recently i was watching a video on quantum computing where the narrators describes that quantum entanglement information travels faster than light!
Is it really possible for anything to move faster than light? Or are the narrators just wrong?
Regards,
Answer
Collapsing an entangled pair occurs instantaneously but can never be used to transmit information faster than light. If you have an entangled pair of particles, A and B, making a measurement on some entangled property of A will give you a random result and B will have the complementary result. The key point is that you have no control over the state of A, and once you make a measurement you lose entanglement. You can infer the state of B anywhere in the universe by noting that it must be complementary to A.
The no-cloning theorem stops you from employing any sneaky tricks like making a bunch of copies of B and checking if they all have the same state or a mix of states, which would otherwise allow you to send information faster than light by choosing to collapse the entangled state or not.
On a personal note, it irks me when works of sci-fi invoke quantum entanglement for superluminal communication (incorrectly) and then ignore the potential consequences of implied causality violation...
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