CHAPTER 10
A Bridge to the Stars
“Where are they?”
—Enrico Fermi’s response to a statement that there must be billions of highly advanced civilizations in the universe having developed interstellar travel and visiting Earth, while walking to lunch with Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, and Herbert York, 1950
THERE ARE TWO POSSIBILITIES. EITHER the infinite universe, with 200 billion observable galaxies and 200 billion stars per galaxy, has a percentage of those stars with planets capable of supporting life, which has evolved into sentient beings, and a percentage of those beings are far enough along to wonder if there is anyone else in the infinite universe, or it does not. Either outer space is teeming with life and, given that our civilization is probably about average, some of it is coming for us; or we are the only living things in the universe. Although the second possibility makes the vast universe seem rather pointless, there is no law or principle in physics indicating that the universe cannot be pointless. Either possibility is slightly terrifying upon contemplation.
The great Italian nuclear physicist Dr. Enrico Fermi wondered aloud why if there are so many advanced civilizations out there they are not all over us, buzzing in and out and landing all over the place. The great British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle countered, stating that they are buzzing all around. We call them “insects,” a class of life for which he could see no evolutionary reason for existing, so they must have come here from outer space.212
Finding, confirming, and making contact with extraterrestrial civilizations may well be mankind’s ultimate quest, and modest steps are currently underway. First, we must discover whether planets, gravitationally gathered globular clumps of supernova debris that have by chance fallen into orbit around a star, are a novelty in our solar system or are common. We had long ago determined that stars are common and more recently found that they are all fusion-powered energy sources, warming up planets against the near-zero cold of outer space and melting the ice on those planets lucky enough to be at just the right distance from the fusion. In just the last decade, improved optical telescope technology has taken us a step further, discovering planets orbiting faraway stars and indicating that they are not a local fluke.213 In the past few years, 2,111 “exoplanets” have been discovered in 1,354 planetary systems. It is now estimated that each star in the Milky Way Galaxy has an average of 1.6 planets orbiting around it. In 2011, the first Earth-sized planets were found orbiting a star, Kepler-20, which is about the size of our Sun. Our Sun, when compared to all the other stars, is somewhat ordinary. It is not too big and not too small, and it is an average kind of star, a GV2 main-sequence type, commonly called a “yellow dwarf.”
About 20% of these G-type stars have an Earth-sized (class M) planet orbiting in the habitable zone, a distance from the star that paints the planet with enough energy to allow complex organic molecules to exist without freezing or boiling away. The nearest such planet is probably about twelve light years away. That is the distance that light travels through the vacuum of deep space in twelve years, or 72 trillion miles. Light clocks out at 186,000 miles per second or 300 million meters per second. As Dr. Albert Einstein pointed out in 1904 in his special relativity theories, nothing can travel faster than light, and it takes an impossible amount of energy to accelerate to any speed approaching that of light.
Before worrying about how we are going to travel twelve light years to meet our neighbors, the next step in extraterrestrial life determination is to search for characteristic light-absorption spectra for organic gases in the atmospheres of class M planets orbiting G-type stars in the habitable zone, looking for scant evidence as their orbits pass between our advanced telescopes and their suns. This will not be easy. Close surface analysis of our own partner class-M planet which is sort of within the habitable zone, Mars, has yet to discover evidence that life ever existed on it. If only we could find some fossilized remnant of even the most primitive life, it would bolster the quest for interstellar life. If life could have once existed on Mars, back when it had lakes of water and a heavier atmosphere, then life would show a tendency to come about under less-than-perfect conditions.
Anticipating success in this step, there have been concerted efforts to find radio beacons or obviously intelligent radio communications signals originating somewhere in the cosmos. Methods for scanning the sky for extraterrestrial radio signals came about with the introduction of radio astronomy. In 1932, Karl Jansky, working for Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, built a large, rotating short-wave antenna array to find out where radio static was coming from. He found that it was coming from the sky, and most of it seemed to be received with the antenna pointed toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy, straight at the Sagittarius constellation. From this one observation was born radio astronomy, and in the second half of the twentieth century many large antennae were built and pointed up into the cosmos. Bright objects in the universe, as it turns out, emit radiation over the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma rays to radio waves, and we had only been seeing them using a tiny slice of this spectrum, the visible light.214
On November 28, 1967, at the United Kingdom Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory on the outskirts of Cambridge, a strange signal was received at 19 hours 19 minutes right ascension and plus 21 degrees declination, in the constellation Vulpecula. It was a continuous, precisely pulsing radio signal, with a period of 1.2272 seconds and a pulse width of 0.04 seconds. Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish were the first to hear it. It did not sound like the usual static from outer space. It sounded as if it were a purposeful, artificially constructed alarm, like a radio beacon. They named it LGM-1, meaning “Little Green Men,” and cautious speculation as to its source began at once.
Astronomers Sir Fred Hoyle and Thomas Gold immediately interpreted the signal as radio frequency radiation from a very rapidly spinning neutron star, the small but extremely heavy remnant from a supernova explosion. The radio astronomers had not discovered a beacon from another race of beings. They had discovered a new type of thing in the cosmos, the pulsar, and it was designated PSR B1919+21. Hewish, at least, won the Nobel Prize in physics for it in 1974. Hoyle protested loudly that Burnell, as joint discoverer, should have been included in the prize.
By 1971, NASA was interested in searching for extraterrestrial radio communications, and Bernard M. Oliver and John Billingham started Project Cyclops, and A Design Study for a System of Detecting Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life was published by the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California. It made an impact on the large-antenna community of radio astronomers, and it was read with interest. Billingham went on to found SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, in Mountain View, California.
Six years passed, and SETI scientists discovered a lot more pulsars. On August 15, 1977, Jerry R. Ehman was working on a SETI project at the Big Ear radio telescope at the Perkins Observatory in Delaware, Ohio. The antenna was pointed northwest of the globular cluster M55, near the Chi Sagittarii star group in the constellation Sagittarius. The radio signal was computer processed and displayed graphically on a video terminal, and it always looked about the same: mostly blank spaces, with clusters of ones, some twos, threes, and an occasional four, all indicating a radio signal intensity. Out of the darkness came an unusual signal at 10:16 that evening, lasting for 72 seconds. It was a tight cluster on the monitor screen, making the alphanumeric sequence “6EQUJ5.” Ehman had never seen a signal quite like it. He printed it out, circled the cluster, and wrote “Wow!” next to it.
