First Physics-based Restriction on Local Psychic Powers

Nick Herbert devises an important new restriction on local psychic powers.

FIRST PHYSICS-BASED RESTRICTION ON LOCAL PSYCHIC POWERS

Personal experience, scientific research and the occasional spectacular phenomenon (a flying monk from Cupertino, for instance) seem to demonstrate the real existence of psychic powers, but our theoretical understanding and extension of such powers seems not to have advanced at all. Most limiting is the fact that we possess no confident scientific understanding of ordinary consciousness let alone its paranormal extensions. Much to be desired would be the application of the methods of our dazzlingly successful physical sciences to some of the problems of mind. That is what I have done, in a small way, in an article soon to appear in the journal Activitas Nervosa Superior (online version here) as part of a Festschrift in honor of Berkeley physicist Henry Pierce Stapp.

On the other hand, the moderators of the Cornell University Physics arXiv, which I scan daily, looking for innovations in quantum physics, have declined to list this article on the grounds that "your submission is not of plausible interest for arXiv." My guess is that the mere mention of "psychic powers" in a physics paper caused some old fuddy duddy at arXiv to lose his lunch.

From the great variety of possible psychic powers I chose extrasensory perception, the alleged ability of a psychically gifted human being to correctly guess, with odds better than chance, the outcome of a sequence of symbols generated by a random process. To simplify the discussion, I limit the choice of target symbols to two, which could be zero/one, black/red, heads/tails or even/odd. And the random process is designed to make each of these two symbols appear with 50/50 probability. The "power" of a psychic faced with such a task is defined by the percentage of correct guesses that consistently exceed 50%. On this scale a perfect score would be "50".

Once we find a high-scoring psychic let's now confront him or her with two different kinds of tasks which I will describe as classical ignorance and quantum ignorance.

Classical ignorance; result exists before guess and is governed by classical randomness

 In the case of classical ignorance, the target symbol exists before the psychic makes his guess. As in the turning over of a top card -- the card was definitely"black" or "red" but its value was hidden from ordinary perception.

Quantum ignorance: result does not exist before guess and is governed by quantum randomness

 In the case of quantum ignorance, the target symbol is produced only after the guess and is governed by quantum randomness -- the basic uncertainty that governs every quantum transition in the Universe. In the example above, the blue cylinder shoots a single photon at a half-silvered mirror. Whether the mirror deflects the photon forward into red photon detector #1 or sideways into red photon detector #2 is determined by an uncertainty so fundamental that some physicists have joked that not even God can say which path that single photon will take.

Now the question I ask about psychic powers is this: Which kind of ignorance does the psychic find easier for his extrasensory powers to overcome -- classical or quantum uncertainty?

Since we know absolutely nothing about how psychic powers operate, we are free to let our imaginations run wild. Perhaps, for instance, quantum uncertainty is somehow "softer" and more "mindlike" than classical uncertainty so the psychic will score higher on the quantum task. On the other hand, if it is true that not even God can predict the outcome of a quantum-random event, then the psychic must necessarily score higher on the classical task.

Via a digression into the topic of faster-than-light (FTL) signaling schemes, I answer the question of whether a psychic can score better against classical or against quantum ignorance.

For longer than I can remember, I have been curious about superluminal signaling schemes and have invented several devices tagged with unusual acronyms: QUIK, FLASH, ETCALLHOME and many others, and I was much involved in the refutation of Demetrios Kalamidas's ingenious KISS scheme. The detailed refutation of each of these proposals led to a slightly deeper understanding of the foundations of quantum theory. And in the case of the refutation of FLASH, resulted in the discovery of the quantum no-cloning rule. 

Each of these proposed FTL signaling devices invokes the strange situation of quantum entanglement in which two photons A and B, separated by a great distance, nonetheless appear to act as though they were a single entity. In the usual setup, photon A is sent to Alice and photon B is sent to Bob. In the math it looks as though what Alice chooses to measure on her photon A seems to instantly affect what Bob will measure on his photon B. Irish physicist John Bell proved in 1964 that any model of reality that correctly describes quantum entanglement must necessarily be non-local, that is, something must be going on that is faster than light. Bell's theorem proves that deep reality must be faster than light. But we humans cannot observe deep reality, only its surface consequences; and these surface consequences always appear to obey the Einstein speed limit.

