Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, paything everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says, don't I
know you from somewhere? I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Vocalban,
(00:22):
I'm Joe McCormick. And today we wanted to talk about
the speed of communication and how that might one day
be a problem. Have you listened to our previous podcast,
you probably heard us talk about how we've really kind
of cracked the speed nut as far as communication goes
here on Earth. It's more of a throughput or bandwidth
issue than a speed issue. But when you start looking
(00:42):
beyond Earth, we still have that speed problem, don't we,
and cross long enough distances? Yeah. Yeah, And we have
a fairly recent example of how this can become a
challenge with the the landing of the Curiosity Rover on
Mars that happened in right, I was I remember where
the night this happened, So do I remember I was
covering it live for this Weekend Tech. Yeah. I was
(01:06):
just blogging about it on Facebook basically, and uh, and
I was watching the live stream and uh, which is
interesting because there were two delays going on. There was
the delay between what was happening on Mars and the
people at the actually imported at the NASA JPL finding
(01:27):
out about it, and then the delay of course between
them and then me at my house getting the stream.
Um and so. But when you think about that, it's
interesting because those are totally two totally different scales of delay. UM.
One is a very small delay based on throughput, like
how long does it take the bits of data from
(01:48):
their transmission to get to my computer so I can
watch them as pixels on my screen? Um? And And
that's throughput, like we talked about last time. Yeah, it's nothing.
It's is trying to squeeze that data into the wire
fast enough and reconstituted on the other end here. But
the other one has a really serious, significant physical limit, yes, um.
(02:12):
And what is that limit? Well, it's the speed of
light in a vacuum, uh so, which is very fast
but quite fair. It's like a thousand miles miles per
second basically, and we think of it as the universal
speed limit, although more on that later. Yeah, well, well
we can say that now, right, that's a good thing
to start with. Actually, um uh Einstein's theory of relativity
(02:35):
says that essentially nothing with mask can go the speed
of light or faster. It's it's an absolute limit. And
the reasons for that are multiple, but basically it would
take infinite energy and and and by the time that
you worked up to it, you would have infinite mass
and everything would be messy. Ye yeah, yeah, that's exactly it.
It would be impossible to propel yourself because you anyway, yeah, good,
(02:59):
good way to put that. Um. So uh so we
think that's the universal speed limit. Um. Well that and
that's what resulted in the fact that it took us
so several minutes to learn the right, That's what I
was getting too. So we're here on Earth and the
people at I realized, the people of the Jet Propulsion
(03:20):
Lab didn't know for about fourteen minutes whether the lander
had succeeded or whether it was you know, like Martians
had captured it and taken it for their purposes, right,
um or what We just had no idea, And so
here it was just an issue of suspense um. Because
(03:44):
the transmission traveling at the speed of light at the
maximum speed, takes that long to get to us, and
we just don't know, but this could actually be a
real problem for exploring other planets, right, what if you
needed to control something in real time on another planet
that the Mars landing was relatively simple, I mean, it's
we were pretty sure that we weren't crashing it and
(04:04):
attending any mountains, you know, and that they were we
were pretty sure there were no giant space lugs out
there ready to eat it, so it was okay. But
you know, but if there have been space lugs, or
if there the planet's surface had been treacherous enough where
for some reason we thought a human being would be
more capable of piloting that ship rather than a very
sophisticated computer than obviously, that would have been an issue
(04:27):
because there would have been a very long delay from
the time when the the lander would be able to
relay that information to you, and then just as long
for your commands to go back to the land there
so that it could adjust in any way. And by
that time conditions will have changed dramatically. I mean you're
talking half an hour almost, right. So this is a
(04:47):
weird case where it's not really a problem here on Earth,
but when you start exploring the galaxy, the speed of
light just isn't fast enough, so we need something faster
we do. Is there a way to talk to the
curiosity lander faster than light can get from one place
to another. Well, before I give my answer, I think
we should probably talk about some some potential ways that
(05:11):
according to give my answer at the end, According to
star Trek, there these there, there's the subspace that's kind
of like a parallel dimension that these are these particles
called called tetrians are floating around, and these these are
really really random momentum particles, and when they bleed over
into real space, all kinds of wacky stuff happens that
makes for really compelling television hopefully. Um right, but but
(05:33):
but but as far as I can tell, this is
not this is not one of those things. It's really
a plot device more so, right, It's than any kind
of physics. It's say, how do we get around this
fundamental problem. Let's explain it away with something that doesn't
really particles, and then we just say, oh, they were
discovered in two so that way no one can complain
(05:53):
about the fact that these things don't seem to exist. Well,
the Vulcans have been using them since Earth Year. The vulcans.
