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Showing posts with the label quantum mechanics

If E.T. phones home, he won't use entagled qubits

I can recall listening to a radio program some 10-15 years ago. The host of the show believed that it would soon be possible to build a faster-than-light communications system using quantum entangled particles, and interviewed several people from a company who were seeking funding to somehow make that happen. But why not?  There would be tremendous value in some sort of "quantum phone" of entangled particles that allowed for transferring messages faster than the speed of light.  Quantum computers are a real thing now. Quantum key distribution could very well revolutionize public key cryptography. Yet if anything, quantum computing is a misnomer because it understates how fundamental quantum mechanics has been on recent technological innovation. Quantum mechanics has been around for a century now and all modern computers rely to some extent on the principles of quantum mechanics to function. But there will be no quantum phone. Let's start by explaining how the quantum ph