An entanglement drive

Question

I am working on an alien race who use quantum entanglement to transport a craft over vast interstellar distances.
I am wanting to know if this form of transportation possible.
The drive could be used to transport all the subatomic particles that make up the ship instantaneously through space via entanglement. I am aware that quantum entanglement only applies to electrons but that can be overlooked due to their level of technology.
Any input regarding how this drive may work would be appreciated.

All my previous ideas have been proved to be impossible so please keep an open mind.

Answer 1

Quantum entanglement has to do with the quantum state of a system, it has nothing to do with transportation

Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon that occurs when a group of particles are generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in a way such that the quantum state of each particle of the group cannot be described independently of the state of the others, including when the particles are separated by a large distance.

Measurements of physical properties such as position, momentum, spin, and polarization performed on entangled particles can, in some cases, be found to be perfectly correlated. For example, if a pair of entangled particles is generated such that their total spin is known to be zero, and one particle is found to have clockwise spin on a first axis, then the spin of the other particle, measured on the same axis, is found to be counterclockwise.

Entanglement doesn't allow transporting particles, it just "connects" their quantum states. It's like expecting that I can send you a paper book I have just because we agreed on coloring the first letter of the book in red in both our copies.

Answer 2

Yes and no.

Quantum entanglement as a plot device in science fiction is often used to depict a way to transfer information at FTL speeds. Now, the actual science of this is much more discouraging... while particles do seem to be connected in a way that should allow for FTL communication, the truth of the no cloning theorem makes it absolutely impossible to do what you need to do to be able to signal at FTL speeds.

Basically if you have a pair of particles and if you can meet the nearly impossible challenge of keeping them entangled for long periods of time, "observing" one particles will determine it's spin, and also the spin of the other (remote) particle.

But if the other guys observe theirs (such as if they wanted to see if you'd looked at yours), then then "observe" the spin, and set it off early. So it can't even be the sort of signal of "when you see this drop out of its entangled state commence interstellar heist hijinks", because the act of seeing it literally sets it off.

However, there are some cranks and fringers who insist that it may be possible to cheat this anyway and have true FTL communication.

But that's not what you wanted right? Well, not exactly. Our universe really is just information even if it doesn't look that way to us. Transmitting information is equivalent to transmitting matter in some cases. It would be possible to build a device that makes a perfect copy of travelers on the other end. Of course, then you're left to the problem of what to do with the originals, which is a trope in and of itself...

Just that you can't do the "spaceships instantaneously zipping to a new location" thing with this. Sorry, but frankly physics is a partypooper and does not want us to have any fun at all. Go to hell physics, you've been ruining reality since forever!

Answer 3

Wormhole generation

Leonard Susskind claims that a pair of entangled particles is comparable to a wormhole. If we suppose this is true, all you need to do is expand this preexisting entanglement wormhole using some sort of warp drive.

Answer 4

Do your aliens have to be made of matter?

Consider first an artificial intelligence - a computer program that thinks and is aware. It is pure information. It can be transmitted from one computer to another, and it would think of this process as 'travel'. An AI could simply broadcast itself out into the universe, in the hopes that some distant lifeform would one day receive the signal, realise it is a computer program, and run it to see what it does.

Now consider what would happen if you had an AI running on a quantum computer. Quantum computers operate by entanglement. If you link n particles together that can each exist in 2 states (called qubits), then it acts like a set of $2^n$ computers in parallel universes all running the program simultaneously, so it has $2^n$ times the computational power of an ordinary computer. If $n$ is more than about 300, that's more ordinary computers than can be fitted into the observable universe. And there's no reason in physics why you couldn't hook up billions of qubits. Pretty smart!

And if these qubits are distributed across vast distances, the entanglement between them remains, and they continue to act like a single coordinated entity. The different parts of its mind cannot convey information from one part to another, but where they need to make a decision, they can ensure that each part of it makes the same decision. If their forces from planet X attack your left flank, their forces from planet Y will attack your right flank in perfect coordination, even though there is no way for the message to get from X to Y in time. They don't travel vast distances across the galaxy because they don't have to - they are already there! They occupy many different places at once. They occupy many different parallel universes at once! And with their vast computing power, they can create many artificial virtual-reality worlds internally, which they can explore.

It has even been seriously suggested that our own entire universe might actually be a simulated world running in some alien's quantum computer. There's no way we could tell the difference from the inside. And that would mean that we are software, too. Such aliens might sometimes pop down into the computer to talk to us, like we talk to AIs living in our computers.

By the way, it's not just electrons that can be entangled. Any particle can. That includes photons, neutrons, protons, entire atoms, and even tiny rods of silicon consisting of billions of atoms.

Answer 5

Let's start with the old sci-fi staple: the transporter. In principle it works by scanning an object, recording its state, sending the info to the destination, and then having a device at the other end build a copy using locally available matter. Presumably the original object is destroyed in the process.

When you consider quantum mechanics this fails. You typically can't simply measure a quantum state of a particle. In some sense you only ever get partial information because in quantum mechanics you choose what measurements to make and that means you permanently lose other aspects of the state.

But quantum teleportation fixes this. It allows you to send information about the quantum state of a particle to another location where that information can be applied to another particle. (It's destructive the sense that it changes the state of the particle here.) There already has to be matter at the destination just as in the case in my first paragraph.

For quantum teleportation to work the source and destination locations must share a pair of entangled particles. And to complete the protocol some ordinary classical information must also be sent. So no faster than light magic.

So in summary: it could allow construction of a transporter that allows quantum states to be transferred from matter here to matter there. But it doesn't move the matter itself.