Are they universes hipsters? We have established that, you know,
they were. They were using tetrion particles before it was cool.
They even have the little hipster bangs like they They however,
have already moved beyond the ironic mustache. Yes, yes, clearly.
(06:15):
You know. Well, it's funny that the difference essentially between
science fiction and fantasy is that the magic things in
fantasy are designed to sound like religious items, and the
magic things in sci fire design to sound like things
from a science text book. Well, and of course, and
and tetrion is really close like obelisks of you know,
(06:35):
like it's just yeah, well but tetrians is a really
close word to take on. Yeahh there we go. Well,
so some people do think that maybe take eons could
help us talk faster than light, get information from one
place to another at a superliminal speeds. So so what
(06:56):
what is a tack eon? Well, attack eon is partically
Oh yeah, I want to emphasize this, a hypothetical particle
that means and that's different from a theoretical particle. Um
theoretical would be one that that's integral, like to some
theory that yeah, Higgs integral to some theory that we
have good evidence for hypothetical just means like we can
(07:19):
posit it and we can sort of talk about it,
but there's no evidence for it. You can justify it
in the sense of creating a mathematical expression that that
where it makes sense, but there's no other evidence whatsoever, right, um,
And and even the first thing you said, the making
sense math mathematically is questionable, but we can talk about
(07:41):
that in a second. So tacons are super liminal particles,
and that means that they always go faster than the
speedy We cannot approach the speed of light. They cannot
slow down that much because it would take again an
infinite amount of energy, right to slow them down. So
you sort of imagine, imagine a big X shape, and
we and all the matter that we know about are
(08:02):
in the bottom triangle of that X. Right. We live
down there, and as we and the where the exes
where the triangles intersect, basically the cross of the X,
that's the speed of light, alright, So it's the center
of the X, right, And as we approach that, going
up towards the top of our little triangle, things start
(08:24):
getting wonky. Of course, you know that we have time
dilation and and crazy stuff, and we can't get to
the apex of that triangle. Um. They live in the
top triangle. Tachyons are up there, and they're basically an
inverse of everything that we experience in the bottom half.
As they approach the speed of light going down towards
(08:46):
that cross, things get wonky. It stops making sense. But
they travel faster than light. If they exist, it's possible.
Some people think that, well, could we harness them to
communicate faster than light? And there are some serious objections
I think to this hypothesis. UM. One of them, of course, is,
(09:10):
as we said, we have no proof that these things
even exist, so we're talking hypothetically anyway, and that should
always be noted as a major objection. UM. But number two, Uh,
you would bring on causality paradoxes if you could really
use what some some physicists described this device as the
tachyonic anti telephone. Right. It's a device that allows you
(09:34):
to call the past as the person who receives your
message would get it before you had actually sent it, right,
And and that's actually what Einstein's theory relativity says. Right,
If if you go faster than the speed of light.
What it seems to imply is that you would start
going backward in time, which doesn't make any sense at all,
(09:54):
at least as far as we can understand, right, And
so that's another major objection. Uh. Also from what I've read,
if you if you look at tach eons um, the
math is really strange to to justify them. So again
using relativistic equations, what it looks like is that in
order for attack on to have actual real energy, it
(10:17):
has to have imaginary mass. Right. I remember seeing an
example being it would have a mass of the square
root of negative one. That's exactly right. Imaginary, an imaginary
number hurt my brain. I'll tell you what's hurting my brain.
So Joe was talking about this x where all of
our matters on the bottom and all the tachyon stuffs
(10:38):
on the top. Who lives on the left and right?
I think that was the new Trinos from the Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon series. Okay, all right, well, and
the street Sharks they're over on the right. I'm back up.
I'm back up to speed now, but I've been lost
since then, so sorry. Yeah, relativistic street sharks carry our
data faster than light, and then we've done it. No.