There was no information coded on the signal. It was simply a continuous radio wave, and the alphanumeric readout indicates only the strength of the signal as it gradually rose to a peak and then sank back to background level. It looked as if the fixed signal source moved into and out of the sensitive focus of the fixed antenna as Earth slowly rotated. The Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico was also listening that evening, and even though it is much more sensitive than the Big Ear, it did not register a similar signal. Decades of looking for a repeat of the signal reception have yielded nothing. The Wow! signal was as close as SETI has ever gotten to a radio signal from extraterrestrial intelligence.
On the 35th anniversary of the Wow! signal in 2012, the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope in Puerto Rico transmitted a response into that same piece of night sky, consisting of ten thousand Twitter messages. The problem with that gesture is that the M55 globular cluster, from which the signal may have come, is 17,500 light years away. That means that when that signal was transmitted, humankind was in the Paleolithic age, they had just domesticated dogs, mastodons were dying out, and a long ice age had descended from the north. The response signal will arrive in another 17,500 years, and by that time at the very least we will have long forgotten what “twitter” means. Over interstellar or intergalactic distances, radio communications become completely unusable. If we were to transmit “Hi there!” to an Earth-like planet in a habitable orbit twelve light years away, it would take twenty-four years to get back a response of “What?” Using the Project Cyclops model, SETI may have been looking for a signal from extraterrestrial intelligence for the past forty-five years using the wrong technology.
Nothing can travel faster than light, and that includes any other electromagnetic radiation besides light, including radio waves, infrared radiation, ultraviolet radiation, X-rays, gamma rays, spaceships, cannonballs, thrown bricks, microscopic dust, loose neutrons, electrons, protons, ionized molecules, and basically anything that displays a physical presence. But, what about something as abstract as information? It has no mass and none of the physical constraints of solid objects. Can information travel faster than light? There is a possibility.
To understand and be convinced of the existence of superluminal communications (information transfer faster than the speed of light) requires a long, scary drop into the darkness at the core of nuclear physics, a place where rational, right-thinking scientists must abandon common sense and connection to the real world. It is a place where scientists must accept blind faith, at least in mathematics, as a guide to concepts that confound and amaze but turn out to be unwaveringly true. It is quantum mechanics. The explanation will involve spontaneous parametric down-conversion, quantum vacuum fluctuation, nonlinear photonic crystals, the three-polarizer experiment, quantum erasure, photon entanglement, and Rick Steenblik. Please hang on.215
Physics is fundamentally based on the work of Sir Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century, and it is named “classical mechanics.” In general, classical mechanics is a set of mathematical rules that can predict the position, speed, acceleration, and trajectory of physical objects, from galaxies to dust particles, with accuracy as fine as can be measured. Using Newtonian classical mechanics to meticulously plan a trip, mankind can blast a rocket off the surface of the Earth, fly 50 million miles through outer space, and land softly on a target the size of a soccer field on the planet Mars.
It is impossible to beat the accuracy of classical mechanics until the sizes of objects to be moved are too small to be seen, as is the atomic nucleus. At this incredibly tiny scale, a lot of what we know about classical mechanics goes out the window. It turns out that many physical attributes, such as momentum, the brightness of light, or the volume of water, cannot be divided down forever. If a glass of water is cut by half over and over, eventually the volume gets so invisibly small that it cannot be further divided. Eventually all that is left is a single molecule of water, and when that is divided, it is no longer water. What is left are the components of a water molecule, which are an oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms locked together as a hydrogen molecule. The water molecule is therefore the quantum of water, or the smallest possible quantity of water. Dividing the hydrogen molecule, which is the quantum of hydrogen gas, yields two hydrogen atoms, each of which is the quantum of the element hydrogen. Dividing a hydrogen atom yields a proton and an electron, which are subatomic particles. Dividing the oxygen atom yields an oxygen nucleus plus eight loose electrons, and dividing the nucleus yields protons and neutrons, which are subnuclear particles, or nucleons. Subnuclear particles may be further divided into component parts. It is at this quantum scale where certain parts of classical mechanics no longer apply.
Some classical specifications are modified to fit the quantum scale, such as the conservation of energy. Classical mechanics says that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but quantum mechanics allows for energy to be converted to matter and for matter to be converted to energy, and the larger energy-matter sum is on most occasions conserved. Matter can be destroyed, as occurs in nuclear fission, but it shows up as an energy equivalent. Momentum is also conserved at the quantum level.
Electromagnetic radiation, which is observable by telescopes of all kinds, has some interesting, weird characteristics at the quantum level. Its physical presence has a dual-mode, or a superposition of states. It can be either a photon or a wave, depending on how you look at it. Photons are discrete puffs of energy, shot out of a light source like machine-gun bullets. The wave mode is a continuous, alternating magnetic and electric field, vibrating at a specific frequency and wavelength. In both modes, electromagnetic radiation travels at the speed of light. Measure it expecting a photon and it will be a photon. Try to find out that it is a wave and it will be a wave. It cannot be both at the same time, and until a sentient being turns on his instrument and points it at the light, it is neither and it is both. Until it is measured, its physical state is undetermined.
Information can be coded into electromagnetic radiation, which it is used for everything from local radio to fiber-optic digital service. Across the surface of the earth, a time lag due to the finite speed of electromagnetic radiation is hardly noticeable. For astronomical distances that consider the spacing between stars, the time lag kills the idea of using it for communications or data transmission.
Another property of electromagnetic radiation is polarization. The direction of vibration is either horizontal or vertical. In the wave mode, looking straight at the light source, the wave either undulates up and down or side to side as it approaches. In the photon mode, the particle either hops up and down or slides to and fro as it races forward. As is the case of the photon-wave traveling mode, the polarization (the direction of vibration) is undetermined until someone who knows what he is looking at tries to determine the state of polarization.216 The two polarization states are superimposed until observed. It does not matter how long the light has been traveling or over what distance it has traveled. The light from the M55 globular cluster, which is 17,500 light years away, has an undetermined polarization state until someone holds up a polarizing filter and gazes at the light through it.217
The most intriguing quantum property of light is the entangled state. The mathematical equations that describe photons seem to allow two photons, traveling in different directions and even having different vibrational frequencies, to share a common quantum state, such as polarization. Moreover, that polarization is undetermined for both photons, no matter how far apart they are or how long they have been traveling, until someone sticks a Polaroid filter in front of one of them. At that instant, the polarization angle of both photons snaps into being. The equations indicate a zero delay between establishing the polarization of the photon traveling through the Polaroid filter and the other photon that is traveling alone. Time and distance are not part of the equation. There is no speed-of-light lag time. If the two photons are separated by 6 trillion miles, the length of a light year, it does not matter. Both assert the same polarization angle simultaneously.218
This weird prediction from Niels Bohr’s otherwise productive “Copenhagen Interpretation” of the physical world came to light in 1935, when the Gang of Three—Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen (EPR)—jumped on this ridiculous entangled photon indication as a proof that quantum mechanics was at least incomplete and did not necessarily correspond to reality. Einstein had a word for entanglement: spooky! He immediately saw it as an implication that information coded into light polarization could travel faster than light, an action that was probably forbidden by his theory of special relativity. This presented as a paradox, at the least, and was seen as an indication that quantum mechanics was full of big, ragged holes. The EPR gang carried a lot of weight, and for decades, the existence of entangled photons was argued and debated, knowing that the credibility of the quantum mechanical world-model depended on consistent, accurate predictions.
