| Hello, I have a question regarding wormholes and
quantum entanglement. I know that, theoretically,
if one was to take two ends of a wormhole and
keep one stationary while one moves around, it
would be possible to travel back in time. Could
this be duplicated practically by using entangled
particles - due to the fact that they are
connected instantly much like the two ends of a
wormhole? In this experiment, one would keep one
particle stationary while moving the other one in
a particle accelerator or something like that, to
observe the time dilation effects between them
(hopefully resulting in some form of backwards
time travel effects, like the case with the
wormholes). What is your opinion on this? And is
it right to compare wormholes to entangled
particles because of their similar
characteristics (with regard to connecting
different points in space - or different
particles separated by space) instantly? Thank
you for your help!
|
Answer 1:
It's actually not possible to send signals or
communicate a-causally with entangled particles.
The important point to understand is that in order
to entangle two particles, they must initially be
in the same location. Even though the entangled
particles may later be separated over large
distances and the collapse may occur
instantaneously, because the particles couldn't
travel to their current locations faster than the
speed of light,entanglement can't be used to send
signals any faster than by sending regular light
signals. In particular, entangled particles
definitely can't be used to send signals back in
time. To understand this, it's useful to
think about how entangled particles are actually
created and used. Researchers commonly create
entangled photons in labs, then send them down
long optical fibers traveling in separate
directions and can perform entanglement
measurements over widely separated distances.
However, because the entangled photons traveled at
the speed of light down the optical fibers, the
entangled communication can't be any faster than
if an ordinary light signal was simply sent down
the optical fibers. Regarding wormholes,
entangled particles aren't really a good
analogy,since they can't cause any sort of
a-causality. You might be interested to learn
about something called Topological
Censorship. Roughly, it states that unless an
observer falls into a black hole (or comes out of
a white hole, but that's really pathological),
they can't even measure if their universe has a
wormhole. If you're interested in learning more
about Topological Censorship, you might be
interested in reading the article article |
Answer 2:
This question is unanswerable in the light of
what we currently know: wormholes have never been
observed to exist, so it's entirely up for
speculation what their properties might be. The
entire concept of wormholes flies in the face of
relativity, no matter what you do, it would
violate causality in some fashion. Anything
involving wormholes therefore involves physics of
the sort that is currently totally unknown. This
is why quantum entanglement is so surprising,
because it, too, seems to fly in the face of
relativity.
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