Indeed, a result proved by Philippe Eberhard, a colleague of Henry Stapp's at Berkeley, shows that any ordinary measurements performed by Alice will have no measurable effect at Bob's receiving site. Eberhard's Proof demonstrates that superluminal signaling using Alice/Bob quantum entanglement is impossible.

Alice and Bob each receive one member of a pair of entangled photons. Is there anything they can do that would allow Alice to send an FTL message that Bob could decode?

To get around the roadblock of Eberhard's Proof, one might consider using a clever and subtle measurement process that evades the proof's assumptions. The hope of devising some unconventional measurement scheme lies behind the KISS, FLASH, QUIK, etc. schemes mentioned above. None of these measurement schemes, however, is bizarre enough to evade Eberhard's sturdy proof of the impossibility of using quantum entanglement for superluminal signaling.

But what about going beyond physics into the realm of psychic powers?

That's what I have done in my recent paper. In my setup, Alice sends Bob a Morse Code signal which he receives as two kinds of ignorance. a dot is encoded as a situation of classical ignorance. And a dash is encoded as a situation of quantum ignorance. Alice sends each symbol as a bunch of N photons that appear at Bob's site to possess the same kind of ignorance, that is, all N photons in a bunch are either all classically or all quantum uncertain.

Upon receiving Alice's message, Bob applies his psychic powers to try to guess the outcome of his measuring a particular bunch of N photons. If Bob's psychic power works better for one kind of ignorance rather than another, then Bob can successfully decode Alice's message as a series of dots and dashes.

This method of signaling faster than light evades Eberhard's Proof because it does not use conventional physical measurements, but measurements of an entirely non-physical kind.

The acronym for my scheme, by the way, is GUESS = Going Unphysical Enables Superluminal Signaling.

However, an easy way to outlaw superluminal signaling of the GUESS kind is to demand that a psychic's ability to guess a quantum random sequence must be exactly equal to his ability to guess a classical random sequence.

This result I call "Nick's restriction". The journal referees made me call it something else but in my blog I can call it anything I want. And so can you.

One beauty of Nick's restriction is that it can be experimentally tested. All one needs to do is find a reliable psychic and to devise a robust on-demand source of quantum randomness.

A further beauty of Nick's restriction is that it cannot fail. If measurement does show the expected result: that a psychic possesses identical powers of guessing quantum or classical random sequences, then Nick's restriction will take its rightful place as one of the solid cornerstone truths of a modern psychic science.

But what if Nick's restriction is false? What if psychic researchers measure a consistent difference between a psychic's ability to fathom one kind of ignorance rather than another?

Why that's even better. For then we will be able to use quantum entanglement to send signals faster than light.

A basic new law of psychic phenomena? Or an easy FTL communication scheme?

On the question of the practical usefulness of Nick's restriction, we simply can't lose.

Does Doc Brown's psychic power amplifier obey Nick's restriction or not?

Automating Quantum Weirdness

Islamic geometric pattern: an example of classical entanglement

AUTOMATING QUANTUM WEIRDNESS

A bowl of spaghetti or an Islamic repetitive pattern is an example of classical entanglement -- things get mixed up. And pulling one strand of spaghetti moves another strand far away. But quantum entanglement is different and difficult to express in ordinary language. When a number of particles get entangled in the quantum way, none of the particles possesses definite attributes. Only the entanglement as a whole possesses stand-alone values. Furthermore, whenever a measurement is performed on any one of the entangled particles, the state of each one of the other particles changes instantly, no matter how far it may be from its neighbors. And quantum mechanics is so delicately arranged that these instant collective changes cannot be used to signal faster-than-light. One way of expressing the entanglement situation is that Nature can communicate faster-than-light (and does so all the time). But humans cannot use entanglement to send signals because they cannot break Nature's "strong encryption" that governs the occurrence of each individual quantum jump.

Quantum entanglement is an unprecedentedly original way of getting things done in the world. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger called it "not ONE, but THE WAY, in which quantum mechanics differs most from classical expectations about how the world works."