(11:00):
But so basically the tachy on business is really complex
and definitely above my head. But from everything I've read, uh,
people who know what they're talking about don't seem to
give this much credibility. They don't think you can do it. Um.
And one major problem is again you mentioned the two
different parts of the X. Well, they're two different parts
(11:23):
of the X. So even if these things exist up there,
there's no way to know that we can mess with them.
There may be no way to interact with that at all.
They could be um what what physicists would call free particles,
meaning that they just don't interact with our type of matter. Right. Well, uh,
I have another I have another little hypothetical thing. This
(11:43):
one's this one, This one's very goofy. Yeah, alright, So
let's say that Lauren, that you are in a you're
living in a space station, like yeah, you know what
You're you're building robots to eventually take over the planet
around which your space station orbits. I've asked you not
to talk about this in public. I'm sorry which planet
it would be for the for this argument's sake, we'll
(12:04):
say Earth, this is all a certain ringed planet. It
was all documented in the movie Determinators. Um. And then
let's say that I'm on a space station that's five
d light years away. Good okay, and and so no,
that's not what I mean. This show is going to
have one less host, one fewer host in a minute. Um.
(12:25):
So let's say that that I want to send I
want to get Lauren's attention, but I'm five hundred light
years away. If I were to send a message uh
from our respective points of view, that would take five
hundred years at light speed to go from my my
station to her station. And in five dred years, Lauren
might not care so much that I found her old
(12:47):
cell phone that left in the station. That that that
that Facebook status update would not be critical. So let's
say that I've devised an ingenious plan. I have a
bell installed in Lauren's space station, and attached to that
bell is a string that's five hundred light years long,
and the end of that string is inside my space station.
(13:08):
And so I just grabbed the end of that string
and I give it a really good tug, so they
will ring the bell inside Lawrence space Station. Now, wouldn't
that bell ring the instant I pull that string. Thus
I am able to communicate. I'm able to get some
form of information across instantaneously across five hundred light years
without having to send a message all the way through. No,
(13:29):
And that would actually be way way slower than a
normal and light speed because we're talking about sound speed, right.
A radio transmission travels at the speed of light. A
wave propagation along a string travels at the speed of sound. Right, Yeah,
you're talking about the same thing. Might even be slower
than the SPEEDI that's essentially string speed of sound, speed
of push or speed of poll is the way a
(13:50):
lot of people say it. But it's the speed of
sound through that particular medium. So in other words, uh, like,
if we were to change that and instead of it
being a string, it's it's a pole. So it's like
a metal pole that stretches five hundred light years and
I start to move my end of the metal pole,
it would actually take longer than five years for that
to propagate across the entire length of the pole, so
(14:12):
that the end that's in Lawrence Space Station would start
to wiggle. This seems counterintuitive, but it's completely true. It's
depending completely upon that that that vibration propagating across, that
wave propagating across and you can see this. There's some
great videos on YouTube where people have a slinky and
they're holding one end of the slinky up vertically like
(14:34):
you know, so that the bottom of the slinky is
off the ground, and then they let go of the
top of the slinky and you you watch it in
slow motion. You can actually watch the wave propagate across
the length of the slinky. Now, the top of the
slinky starts falling towards the ground according to gravity, pulling
it down. It's accelerating at at the speed of gravity,
but the bottom of the slinky remains in place until
(14:57):
that wave propagates acrocess. So yeah, you'll actually see like
the top of the slinky is falling to the ground
and the bottom of the slinky is still there until
that wave propagates, and then the bottom of the slinky
starts to fall. So this is now on on Earth.
This is so quick that we barely notice it. Right,
You're going an incredibly long slinky for us to notice
(15:20):
this when it's not slowed down to super slow speeds,
but when you're talking about light years. That's a huge distance,
and it that at that scale this stuff really matters.
And so that's why you could not just have, you know,
two cans and a piece of string and and just
chat across the emptiness of space that way. Expect an
(15:40):
answer anytime soon. Anyway, So we've established that Tachian is
probably a no go treehouse telephone, not as good as
what NASA uses. I tried really hard. So what else
is left? Are there other ways people might think we
might be able to go faster than what we've got, Well,
there's there's here's another theoretical sort of well hypothetical sort
of thing, but it falls apart once you do the math.
