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Quantum spookiness

The phenomenon of quantum entanglement has made news on the science wires from time to time over the past decade or so.

Basically, if you entangle two sub-atomic particles (usually electrons or photons), they act as if they were a single particle -- even when separated by massive distances.

If quantum entanglement can be harnessed in a robust, reliable, sustainable way, the potential for revolutionising our communications technologies is astonishing.

Of course until now, the effects of QE have only been measurable using complex lab equipment surrounded by grey-bearded professors in white coats. This week however, a far more practical demonstration was unveiled.

According to this New Scientist story researchers were able to create an image (perhaps of Schrodinger's cat) through the use of QE.

This experiment and demonstration is perhaps the most outstanding example of QE's effects seen to date.

So exactly how could we use QE?

Obviously, if we could create entangled pairs, each one would become like a tuned radio receiver -- mirroring any changes applied to the other, completely impervious to interference and the effects of distance.

Existing radio-based communications have severe limitations that QE would appear to eliminate...

The RF spectrum is a finite resource and different frequencies have significantly different propagation properties.

Lower frequencies require larger antennas and offer lower data-rates but are far less affected by obstacles (such as earth, water, air, etc) that they may have to pass through.

Higher frequencies use smaller antennas and higher data-rates but have far greater "path loss" and can be completely blocked by hills, or even trees. These frequencies also tend to bounce off natural features and buildings, creating something called multi-pathing, a phenomenon that often caused "ghosting" on old analog TV sets.

As we increasingly turn to wireless technology, we already find ourselves running out of available RF spectrum so QE-based systems would be a godsend. This is because it appears that each QE pair operate totally independently of every other QE pair and, since the supply of quantum particles is virtually infinite, we would never run into the problems now becoming so prevalent with RF-based systems.

QE is also immune to the effects of distance, obstructions and path-loss so in theory, it would be a brilliant way to deliver communications with the growing number of rovers and satellites we have on or around other planets in the solar-system.

Another very important aspect of QE communications is that *only* the paired particles will interact with each other so the link would effectively be 100% secure from snooping. Indeed, it would be impossible to detect that the link even existed. The security implications of this are immense -- no need for encryption to prevent snooping.

Of course it is *very* early days -- far to early to consider any practical QE-based communications to be truly practical. However, it's worth remembering that it wasn't that long ago that you could count the total number of computers in the world on the fingers of one hand and their combined power was a very tiny fraction of that found in your smartphone.

From a technology perspective, the future is a very exciting place to be and I'm headed their right now, one day at a time!

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