Even at this early stage in our understanding of this phenomenon, quantum entanglement has found practical use in quantum computing, quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation as well as in many subtle new forms of optical imaging.

For the development of new quantum devices, human engineers are particularly handicapped because quantum mechanics follows a non-human logic that defies human intuition.

Enter MELVIN the robot.

Like his inventors (Mario Krenn and his colleagues at the University of Vienna), MELVIN thinks only classically. But he is able to design and test hundreds of possible thought experiments carried out with any number of quantum entangled particles. MELVIN was built to simulate the entanglement of photons. So he has at his disposal photon-entangling crystals, beam splitters, mirrors, wave plates, polarizers, holograms and perfectly efficient photon detectors. But quantum behavior is so generic, that any new results that MELVIN might discover for photons can almost certainly be exploited in other quantum systems such as electron spins, cold Bosons and superconducting junctions.

Schematic of MELVIN, the quantum engineer.

The first entanglement experiments (called EPR, after Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen whose pathbreaking 1935 paper first focused attention on the phenomenon) considered only TWO entangled particles. Work on two-particle entangled systems has been very fruitful, leading in 1964 to Bell's Non-locality Theorem, as well as the discovery of many new phenomena, notably quantum teleportation.

Entanglement was extended to THREE particles by Greenberger, Horne and Zeilinger (GHZ) who were able (with 3 particles) to construct a particularly elegant form of Bell's Theorem.

One task of MELVIN is to search for new phenomena beyond simple EPR and GHZ experiments by expanding quantum entanglement into the realm of greater numbers of particles and into higher entanglement dimensions. "Dimensions" refers here to particular particle attributes that participate in the entanglement. MELVIN considers three different dimensions of photon entanglement: #1. Path entanglement, #2. Polarization entanglement and #3. Orbital angular momentum entanglement. Since a particular photon can be both path-entangled, polarization entangled and OAM entangled at the same time to one or more other particles, the number of different allowed kinds of entanglements rapidly becomes astronomical.

But MELVIN is up to the task. He rapidly constructs numerous virtual experiments which are tested against certain criteria set by the experimenters. Most tests fail. But those that succeed become new building blocks that increase the odds that more of the tests will succeed. MELVIN is a kind of Darwinian machine: only the fittest experiments survive. While MELVIN the robot tirelessly produces hopeful candidates, the task of the human experimenters is two-fold: #1. to devise good tests for determining the "fitness" of a proposed experiment and #2. to use human logic to simplify the fit experiments and make them as efficient as possible.

MELVIN has already produced some unusual, never-seen-before types of quantum entanglement: partial entanglements, nested entanglements, cyclic entanglements and many more. The beauty of this robot designer is that not only does MELVIN produce exotic forms of entanglement, but he also outputs an exact plan of the hardware that will produce these new entanglements in the lab.

Which leads to a third important function of the human experimenter: #3 to discover new uses, either theoretical. practical or both for the flood of new "quantum lifeforms" brought to life in the lab by this imaginative robot/human collaboration.

A typical experiment designed by the MELVIN/human team

The MELVIN project is just one example of the extraordinary fruitfulness of the notion of quantum entanglement. As they say in show business: "Entanglement's got legs." It's going places.

Which leads to another Shri Nick Predicts.

Shri Nick predicts that either this year (2015) or the next, the Nobel Prize in physics will be awarded to John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger for their pioneer work in quantum entanglement. Such an award will also serve to honor the work of John Stewart Bell whose untimely death denied him this prize.

Remember, you heard it here first.

Demetrios! the Opera

Bruce Damer auditioning for Demetrios! the Opera

DEMETRIOS! THE OPERA

Mama, Mama, Mama:
Photonic entanglement
O Mama mia:
Faster than light.

Mama, Mama, Mama:
Gray light's the Secret.
O Mama mia:
Could Einstein be right?

Will we go back in time
When his theory's been tested?
Can we mix Gray light and Fock
Without being arrested?

Has he found the white light
At the end of the trail?
Is Demetrios the knight
Who's discovered the Grail?

Changing our history
Could really be risky:
Is this how the story 
Of humankind ends?

One touch with the past
Might well be our last: 
Adios, homo sapiens. 