The elegant EPR work from 1935 was blown out of the water in the early 1980s, while a lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan near Paris, Alain Aspect, was working on his doctorate in physics. He managed to build a series of physical experiments in which two entangled photons, separated by an arbitrary distance, obviously assumed the same state of polarization when one of them was measured. Aspect’s demonstrations proved that the weird Copenhagen version of reality is correct, while the orthodox reasoning of the EPR arguments is not. Reality had been redefined.
Discovering that two photons can be entangled was a big step, but finding a way to produce continuous streams of entangled photons, making them useful on a more practical level, would be another leap. By 1995, Dr. Paul Kwiat at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and others had built and tested optical setups that produce a pair of steerable beams of light in which a photon in one beam has a doppelganger in the other beam. Each pair of matched photons has an entangled, undetermined state of polarization, waiting to be purposefully snapped into either horizontal or vertical orientation as they sail off in opposite directions at the speed of light.
The technique used to make entangled photon pairs is parametric down conversion. Down conversion has been used in electronic work for decades to change the frequency of an incoming radio signal to a lower value. It is commonly used in cable and satellite television to reduce an extremely high-frequency microwave signal down to something that a television can handle, and it is used in home data systems to down-convert electromagnetic signals carried by cable and fiber-optical systems to make them readable by a Wi-Fi or Ethernet receiver operating at a lower frequency. For down-converting light, which involves frequencies far removed from the microwaves used in electronic systems, exotic methods are necessary.
An optical down-converter uses a powerful laser producing a tightly controlled beam of ultraviolet light. This beam is directed into a nonlinear photonic crystal, which absorbs each ultraviolet photon and instantly reemits it as a lower-frequency photon. A prime example of a down-converter crystal is the beta barium borate (BBO). Others include potassium dihydrogen phosphate (KDP) and lithium niobate (LN).
A photon’s frequency is directly proportional to its energy, with Planck’s constant as the scaling factor. If the photon is converted to one having a lower frequency, then the conservation of energy and momentum at the quantum level demands that the missing energy be accounted for. In a cable television the down conversion is justified by dumping the excess energy and momentum into the heat sink on the integrated circuit in the cable box. In the optical down-conversion crystal, the only way to even up the energy accounting is to make another photon. An ultraviolet photon thus turns into two red photons coming out the other end of the down-converter crystal. The two new photons retain the quantum features of the original ultraviolet photon. Every characteristic, including the energy, still adds up to that one, original photon, and yet it is now divided into two.
If an ultraviolet laser puts out a beam of photons vibrating at 1 × 1015 Hz (a wavelength of 300 nanometers), then each has an energy of 6.6 × 10–19 joules. If this incoming ultraviolet photon breaks evenly into two photons while blasting through a BBO crystal, that gives each new photon 3.3 × 10–19 joules, or a frequency of 0.5 × 1015 Hz (a wavelength of 600 nanometers, which corresponds to the color red). The wavelength or the frequency of visible light manifests as color.
Turning one photon into two lesser photons may seem simple, but making two entangled photons is a bit more complicated. Entangled conversion is a rare event, happening in only one out of a trillion down conversions in the appropriate crystal. It is a perfectly random event. It happens only if at the exact location in the crystal where a down conversion is in progress there happens to be a spontaneous vacuum fluctuation.
In the vast, empty vacuum that separates the subatomic particles making up the beta barium borate molecules and everything else that we consider solid, there exists a fundamental energy. In the quantum world, even absolute nothing has energy, and for a very short period of time the energy can become mass, for no other apparent reason than that it is mathematically allowed to. This vacuum energy and its spontaneous fluctuations may have been vitally important in the creation of the universe. It could also explain the current expansion of the universe and answer questions that we have yet to ask. For producing entangled photons, it is essential.
Fortunately, we can predict exactly where the two streams of entangled photons will exit the down-converter crystal, and the rest of the laser beam and its down-converted-but-not-entangled-photons are discarded. A new photon resulting from a down conversion of the ultraviolet laser beam is constrained to exit the crystal in a cone-shaped region, slightly off the axis from the input beam. Ultraviolet photons that do not participate in down conversion continue straight through the crystal. There are two converted photons per conversion, almost all of which are not entangled. Half of them are horizontally polarized, and half are vertically polarized.219 The two down-converted photons are separated into two exit cones out of the crystal, with the vertical polarized ones slightly off the laser axis on top and the horizontally polarized ones slightly skewed on the bottom.
In circular cross section, the two exit cones intersect. They overlap, like a Venn diagram demonstrating two sets intersecting. The two outgoing lines where the two cones intersect define the trajectories of those down-converted red photons that happen to be entangled. One goes left and one goes right, and these slightly angled paths can be diverted prismatically without measuring the polarization and spoiling the entanglement. The entangled red photons, lacking any defined polarization, hasten away in opposite directions at the speed of light.
By the time Paul Kwiat was publishing papers about making continuous streams of entangled photons, Rick Steenblik, recovering from our adventure with cold fusion, had resigned his research scientist position at the Georgia Tech Research Institute and formed a company, Chromatek, Inc., to exploit his patented 3-D optical system. Commerce rolled, and Steenblik enjoyed success.
Forever seeking a new technical challenge, Steenblik spontaneously decided to use the new, exciting work that described making entangled photons to develop a superluminal communications system. He formed a new company, Ansible, Inc. The name derived from a fictional machine that could send and receive messages instantly over interstellar distances, the ansible, appearing in Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction novel from 1966, Rocannon’s World. By 1997, he was working on a design and anticipating a patent application. The project was a deep industrial secret, code-named TAXI.220
One February morning, he came to my office at Georgia Tech, bubbling with quantum mechanical jargon, and produced a very large, heavy green notebook that came crashing down on my desk. Would I please review this document for technical accuracy? He was asking a lot, considering the nonexistence of spare time, but he had tweaked that tangle of nerves that cannot help but respond to something new and weird.
