his system which will result in any detectable change to Brunhilda's. You can't even set up a system where entangled = 1 and collapsed = 0 due to the no cloning rule (since Brunhilda can't clone her particle's state and observe it many times).
A transmitter in which every bit randomly assumes 1 and 0 doesn't seem intuitively useful to me...especially with no nonclassical way to distinguish 'waiting for message' from 'message received'.
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Huh, I'm not sure I follow. How could Andrew agreeing to observe before Brunhilda possibly communicate any useful information? 'I see a down here, so Andrew must have seen an up, but Andrew had no control over it!' Is that useful in any way? Maybe I'm being dumb, but I don't see how Andrew can use this to signal Brunhilda.
I thought the point of no-communication was that there's nothing Andrew can do to his system which will result in any detectable change to Brunhilda's. You can't even set up a system where entangled = 1 and collapsed = 0 due to the no cloning rule (since Brunhilda can't clone her particle's state and observe it many times).
A transmitter in which every bit randomly assumes 1 and 0 doesn't seem intuitively useful to me...especially with no nonclassical way to distinguish 'waiting for message' from 'message received'.
I think you are more than a bit biased by your experience of telecommunication in our modern age ... At least three modes of telecommunication (light signals, telegraphy, early radio) work/ed only because the recievers were constantly monitored, hence there was no exact divide between "waiting for message" and "messasge recieved" which gave rise to "odd" language codings STOP which were meant to fix what the technology in itself could not STOP
Now this is not fully applicable here as the act of oberserving is key to the workings of quantum entanglement, however it makes me wonder if that cannot be ciricumvented my having a several devices lined-up which would basically recieve the same message but only half would be observed at any given time - then meshing together a possible message from all readings
This again only works if you are working with significant margins of error, leading to false results and altered message content (reading a text message that has been auto-corrected might be a nice analogue here) ... which would immdiately exclude from the use in various contexts (all contexts were data integrety is paramount are out, which means science, economics, military and politics)
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I don't follow. The no-communication theory states not just that you can't receive information purely by entanglement, but that you can't even encode and transmit it.
It's not just that there's bad data integrity - you can't even send the most basic yes/no signal. All your available bits set themselves randomly.
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I wasn't truely lucid yesterday morning (happens every now and then)
The underlying point of my rambling was that maybe a regression in operating procedure (back to when it was s.o. job to sit by the telegraph for most the day on the chance that a message might be coming down the line) to utilize a new technology
My thesis has me adapting to a lot of 1912/13-technology, that's why something like that is on my mind
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That sounds cool!
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I think I missed half of your earlier explanation somehow.