I am trying to use entanglement in a story. I would like to mix fact with reasonable fiction. Can you tell me how bug the holes are in this scenario.
Firstly I should clarify the statement that you quote from me. I wrote it down quickly without thinking (showing the old adage that information can not be transmitted faster than light, but rubbish can
).
So...I think virtually all physicists would say that quantum entanglement does
not allow information to travel faster than light. Rather, in quantum interpretations like the Copenhagen interpretation, the mechanisms of QM invoke nonlocality that contradict the assumptions of local realism. As part of this, in entanglement, there is an instantaneous rearrangement of quantum states, no matter how distant they are, required to explain the phenomena. And this is really what I mean by 'information' in the above statement! (i.e. I was wrong, it's not
)
Any attempt to take advantage of this to transmit information however is assumed to fail.
This is explained, I think, because it is assumed that quantum mechanics must in the macro limit become identical to classical physics. And classical physics is assumed to be causal and from special relativity this causality is limited to the speed of light. So quantum field theory is formulated to so that this causality is 'built' into it.
Now you can bolster this argument by saying that there has been no experimental evidence of faster than light transmission etc. And from this one could argue that faster than light transmission of information or time travel, would lead to paradoxes. Which is a reasonable starting point. However in mathematical terms I believe that we have formulated all our laws on the assumption that the above is correct - and thus it becomes a circular argument really. These laws won't show any superluminal transmission because we built assumptions that they can't in from the start.
However, to give you a chink of possibility, we know that our understanding of the universe is incomplete. What if under very specific conditions superluminal travel would be possible - say with wormholes? Then we'd need to recast our laws. And the paradoxes? Well, we'd see what happens I suppose. Like I said before, if we break certain assumptions about reality, many of these paradoxes can actually be easily solved.
Right, to your post, sorry about the diversion. Just trying to be as clear as possible (in my mind at least).
Particles that make up atoms deform space time. The particles are made of quarks that apparently don't deform space time by themselves. Is there enough gray area in the current understanding of the structure of the universe that I could reasonably say that individual quarks are dimensionless projections, from another dimension that contains space time, and that these quarks don't do anything until they join together to form particles that deform space time.
Now I know that quarks cannot be directly observed, only as part of composite particles. This comes about because the strong force that keeps quarks together is assumed to be asymptotic (is ~zero when the quarks are close to each other in a hadron, but grows exponentially as you try and separate them. And grows so fast, that you have to put so much energy to break the bond, that you create new quarks that 'cap the broken ends' and keep the split quarks in hadrons.) And that this behaviour seems to explain the results of our experiments in atom smashers such as CERN.
So the fractional charges and intrinsic masses that these quarks have must be assumed and taken from indirect measurements. Perhaps this is just a mathematical trick to explain some atom smashing results? So perhaps what you've outlined above could be possible.
However in defence of the standard model, quarks are still assumed to be fermions and thus have a whole lot of other properties in common with other fermions, such as electrons. Your dimensionless quarks seem to add a new layer of complexity to this. What is the thing that causes quarks to all of a sudden make mass? Why does it not apply to electrons?
However I understand that your purpose is to try to find a way to make faster than light communication somehow, not solve reality.
The individual projected "quarks" are programmed to be what they are and that information about their parameters is contained within the deformation of space time and is available instantly anywhere in the universes without any delays. The individual quarks programming has nothing to do with what happens after they join together to form particles. The particles are free to do what they want. That would avoid the possibility of everything being preset up and is a "movie" of a past, present, and future that can't be changed.
This scenario would be to set up a communication system that would appear to be faster than light.
Now getting aside from the problem of how we observe or produce a stable single quark. I'm not entirely sure what information can be encoded into a quark (is it like a designer quark?) or why it would, as a particle, be instantly available in the entire universe. Do we 'go up a dimension', a dimension that does not obey our physics, and then cause some process that imposes an entangled quark pair on the lower dimensions. (But if we can do that, why not just transmit the information in this higher dimension? Perhaps the act of using these higher dimensions causes an
artefact of entangled pairs - it's not the cause of the transmission but the
result of our lower universe trying to make sense of what we've asked it to do???)
I do agree, to get rid of a great deal of paradoxes that superluminal travel and communication could cause, that past and future could be unalterable. It's what I'm exploring in my WiP.
Hope the above helps.
EDIT: Was typing the above when
@Brian G Turner gave his reply. Yes lots of SF devices use this property, but fundamentally I think they made the same mistake I made in the quote and can't work. So fine for hand-wavy Space Opera, but not for hard SF