(16:02):
I don't have a whole lot of detail on it,
but I just want to kind of give a quick
shout out to the Casimir effect, which is a small
but measurable force that exists between two uncharged conducting plates
when they are incredibly close together, and photons that travel
across the gap between these two uncharged conducting plates go
(16:25):
faster than the speed of light by a very very
very small amount. Yeah, so from based upon measurements, the
photons are actually moving faster than what photons can move. However,
once and this is all theory, by the way, but
but theoretical investigations into this effect to see if this
(16:45):
would be a way to scale this in any form
of communication have turned out to show that there's nothing there.
You can't you can't communicate this way um. Then there's
quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement. Speaking of photons, yeah, this photons
are are one thing you could do. You could do
with polarization of photons. But quantum entanglement. This is the
idea that before we get into this, we should say
(17:06):
that this is the big one, right, this is the
big kuna. This is the one that people think, they
really do think maybe there's this one, this one in
quantum tunneling. These are the two big ones. They're they're
they're actually talking about setting up a setting up a
quantum entanglement experiment on the International Space Station. Yeah, so
let's let's get into ye. So, so quantum entanglement brings
(17:27):
in some problems with quantum theory, I say problems, Einstein
said problems. Einstein found this idea of quantum entanglement to
be really problematic and scary, spooky, yeah, you actually call
it spooky action at a distance. Well, so, quantum entanglement
is this concept where you get these two sub atomic
particles and they are entangled in such a way that
(17:50):
the behavior of one will tell you something about the
behavior of the other. So necessarily, like you definitely know
when they're entangled. Yeah, well, not definitely, notily um, because
it gets a little complicated. Uh, because Heisenberg's uncertainty principle
tells us that we cannot know everything about we can
we can draw a conclusion about something about the other
(18:12):
particle's behavior. So, for example, we might talk about the
spin of a subatomic particle. Now, spin can be across
different axis. It's not just across one axis. But for
the purposes of this, I'm just going to say we're
just gonna look at one axis of spin to make
this a simple example. But please keep in mind that
(18:33):
this is just as simplified example. It's not how the work. Right. So,
let's say that you've got two subatomic particles that are entangled,
and one of them is spinning along an axis in
a clockwise direction relative to your position. So when you
observe it, it looks like it's moving in a clockwise position.
Remember everything's relative. Well, then the other particle, even though
(18:57):
you haven't even looked at it, you will know that
because the two are entangled, the other particle is going
to spin in the opposite direction of the first one.
So it's spinning in a counterclockwise or witter Shan's direction
based upon your uh, your perspective, read your Shakespeare Joe
uh so, so yeah, it's it's clockwise and and and counterclockwise.
(19:19):
Or as one of my uh one of my my
directions once said for a fan that I was trying
to build anti counter clockwise would be the first one,
and clockwise would be whatever. So we have one starring clockwise,
the other one string counterclockwise. By observing one, you know
what the other one is doing. But at that point
that entanglement breaks down. They are no the behavior of
(19:39):
one is no longer dependent or entangled with the behavior
of the other. They're not to be right because you've
observed it. That system is broken down. That's one of
the big challenges, or really the big barrier to quantum
entanglement is that you cannot actually pass information through entanglement. Well,
wait a minute, I don't know if we said for sure,
(20:00):
why this would be faster than the speed of light,
And that would be because you can take these things
really far apart, right, you can. You could take one
sub atomic particle to the other end of the universe,
you know, in theory, and once once even tangled them,
they're they're entangled, right, It's non localized. It's the locality
is not an issue at least well locality as we
understand it in the sense of space. In the quantum world,
(20:22):
locality means lots of different stuff. So that's it's one
of those things where part of the problem is just
the vocabulary and the way that the quantum physicists use
it as opposed to people like me. It could be
that these two quanta are actually right next to each
other in a dimension that we can't even see. That.