Imagine a trip to Mars. It could take over a year, and the onboard personnel want to be able to have phone conversations with people back on Earth every day as they travel toward the red planet. Using focused radio beams, daily communications are certainly possible, but in a few days the delay due to the speed of radio signals (light) as the distance between the ship and Earth lengthens puts an irritating interruption into the conversations. It is like trying to talk to someone in Europe over an undersea cable. Just a 1-second delay is enough to make the two who are conversing trip over each other every time there’s a pause, waiting for a response. By the time the Mars ship is only a fifth of the way to the destination, the delay has become an agonizing minute.
Now, imagine a trip to Mars with a small, automated communications-relay ship following the main ship, traveling at exactly half-speed. It is always behind the ship, halfway between it and Earth. On the relay are a pair of ultraviolet lasers, running continuously on a thermoelectric power source, like a Russian lighthouse. One is for ship-to-Earth transmission, and one is for Earth-to-ship transmission. Each laser assembly is sending out two beams of entangled red photons, with one aimed at the ship and one aimed back to Earth. Send/receive telescopes on the Mars ship and back on Earth keep the photon beams in sight. The ship-to-Earth laser is spaced forward, toward the ship, and the Earth-to-ship laser is spaced back, lagging behind and just a little bit closer to Earth than to the ship.
The telephone signal in the Mars ship is translated into digital ones and zeros, and is fed to an electronically stimulated polarization filter placed at the focal point of the ship’s transmitter telescope. The stream of red photons coming in at the telescope, not quite yet having decided on a quantum polarization state, are snapped into a modulated pattern of polarizations at the filter position, with a vertical polarization being a one and a horizontal polarization being a zero. The transmitter telescope is slightly closer to the photon source than the receiver back on Earth, so it is the transmitter that establishes a polarization state in the photons.
Immediately after having been given a polarization by the electrically flipped filter, the entangled photons are picked up on Earth by its receiver telescope and are focused onto a fixed, vertical polarization filter. The red signal from the relay ship blinks on and off, as the now polarized photons either slide through the filter or are stopped by it. A blink on means a one, and a blink off means a zero. Communication between the Mars ship and Earth is established, and there is no speed-of-light delay. The entangled photons respond instantly to the measurement of polarization using previously established beams of light. It doesn’t matter that it may have taken several minutes for the photons to travel. The fact that an entangled pair exists simultaneously at the transmitter and the receiver end makes all the difference.
To send reply signals back to the Mars ship from Earth, the other photon source, the one that is permanently positioned slightly closer to Earth than to the ship, is used in the same way. If that is insufficiently dramatic, then imagine a robot mission to a star that is twelve light years away. Using advanced ion drive, the automated craft accelerates to a respectable speed, but it is still going to take twenty years or so to make it to the distant planetary system and start mapping the area. What makes the mission possible is that there are no humans on board who have to be kept alive for forty years inside an enlarged telephone booth. Back on Earth, the ship is being flown like a drone, complete with a television camera and even hellfire missiles, if hostility is expected. Having an entangled photon relay ship trailing behind is the key to interstellar exploration.
Steenblik walked outside one clear night and picked a star out of the heavens. He held up a Polaroid filter and flipped it vertically and then horizontally several times. He wanted to be the first person on Earth to send an entangled photon signal to a receiver somewhere out there, using the supposition that the extreme, continuous photon load out of a star produces, by quantum probability, a number of entangled photons per second that are bound to hit Earth right before the entangled ones are intercepted by a planet that is slightly farther away on the other side of the star. If someone on that planet were searching for a digital polarization with a telescope, then a communication had been achieved.
An intriguing idea, is it not? If only it would work. There is one fatal flaw in the setup, and it is a big one. When a Polaroid filter is presented to an entangled photon with an undetermined state of polarization, it does not cause it to be polarized in the direction of the filter orientation. It finds the polarization, and it can be either horizontal or vertical. The quantum polarization of a photon is utterly random, as only a quantum property can be. (Although things can certainly seem random, nothing outside a quantum property actually is random.) Upon being impelled to reveal its polarization, a photon of undetermined state effectively tosses a coin. Heads it is horizontal; tails it is vertical. This is why a Polaroid filter blocks out half the light, and it makes a good sunglasses lens. On average, 50% of all photons coming directly from the light source are vertically polarized, and 50% are horizontally polarized. When you look through polarizing glasses at a light source, only half the available photons make it through the filter.
The sender and the receiver in the spaceship communications system both have the exact same sequence of random numbers, available at both ends with zero speed-of-light delay, for what it is worth.221
Maintaining focus, Steenblik continued the investigation with research into current developments, experimentation, and contemplation. Flipping through the pages of my green, not-to-be-reproduced notebook I found an inserted envelope labeled “3 POLARIZERS.” Inside were three Polaroid filters, cut from cinematic 3-D glasses. He had marked the direction of polarization on each filter with a pen. Steenblik had run across one of the simplest, most mysterious, and least understood puzzles in all of optical physics: the three-polarizer experiment.
Buy or borrow three plastic Polaroid filters. Hold one of them up to a light source, like a desk lamp, while looking through it. The light will look a bit dim. That’s because, now that you are measuring them, the photons are at randomly selected polarization angles. No matter how you hold the filter, half the photons will make it through the filter at an angle that it defines as “vertical” while the other half tries to go through 90 degrees out of phase and is captured by the filter, never making the crossing to your eyes. Now, take another filter, and put it in front of the first one. Rotate it 180 degrees, or one half of a full turn. You will watch as the second filter goes from transparent to opaque. At the opaque angle, the filter is set to the horizontal position, so you have one vertical and one horizontal filter in series, and nothing gets through. The first filter sets the previously undetermined polarization angle, and the half that are vertical make it through the filter. Everything coming through is therefore set to vertical, so there is no way it can make it through a horizontal polarization angle and the stack of two filters goes black. (Depending on the quality of your filters, the blackness may not be absolute.)
So far, everything is quite logical and simple. Now, take the third filter and slip it in between the two previously positioned filters, at a 45-degree angle. Presto! The filter pack goes clear, and the light source is now perfectly visible through the stack of three filters. The first one is vertical, the second one is at 45 degrees, or at an angle halfway between vertical and horizontal, and the third on is horizontal. You are actually looking at a light source dimmed to one quarter or 25% of its original brightness. Turn the third filter, in the middle of the stack, 180 degrees and watch as the light fades out to blackness and returns. Do it in front of a physicist. If he or she is not familiar with the experiment, the scientist will find it hard to believe what is happening and may scramble desperately for an explanation.
