As you know very well, SF is full of gadgets and shortcuts, and in recent years “entanglement” seems to have replaced “sub-ether” as a favorite fast communication gadget. It doesn’t really upset me–but I am enough of a professor to point out that it won’t work as advertised.

Something slightly more plausible–and I should have mentioned it in my main article– would be using quantum devices as one-time communication gadgets. You can send messages one way, once, and then have to get a new one. I’m working on a series of stories using this, although none have sold yet….

It was a deliberate decision, for the sake of the story I wanted to tell, but I am enough of a hard SF proponent that it still makes me squirm a little. :-\

If orthodox quantum mechanics holds–and so far it has, spectacularly so–it is impossible to use entanglement to communicate.

If one finds a way to use something like entanglement to communicate, then orthodox quantum mechanics *must* be, at some level, wrong.

That’s entirely *possible.* By no means would I rule it out. Classical Newtonian mechanics is mostly right, but at some level it is wrong, and that wrong is relativity, and quantum mechanics.

(If you were to ask me, do I think it likely to happen in the real world? I have to say no. Most of the time, when we discover new theories, they general restrict us and upset us, more than hand us magic. There are exceptions: lasers, and E = mc^2, and antibiotics for example. But look at how classical mechanics is wrong. Relativity tells us there is an ultimate speed limit. Quantum mechanics tells us the universe is fuzzy and random. My guess is that any theory that replaces quantum mechanics will only make us feel worse, not better.)

In recent decades, physicist Austin McKinney, a researcher at the Broadlawn Institute, discovered that by imposing an intense oscillating magnetic field on the first entangled particle, a tunneling effect occurred, and he could influence the state it would take when he measured it. This, in turn, instantly controlled the state of the other particle when it was measured, no matter how far away the particle happened to be.
However, the tunneling process was far from perfect. The particle would adopt the desired state only once in ten thousand attempts. The other 9999 were random. But McKinney was undeterred. He developed a highly-redundant, error-correcting encoding scheme and was able to achieve a data transmission rate of 3 bits per hour.

So is it possible that physicists in the future will find a way to circumvent the breaking entanglement issue?

There are two problems–first, when one makes a crude metaphor for the microscopic world, it often is taken too concretely, and, second, there is a kind of exoticization of quantum mechanics which dwells on the metaphors; this is especially true when people try to tie it to some philosophical point, such as in Fritjof Capra’s awful book “The Tao of Physics.” So be aware that the metaphors are *just* metaphors.

The way to really understand quantum mechanics is to learn it through mathematics; trying to describe quantum mechanics without math is like trying to describe a symphony to someone with cotton in their ears.

I’m a bad person to ask *because* I teach QM at a technical level; I don’t read popularizations when I can avoid it, because they are, frankly, painful.

That said, I remember Gary Zhukov’s “The Dancing Wu Li Masters” being less awful. Although superficially it looks like “The Tao of Physics,” Zhukov was careful to note that he was using metaphors to try to explain quantum mechanics–not using quantum mechanics to justify a particular philosophy. (It’s not the philosophy I object to, but the bad use of metaphor.)