That's one way of looking at it. Yes, so in
the in the dimension of space, they could be very
(20:43):
far apart. You could have one on the other side
of Alpha Centauri, one here on Earth, and by observing
the one here on Earth, you know what the one
on Alpha Centauri, what what that one behavior of the
one in Alpha Centauri was doing. So that's positing the
transfer of information uh, instantaneous lee or Another thing I
read was that they think maybe it goes at like
ten thousand times the speed of lighters. Yeah, that's what
(21:06):
that's what one professor has come up with. Well recently,
the Einstein Boris Podolski and Nathan Rosen all thought that
this was that this was a terrible idea, that that
it was clearly that the problem was that we just
didn't understand enough about quantum theory and that this could
not be possible. They raised what was called well, now
(21:28):
we do know different things, we do know more, but
we know we know it's impossible for different reason, for
a different reason than what they They came up with
what was called the EPR paradox, which is essentially what
I was saying, that you know, you cannot transmit information
faster than the speed of light. And in fact I
saw a great example Karen Masters that Cornell has a
(21:48):
has a little uh web page where she was answering
questions about this sort of stuff, and she said, all right, now,
imagine this scenario. You've got two friends and they are
an equal distance away from you on the other side
of the galaxy, So ones on one direction, ones in
the other direction, And before they left, you told them
that you would send a beam of light uh to
(22:14):
each of them, and the beam for one of them
would be read and the beam for the other one
would be blue, and you would send them both at
the exact same time. So you send those beams, and
the one on one end of the galaxy ss red,
so they know that the one on the other end
of the galaxy is blue. Does that mean that they
have received information faster than the speed of light in
the answer is no, because they actually already had the
(22:35):
information subluminally, because they learned about it before they even
left Earth. That they haven't gained anything new here, and
that there is no way to actually communicate real information
using this method. You all you can do is draw conclusions.
So there's there's this barrier. It's it's an interesting phenomenon
and phenomenon, I should say, and it would be really
(22:59):
cool to learn are about it, but it does not
look like there's any way to harness it to actually
communicate any information, right right right. It's it's not like
a like a Morse code kind of thing where you write, no,
you can you can look at a photon to learn
a fact, but you can't send information for one thing,
you cannot even manipulate those those quanta to do what
you want. They what's happening is the quanta are in
(23:21):
an unknown state and then you observe it, you learn
the state. But at the same time that breaks down
that entanglement. So you can't manipulate the state of the quanta.
I mean, you can manipulate the state like crazy if
you're a politician. I mean, essentially, what you're saying is
that the problem with quantum entanglement is you may be
able to know things across a great distance really fast,
(23:43):
even faster than light, but all you can do is
just no a random outcome far away and you can't
know everything. Yeah, so that's the other thing is that
you're you're learning that it's changed. You can you can
you know random outcome, but you can't get messages back
and forth exactly. And so yeah, it's not it's not communication, right.
(24:05):
Maybe someday we'll learn some way of harnessing that. But
it looks like it's a fundamental element of the universe.
It's something that is just beyond our ability to to manipulate.
Can I tell you, I'm really excited about all the
email we're going to get about how we're totally misunderstanding this. Well,
i'll be sure to afford it to you. Actually you're
(24:28):
on that list, so you'll be able to see it yourself.
Let's move on to quantum tunneling. Excellent, because the tunneling,
it's a quantum tunneling. Have you heard about that? What
is that? What quantum dwarves do know? Is that what
those quantum the quantum worms from tremors, you know, Oh,
I know what you're talking about. But those were not
quantum No, no, they were on far too great a
(24:49):
scale to be on the quantum scale. Well, okay, just
tell me about your boring quantum tunneling. Sure will, so,
all right, Now, when you get down to really super
super super tiny scales like the nano scale, all right,
and or the atomic scale, that's that's even better. So
you get to the atomic scale, let's say you've got
(25:10):
an electron traveling down a pathway. You don't really know
exactly where the position of that electron is at any
given moment. You really can just create sort of a
sphere around the potential places where that electron could be
given its momentum. So you don't. You don't really know
(25:30):
exactly where that electron is. That's my point, all right.
So that sphere is a certain size, you have like
a probability, a probability, there's a probability that could be
at any on any point in that sphere. Now that
sphere is approaching an electronic gate, so a transistor. So
this is something that we'd see in a microprocessor, and
(25:51):
in fact, quantum tunneling is something that microprocessor manufacturers have
to actually worry about. So it gets towards this gate.