It turns out that photons have two independent polarization modes. There is the familiar vertical/horizontal mode and there is the lesser-known +45-degree/-45-degree mode. Wherever vertical is defined, there is another, completely different polarization with the photon vibration angle turned clockwise and set at the midpoint between vertical and horizontal. It is 45 degrees out of phase with vertical as one orientation, and perpendicular to 45 degrees as the other possibility, with the polarization axis turned counterclockwise and put halfway between vertical and horizontal.
A photon can be set by measurement to be either vertical/horizontal or +45 degree/-45 degree. It cannot be both at the same time.
When those photons make it through the first Polaroid filter, their polarization angles have been frozen in place by the act of measurement. All the photons striking the first filter are defined as either vertical or horizontal, and half of them make it through. The intensity of the light source is 50%. Next, the vertically defined photons hit a filter that is canted at 45 degrees. This filter is neither vertical nor horizontal. Passage through the filter is not defined, because there is no way for the photon to be in both polarization states at the same time.
Not having a logical path through or not through the filter, the quantum state of polarization is erased. The state of the photon’s quantum polarization is reset to its premeasured value, and we start over from scratch. The photons proceed to the third filter, but there are still only 50% of them. Half of them were irretrievably lost in passage through the first, now canceled, measurement.
The photons with newly undefined polarization states proceed through the horizontal filter, and they are redefined as either horizontal or vertically polarized. Half of them make it through the filter. The result is a clear view of the light source, cut down to 25% of its original intensity. Odd as it may seem, the light will go through a stack of three filters, but not through two of them. It does not matter whether the third polarizer, in the middle, is set for +45 degrees or -45 degrees. The effect is the same either way.
This three-polarizer phenomenon has been proven to give the same paradoxical results using entangled photons as it does with single photons in repeated experiments in multiple quantum-optics laboratories.
Steenblik’s inspired solution to the problem of not being able to send a meaningful series of ones and zeros faster than light using vertical/horizontal polarization was to use the quantum erasure phenomenon. Instead of flipping a vertical/horizontal filter between the two orthogonal states to make ones and zeros, this modified scheme uses a fixed vertical polarizer at the source of entangled photons pointed at the receiver, presetting both the receiver and the transmitter photons to have either horizontal or vertical polarization. At the faraway location of the transmitter, set slightly closer to the source than the receiver, ones and zeros are made by introducing a 45-degree polarizer in and out of the beam right in front. With the 45-degree filter in the beam, the quantum polarization is erased and a one is being sent. With the filter out of the beam, it remains defined as vertical/horizontal, and a zero is being sent.
At the receiver end, the beam is viewed through a vertical Polaroid filter. If the 45-degree filter is out of the transmitter circuit, then each photon has a 50% chance of making it through the filter. If the 45-degree filter is inserted into the transmitter circuit, then each photon has a 25% chance of making it through the filter. The difference in probabilities is interpreted as ones and zeros, the binary numbers.
This schematic diagram shows basically how the faster-than-light communication system works using entangled photons. The problem of random polarizations from entanglement may be solved using quantum erasure. The signal is sent with the beam to the transmitter and the beam to the receiver both vertically polarized. To send a binary “1,” the vertical polarization is erased by switching on a 45-degree polarization into the transmitter beam. The received beam responds instantly to the erasure, regardless of the distance.
The enhanced technique to Steenblik’s design is to evaluate packets of multiple-sent photons, instead of evaluating one photon at a time. The beam of entangled photons is chopped into bundles of many photons per bundle. The number of photons per bundle is counted at the faraway receiver end. In a standardized bundle of 100 photons, if approximately 25 make it through the receiver filter, then that is a one. If 50 photons are counted in a bundled interval, then that is a zero. Send a powerful stream of photon bundles across twelve light years of space and before long you have downloaded the latest Alvin and the Chipmunks movie at a speed that defies relativity.222
It is true that this method may cause instant agreement between the sender and the receiver as to the states of the photons, regardless of the distance separating the two, but the communication is not exactly instantaneous. There is a slight delay as the photons in a packet bundle are counted, deciding whether a one or a zero has been sent. There is also a speed-of-light delay introduced by the fact that the transmitter must affect the photon stream first, before it hits the receiver. The receiver stream must be longer than the transmitter stream. For interstellar distances, precise positioning of the entangled photon source becomes problematic, and uncertainty can introduce a large length offset between the transmitter and the receiver. This offset length adds a receive delay equal to the length of time it takes light to traverse the offset. It will be grand if such practical considerations are the only thing standing between humanity and superluminal communications.
This design for a superluminal communications system is a handsome piece of logic, but will it work? Perhaps. The microscopic causality postulate of axiomatic quantum field theory seems to imply that sending data faster than light is impossible, but such orthodox quantum theories have been wrong before. Before he could absolutely prove the concept with elaborate experimental setups, Steenblik had to lay Ansible aside and put food on the table with more immediately lucrative optical inventions. Faster-than-light communications is a fundamentally important concept, but that does not mean that it is profitable. Meanwhile, other scientists have begun to dip a toe into the ocean of entangled-photon transmission and reception techniques.
Dr. Anton Zeilinger, an Austrian quantum physicist at the University of Vienna, has conducted some large-scale related experiments, such as achieving quantum teleportation over 144 kilometers separating two Canary Islands. He was the first to implement quantum cryptography with entangled photons in 1999. He has demonstrated communications by entangled photons using both free-space transmission and fiber optics across the Danube River, and later between those same Canary Islands. His dream is to put a source of entangled photons into orbit in an Earth satellite and prove that the superluminal methods obviously communicate faster than light.
In the past few years, the SETI Project has branched out its message-receiving modes to include optical telescopes, looking for signals encoded into laser beams.
In parallel with the problem of interstellar communications, as beliefs are trampled, antennae are aimed, and nonorthodox quantum mechanics is plumbed, there was no way to prevent the next step from having started. The effort may be premature, but design studies of interstellar transportation devices have been conducted since the beginning of the Space Age.