One touch with the past 
Might well be our last: 
Adios, homo sapiens.

Big Swirl

Superposition of +10 OAM plus -10 OAM

Quantum mechanics is usually perceived as the (somewhat bizarre) physics of the very small, while large objects obey the logic of common sense. One of the most exciting trends in modern physics is the attempt to create larger and larger objects that obey quantum rules and hence to quietly smuggle the weirdness of quantum reality into the realm of everyday life.

Recently Robert Fickler and his colleagues at the University Of Vienna have devised a clever experiment that expands the realm of quantum entanglement into the region of high quantum numbers by devising a scheme that entangles two photons with arbitrarily high values of "orbital angular momentum (OAM)"-- a quantity I will call "swirl".

Every photon has an intrinsic spin equal to one Planck unit. Most experiments in quantum entanglement operate by using special non-linear crystals to produce a pair of photons in which this spin degree of freedom is divided between the two photons in such a way that each photon is in an uncertain spin state but the spin of the larger two-photon state is quantum-determined. This leads to the unusual situation (characteristic of quantum entanglement) that no matter how distant the two photons are separated, they in some sense still form a single entity so that an action on one photon seems to instantly influence the properties of the other. One might imagine that this instant influence could be used to send faster-than-light signals and hence break the well-known Einstein speed limit but quantum theory possesses a subtle structure that allows Nature access to this superluminal channel while denying it to human beings.

Fickler and his friends start with the usual pair of photons entangled in spin-one space and by clever use of a Spatial Light Modulator (SLM) -- a liquid-crystal device not too different from the gadget that is producing this image on your flat screen -- they can add to each photon a lot of "swirl" beginning with 10 spin units (shown above) and working their way up to successfully entangling two photons each possessing 300 units of swirl. The amount of swirl they can add to the photons is limited not by the laws of physics but by the pixel density of their Spatial Light Modulator so with better technology much larger values of "swirl" than 300 can be entangled.

Using their current setup, Fickler and company conveniently produce not just a photon with a big swirl of 300 but a photon that exists in a superposition of 300 units of clockwise swirl plus 300 units of counterclockwise swirl -- a situation I have elsewhere called "Schrödinger's Carousel".  And this (300/-300) swirled photon is quantum-entangled with a similar high-swirl photon which can be located many meters away.

However clever this achievement, a swirl of only 300 units is still much too small to be perceived by human senses. But there is an analogous phenomenon created by lots of tiny aligned spins (much more than 300) called magnetism which might someday be coaxed to produce bizarre quantum phenomena perceivable by humans.

For me one of the most elegant experiments that connects the micro-world with the macro-world is the Einstein-de Haas Effect. If you suspend a magnet on a string and demagnetize it by heating, the magnet magically begins to rotate without the application of any force. This mysterious rotation is explained by the fact that magnetism is the result of an immense number of electrons whose spins (one unit each of AM) are all aligned in the same direction. When the magnet is heated, the direction of these spins is randomized. The overall rotation is still conserved however, and is transferred from the electrons to the crystal lattice and hence the whole magnet begins to spin.

Learning how to entangle big swirls is starting in Austria with pairs of photons but perhaps, using quantum entanglement, magnets, which are already remarkable things, may someday be transformed into macroscopic quantum objects that will behave in ways that seem truly miraculous.

On another note, I've just discovered how to add a "favicon" to the URL line of my blog, and after experimenting with many complex images, have decided to use this simple "white portal" on a purple background to symbolize my quantum tantric quest to discover radically new "doorways into Nature"

New doorway into Nature?

ADDENDUM: My younger brother Duke, an ex-Marine now living in Montana, suggested THIS as a candidate image for "doorway into Nature."

Brother Duke's old doorway into Nature

Alternative to Marriage

"I've come to New York to introduce an alternative to marriage." --Jon Keats

With five millennia of history, and a plethora of religious and civil ceremonies, marriage is a popular means of producing families. Yet matrimony isn't the only method of uniting people, nor even is it the most effective technique. Modern science suggests a far more profound alternative, one that does not operate by religious tradition or civil mandate, but rather bonds couples by a law of nature: quantum entanglement. More here.