The gate is closed, which means that the electron should
not pass through it. But if the gate is thin enough,
so we're talking about a microprocessor that's got very very
very tiny connections in order to pack as many transistors
(26:12):
in there as possible. If the gate is thin enough,
then that field where the electron possibly could be could
overlap that gate and actually pass on to the other side.
And because the probability is there that the electron might
be on the other side, sometimes it is on the
other side, so it it's as if it has passed
through the gate without actually passing through it. On one moment,
(26:35):
it's on one side. On the next the next moments
on the other side. Now, with microprocessors, this is a
problem because if the gate is supposed to be closed
and blocking off the electrons, and the electrons are passing
through any then we don't want tron electron to be
on the other side. Yeah we've got you can get
computer errors, you know, things that it's just not working
properly because it cannot control the flow of electrons the
way it needs to in order to run processes. So
(26:57):
this is a real problem when it comes to micro architecture.
This gets into a thing about matter, right that solid
matter isn't really solid. Yeah there's more empty space, and
yeah there's all that as well, but that's that's slightly different,
but an interesting idea. So the part about quantumunneling that
gets too faster than light communication is that it appears
(27:18):
that the electron can pass over a distance faster than
a photon would be able to travel that same distance.
So you know this this jump where it would go
from one side of the gate to another side of
the gate. It could do that at a speed that's
faster than the speed of light. How is that possible?
Because an electron has mass. I see, that's a good question,
(27:40):
and honestly the answer is really more like we probably
it's probably another manifestation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, where to
us it appears as if the electron is moving faster
than the speed of light, when in reality it's not.
But it's really just a probability issue more so than
a right, it's more of a probability thing than a
than actual speed thing. But then you know, there are
(28:02):
those who have said that you if you calculate it
at these incredibly tiny distances. Remember this is we're talking
the nano scale here, so very small sto nanometer is
one billionth of a meter, so we're talking really really
tiny at that scale. Uh, it's essentially that electron might
move at what would be equivalent to four point seven
(28:23):
times the speed of light. But again it's all this
probability and certainty stuff. It may not have anything to
do with speed at all. It has to do with
our understanding of of quantum mechanics. Well, yeah, I mean
it would have to write because that would posit like
we talked about earlier, that the electron would have to
have infinite mass and infinite energy, right, So obviously that's
(28:46):
not happening. And again most physicists are saying that there's
even with this interesting phenomenon, there's no capacity here for
faster than like communication. So you know, we've been shooting
down these things left and right. I think ultimately what
the conclusion we come to is, as we understand the
(29:07):
world to operate, as of right now, there is no
faster than like communication opportunity out there. That's not to
say that we won't find it later done the line,
and that some discovery won't allow us to have this
This what to us right now really does seem well,
(29:27):
it does seem impossible based on what we know. But
I think we should point out that almost every really
really cool innovation has come by people trying to do
things that were said to be impossible, right, Yeah, Yeah,
And and who knows what we'll know tomorrow? Yeah, who
knows what we'll know by the time this podcast goes live. Yeah,
we'll get more of those emails, right, excellent, And if
(29:47):
we're lucky, maybe we already received them because they were
sent faster than light and they've traveled back in time
to before we only they had gotten here just before
we recorded, we could have prevented all that attacking on
anti email server. Yeah, I think I've got my spam
filter blocking all tacky on messages. So yeah, all right,
Well that that's a good discussion on fast and light communication.
(30:10):
We're gonna wrap this sucker up. So guys, if you
have any suggestions on topics we should tackle in future
episodes of Forward Thinking, get in touch with us. Let's know,
we've got an email address that's f W Thinking at
discovery dot com. Or drop us a line on our
website that's fw thinking dot com. You can read our
blogs there, you can watch the video series, you can
(30:31):
listen to more episodes of the podcast. You can join
us on our social media, and you can tell us
how we all need to go attend a quantum mechanics
lecture to make sure that we know what we're talking about.
I am fairly confident, but then I'm also tired. But
we will all talk to you again, maybe in the past.
(30:56):
For more on this topic in the future of technology,
visit forward Think dot com problem brought to you by Toyota.
Let's go places