The American physicist Robert W. Bussard first found work in 1955, when he moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, and became one of the Rover Boys, designing a series of nuclear-fission-powered rocket engines. This team eventually designed and tested the remarkable Kiwi engine, which was intended for use sending humans to Mars. In 1960, just as the Kiwi design was beginning to look practical, Bussard branched off on his own to design a nuclear-fusion engine. His designs were so interesting, he was not ordered to stop to focus on the Kiwi project.
The Bussard engine is intended for interstellar travel, powered by hydrogen fusion and using fuel scavenged from the immense vacuum of outer space. Hydrogen is the most common substance in the universe, and a large percentage of it exists as ions (naked protons) just floating between stars. Bussard’s spacecraft concept scoops it up with a large, forward-looking funnel. Hydrogen caught in the funnel is directed to a collection hole at the center by magnetism and is conducted to a continuously operating fusion power reactor. The highly energetic exhaust of the reactor is used as a rocket engine, directed out the back to accelerate the ship forward. This now famous design is called the Bussard Interstellar Ramjet.
As seems the case with all interstellar transportation system designs so far, there is more than one intractable problem with the Bussard ramjet vehicle. Plain hydrogen does not fuse easily into heavier elements, which is the process by which fusion creates energy. In fact, the fusion cross section of this reaction (the probability that it will happen) is immeasurably small. The only reason the proton-proton fusion idea works at all in a reactor the size of a star is that the reactor is typically hundreds of times wider than Earth. There is no hope of fusing two hydrogen ions together in a vehicle that is built to weigh as little as possible.
Confronted with this criticism, Bussard countered by saying his reactor would use the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle to fuse hydrogen into helium. This “CNO cycle,” as proposed by Dr. Hans Bethe of Manhattan Project fame, uses the three heavier elements as reusable catalysts in a complex star-based reaction. Again, the mass required to create minimum environmental conditions for such a reactor is of stellar proportions. CNO cycle fusion has never been accomplished in an Earthbound experiment.
The estimated density of loose protons in interstellar space has more recently been downgraded, and it will take a much larger collection funnel to fuel the reactor than was originally estimated. Assuming that these protons are standing still in space, they will crash into the collector and must be accelerated to match the speed of the ship. The calculated drag produced by having to continuously bring the fuel up to speed may exceed the possible thrust from a fusion engine, if such an engine were possible. Some protons in space are traveling in random directions at near relativistic speeds, in which case they will go clean through the collector funnel and out the other end of the spacecraft without participating in propulsion. Critiques have not even approached the question of how a ramjet that can only produce power speeding forward is supposed to slow down and stop when it reaches the objective. In interstellar space, the only way to stop is to accelerate in the opposite direction with enthusiasm equal to that which achieved forward speed. The ramjet cannot do that.
Bussard passed away in 2007 in the middle of efforts to gain further funding for his Bussard Polywell fusion power plant, which had been in development under a U.S. Navy contract since 1994. Work on this reactor continues to this day at the EMC2 Fusion Development Corporation, which is soliciting for tax-deductible donations. Net power has yet to come forth from the Bussard Polywell fusor.
In 1933, Philip E. Cleator founded the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) in Liverpool, England, to promote, research, and speculate about ways to get people off the planet. Although its creation was preceded by American, German, and Soviet societies of similar bent, it is the only one that was not absorbed into government stewardship and survives to this day as a nonprofit, privately held organization. Finding itself unable to do physical experiments with rockets like the rest of the societies due to the British Explosives act of 1875, the group was free to imagine atmosphere-escaping rocket ships with no practical constraints or dangerous chemicals. The concept of noisy, disrupting rockets was frowned upon in England before World War II, and British rocketry research literally did not get off the ground.
That lack of experimentation did not prevent detailed design work and mission planning. By 1938, the BIS had put together a Moon-landing trip, complete with a parachute landing back on Earth. The boost vehicle was a multistage affair, to be built using thousands of small solid rockets, each having approximately the energy density of a road flare. The Moon-exploring individuals were protected from the Sun bearing down in a zero-atmosphere environment by a tarp-like outer garment resembling a rain poncho. It was a bold, exciting exercise, designed to spur interest in outer space exploration.
By 1973, the BIS had moved beyond the solar system and began planning for an unmanned interstellar probe. The effort was named Project Daedalus. A criterion was that it must be able to reach the system surrounding Barnard’s Star, 5.9 light years away, within a human lifetime. At that time, the only known or feasible way to move in outer space was using a reaction engine, blowing a high-speed exhaust out the back of the vehicle. The design team, led by Alan Bond, reasoned that it would have to be a fusion-driven rocket. Given the maximum attainable speed using rockets as calculated by the team, 12% of the speed of light, it would take 50 years to reach Bernard’s Star.
The star-probe would have to be assembled in orbit, as it would weigh 54,000 metric tons, with 50,000 metric tons of that being fusion fuel consisting of small, cryogenically frozen pellets of a deuterium and helium-3 mixture. The first-stage engine burns for 2 years, accelerating the probe to 7.1% of the speed of light. The first stage is cut free, and the second stage starts up, firing for 1.8 years and increasing the speed to 12% of the speed of light. After second-stage-engine shutdown, the probe coasts for 46 years, then blows past the objective, Bernard’s Star, doing 22,320 miles per second. There is no fuel left for braking action, but telescopes on board will automatically survey the region, quickly, and radio the recorded data back to Earth. The signal will travel 5.9 years.
The design was completed in 1978. There are some problems. The engine, Friedwardt Winterberg’s inertial-confinement-fusion drive, uses multiple, focused electron beams directed at deuterium-helium-3 fuel pellets, one at a time. The deuterium-helium-3 fusion requires more effort and more ultrahigh temperature to initiate than does a deuterium-tritium fusion, but it yields 18.354 MeV per fusion, as opposed to 17.571 MeV for the easier reaction.
This type of energy-producing fusion using inertial confinement has never proven to be possible, despite forty-five years of intense, expensive research and experimentation at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and other laboratories in Europe. Billions of dollars have been spent so far trying to make a tiny pellet of frozen deuterium-tritium fuse and produce net energy by aiming a few hundred trillion watts of focused beams at it. The deuterium-tritium fusion is the least difficult configuration to fuse. No joy yet.
A further complication is the fuel for the fusion engine. About 25 million kilograms of helium-3 is required. Helium-3 is rare and expensive. Industrial consumption and production of it in the United States is about 8 kilograms per year. That much helium-3 costs somewhere between $6 million and $120 million, depending on demand. It is collected from decaying stockpiles of tritium, which is still used in nuclear weapons.
Seeing this as a problem, the BIS team suggested mining it in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter using robotic factories supported by very large hot-air balloons. It would take about twenty years of mining to accumulate the fuel-load for Daedalus. The engineering problems to be solved for this plan plus the expense are mind-boggling.
Independent calculations using the maximum theoretical thrust of the Winterberg engine indicate that it would take 100 years to accelerate to the desired coasting speed, and not 3.8 years as planned, if only it were possible to achieve 12% of light speed using any type of rocket. These engineering problems, plus the small dividend of information resulting from a project that would require the undivided economic attention of the entire world, suggest that implementation of Daedalus is not likely. It is, however, a start, and the BIS team deserves recognition for having the nerve to propose it.
After thirty years, seeing that most of the Daedalus engineers had died or retired, BIS decided to reengineer the interstellar probe concept and announced a new initiative, Project Icarus, on April 4, 2009, at the United Kingdom Space Conference at Charterhouse, Surrey. The specifications for Icarus are similar to those of Daedalus, but the mission length has been drawn out to one hundred years, and fusion engines using something besides helium-3 are allowed.
Back in the United States, a NASA project was awarded to the U.S. Naval Academy in 1987 for a concept design of an unmanned interstellar probe. It was named Project Longshot. Its mission was to fly to and assume orbit around the nearest star, Alpha Centauri B. The Alpha Centauri system, which consists of three stars orbiting around one another, is only 4.37 light years away. The Longshot specifications are somewhat more practical than those for Daedalus, with a mission length of one hundred years and a maximum speed of 4.5% of the speed of light, but it too relies on the inertial-confinement-fusion engine.
A workable inertial-confinement-fusion reactor seemed right around the corner in the last decades of the twentieth century, if one read the glowing reports from Lawrence Livermore, but the idea of causing self-sustained, pulsed hydrogen fusion by making very tiny H-bombs seemed to run into a series of brick walls, and success no longer seems as guaranteed as it once did. The Longshot vehicle, unlike Daedalus, was to have an onboard fission power plant making 250 kilowatts to run the inertial-fusion lasers and the telemetry transmitter aimed back at Earth. The total mass of the vehicle, 396 metric tons, seemed reasonable, but the fuel-load would include 132 metric tons of helium-3. That was better than the Daedalus design, but helium-3 was still an impossibly exotic substance.
Project Breakthrough Starshot, a new initiative to send an unmanned probe to the Alpha Centauri system, was announced in New York City on April 12, 2016, by physicist and venture capitalist Yuri Milner, British cosmologist Stephen Hawking, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. This project is true, outside-the-box thinking. It is, in fact, not in the same building with “the box,” but for interstellar transportation ideas free thinking is appropriate.
The Starshot probe is to consist of an unmanned rocket boosted into high-earth orbit. The orbiting vehicle then releases one thousand “nano-spacecraft,” designated StarChips, one at a time. Each StarChip weighs only a few grams and occupies only about 1 cubic centimeter of space. It automatically deploys a featherlight, 4-by-4-meter sail and awaits launch into interstellar space from an external influence.
The launch influence is several ground-based 100-gigawatt lasers, all aimed straight at the sail and giving it a jolt of a few billion joules of light energy for 10 minutes, which will accelerate it to interstellar coasting speed and send it on its way. A StarChip should make it to Alpha Centauri in twenty or thirty years, hastening along at 15% of the speed of light. Hazards include space-dust collision wipeout, which is why one thousand of them are launched sequentially. Statistically, at least one should make it. Each StarChip is equipped with a plutonium power source, computer, camera, sail deployment mechanism, and laser communications system with sufficient power to send continuous data back to Earth.
Design challenges will begin with making a plutonium thermoelectric generator that stays within the weight specification of a few grams. To make 10 watts of heat requires 20 grams of plutonium-238. To turn that heat into electricity requires a silicon-germanium thermocouple and an integrated circuit voltage converter. The heat-to-electricity efficiency of the best possible thermocouple generator is 7%, so a 10-watt plutonium-238 generator gives 700 milliwatts of electricity. Assuming that a 700-milliwatt laser beam, which is an expensive green laser pointer, will make it back to Earth from 4.37 light years away, the weight budget is already blown.
The deployment of several 100-gigawatt ground-based propulsion lasers raises a power issue. A large nuclear power plant running at full capacity will generate one gigawatt of electrical power. The largest solar power plant in the world, the SEGS in California, generates 0.354 gigawatts at high noon. The biggest wind farm in the world, the Gansu in China, supposedly makes 6 gigawatts on a windy day. Supplying power to these lasers will be expensive.
The ground-based lasers to be used in this project have unusually high power specifications. Lasers with beams in the trillions of watts have been built for use in inertial fusion experiments, but these devices can deliver a 1-nanosecond pulse exactly once. The propulsion lasers must deliver continuous power for 10 minutes. The most powerful industrial lasers capable of semicontinuous duty currently in use have power ratings as high as 25 kilowatts. To produce a sustained laser beam of 100 gigawatts, which is about 4 million times greater, will require active development. Note that the StarChip sail must have a 100% reflectivity of these laser beams, lest it absorb a few billion watts and quickly reduce to a superheated puff of individual atoms. Any laser-weapon engineer will be glad to complain loudly about the impossibility of aiming a high-energy light source into outer space through the 80 miles of turbulent air surrounding the Earth to hit something as small as an intercontinental ballistic missile. There is a lot of challenging work to be done for implementing Starshot.
In general, given the current state of physics, cosmology, technology, and space exploration budgets, no subject of interstellar travel being discussed now is remotely possible, including antimatter rockets (Project Valkyrie), wormholes, quark matter, or the Alcubierre drive. This only means that the new and future generations of scientists and engineers are in for an exciting ride.223 If constructive communications with other civilizations in the interstellar community is established, then priorities and goals may snap into focus. You have it to look forward to.
Rick Steenblik now lives the good life on an island in Hawaii. I write books.
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212 Fred Hoyle died in 2001 at the age of eighty-six. He was also a science fiction writer, and his book The Black Cloud, released in 1957, was critically acclaimed. One of his better quotes is “It’s better to be interesting and wrong than boring and right.” Enrico Fermi was fifty-three years old when he died in 1954, a year before his patent for the nuclear reactor was declassified. A street in Rome, Italy, is named for him.
213 The first discovery of an exoplanet was actually made using a radio telescope. In 1992, Alexander Wolszczan and Dale Frail discovered something large orbiting pulsar PSR 1257+12 and periodically getting in the way of the radio signal coming from the pulsar. A pulsar is actually a ruined star that has blown up in a supernova and left an energetic remnant. The radio-occluding object must be what is left of a giant, rocky planet that was sterilized in the supernova event. Since then, Earth-type planetary searches are carried out by the Kepler Space Observatory telescope, launched into solar orbit by NASA in 2009.
214 Electromagnetic energy is released into the nuclear-powered universe in a very wide spectrum of frequencies and energies, from infrared light to extremely high-powered gamma rays. This spectrum of available photons from the sky has a peak right in the middle of the visible light spectrum, right at the color yellow-green, and falls off to lesser intensities as the frequency trends higher and lower on either side of the peak. Yellow-green happens to be the most sensitive part of the narrow visible light spectrum for our eyes. Human vision seems to have evolved for us to see as much of the universe as possible without the use of electronic instrumentation. Just look up on a dark night and see structures that are thousands of light years away, without the use of a 305-meter radio telescope antenna.
215 I shall scrupulously avoid the use of “Schrödinger’s Cat” as a method of dipping the laymen into the quantum world. Dr. Erwin Schrödinger, a revered quantum theorist who invented wave mechanics, concocted the cat example as a gedanken experiment to illustrate the superposition of quantum states, and it was a clever way to bring the phenomenon into the macroscopic world where it could be effectively touched and seen, but I and others have found that it has a semi-violent counter-effect on people who may not have majored in physics. They tend to zoom in on the poor, half-dead/half-alive cat and miss the abstract point. Just as I try desperately to explain that Schrödinger did not actually put a cat in danger, I fear that the angry villagers are starting to come up the driveway carrying pitchforks and torches. The cat experiment is covered specifically in many books, but not here.
216 How do we define horizontal and vertical? If, for example, the observer is floating in space, there is no up and down and no vertical and horizontal. In this case, hold a polarizing filter in front of the eyes and observe a polarized light beam. (The light has already been through a polarizer and has been assigned a discrete polarization.) Turn the filter until the beam is blocked by the filter and the light is no longer observable. Name it “vertical.” Turn the filter 90 degrees in either direction. Define that position as “horizontal,” and observe as all the light comes through the filter. The polarization state of the incoming light is, by definition, horizontal. The only difference between horizontal and vertical polarization is that 90-degree angle.
217 If you have ever worn a pair of polarizing sunglasses, then you have used polarizing filters. The filters that make up these glasses are set up to transmit vertically polarized photons. The usual sunlit scene as viewed through the glasses is shaded to one half the available photons. As they bounce off the scenery and into your eyes, the photons are randomly polarized, so exactly half of them turn out to be vertically polarized and make it through the filters into your eyes. However, the photons that reflect off the hood of your car are horizontally polarized, due to the fact that the hood is basically a flat, horizontal surface laid out in front of you. Those photons do not make it through the filters, so the polarizing glasses do the neat trick of saving your eyes from the glare of the sun on the hood. Edwin H. Land invented this type of filter in 1929, using iodoquinine sulphate crystals bound in a transparent polymer film. This polarizing filter, the J-sheet, was improved in 1938 by embedding pure iodine crystals in a polyvinyl alcohol. This formula was named the H-sheet. Land went on to develop the highly successful Polaroid instant camera in 1948. He made a fortune and then lost it all in 1981 after having developed the Polaroid instant movie camera. The home video cameras using VHS tape landed right on top of his instant movie camera introduction, and it was a solid wipeout for Polaroid.
218 As is the case of some simplifications used to make these explanations understandable, this is almost true. There are actually two modes of shared polarization between entangled photos: Type I and Type II. In Type I polarization correlation, the two separate photons have exactly the same direction of polarization, and they are deemed parallel. In Type II polarization, the two photons always become polarized in perpendicular directions. The angles are exactly 90 degrees out of phase. The polarization mode depends on what type of crystal is used to generate the entangled pairs.
219 The fact that these photons are sorted into vertical and horizontal polarizations upon emerging from the crystal means that their polarization has been measured and they are locked into their polarization states. The situation in which the scientist notes the two red cones coming out of the crystal, illuminating dust particles floating in the air of his supposedly dust-free lab, is enough to make it so.
220 In a recent light-speed communication with Rick Steenblik, I finally found out where the code word TAXI comes from. I quote him: “The TAXI name (not an acronym) arose as a code word. Shortly after I started doing serious research into the published methods of creating an entangled photon source, I had to go on a business trip for Chromatek. I was reading published papers on the flight and then wanted to talk with Mark about what I had learned. I called him from the taxi, en route from the airport to my destination, and (in the interest of maintaining the security of the ideas) I explained the entangled photon sources in terms of the taxi engine, drive shaft, transmission, wheels, and so on. Mark immediately understood the analogy and we had an excellent brainstorming session about generating entangled photons without ever uttering a word about photons, entanglement, lasers, or nonlinear crystals. Naturally, we had to code-name the project TAXI.” Although the ansible concept first appeared in Le Guin’s novel in 1966, Steenblik had never heard of it. He picked up ansible from Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, which was introduced in book form in 1985. Mark Hurt was Steenblik’s business partner.
221 A good technologist can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, making use of the fact that one system’s fatal flaw is another’s feature. The simultaneous, continuous stream of digital random numbers at either end of the communication is being used for extremely high-speed banking solutions in which random numbers are needed for encryption. Using fiber optics and a centrally located source of entangled photons, two banks separated by hundreds of kilometers can have the same random encryption key appear at both ends, instantly. The numbers are completely random, and are not generated by a crackable algorithm. It is the first practical use of entangled photons. Einstein would find it irritating.
222 I have described the first of four modes of superluminal communication claimed in Richard A. Steenblik’s US patent number US 6,473,719 B1, Method and Apparatus for Selectively Controlling the Quantum State Probability Distribution of Entangled Quantum Objects, applied for on January 11, 1999, and awarded on October 22, 2002. Steenblik’s earlier patent of the same name, US 6,057,541, is referenced in Mark John Lofts’s US patent application, US 2006/0226418 A1, filed on November 10, 2004, Method and System for Binary Signaling via Quantum Non-Locality. Lofts admits that Steenblik’s method will work, but he claims that his is less unwieldy. The abstract of this patent is difficult to comprehend. Be warned: because a scientific concept is granted a US patent does not necessarily mean that it works. Remember, T. G. Hieronymus was granted US patent number 2,482,773 for his crazy material analyzer (see Introduction). Having been granted a patent does, however, mean that the invention does not use or imply the use of cold fusion.
223 Bear in mind, when I was an undergraduate, the terabyte hard drive was utterly impossible.