A key theme of our work in the Fundamental Fhysics Group was whether entanglement could be used directly for communication.

I was a graduate student briefly at Brandeis 1960-2 where I had the first glimmerings of Bell's theorem before Bell from reading a Review of Modern Physics paper on the Tau-Theta puzzle. I had also read Bohm's "Quantum Theory" as an undergraduate at Cornell. When I argued with Schweber, Deser and other Brandeis faculty that the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect seemed to conflict with relativity implying a faster-than-light influence of some kind, they essentially told me to "Shut up and calculate." This was a major reason for my quitting my National Defense Fellowship and going to work for a CIA affiliated company Tech Ops at Mitre on Route 2. When I went back to Cornell in 1963 I brought Jonathan Glogower with me with Phil Morrison's help. Lenny Susskind, Glogower and I worked together on the time/phase operator problem that I had initiated while back in George Parrent, Jr's Tech/Ops group. Indeed, there is a reference to it in my 1963 Nuovo Cimento paper on correlation functions of black body radiation - work I did at Tech/Ops. I was invited to Ford Philco Aeronutronics in Newport Beach where I stayed for six months with Fred W. Cummings of Jaynes and Cummings. In the interim Susskind and Glogower finished the work I had initiated with them. They did a most of the math in the paper. Lenny later told me that he wanted to put my name on the paper published in the same journal Bell published his paper in, but Peter Carruthers discouraged him from doing so. This was Susskind's first published paper I believe and has been much cited. Lenny also recently put into writing that my name should have been on that paper as a co-author and will corroborate this story in its essentials.

Now to an important announcement. Here is an excerpt from a paper I am writing about the key ideas discussed in Kaiser's book.

There may be a loophole in all the proofs against signal nonlocality. The unitarity and Born probability axioms of quantum theory break down in the presence of Higgs-Goldstone spontaneous symmetry breaking permitting stand-alone entanglement signals for interstellar space communications without light speed retarded time delayed keys to unlock the messages.

Jacques Vallee emphasized the importance of trying to overcome the light barrier for star ship technology with quantum entanglement in the first meeting of the joint DARPA-NASA workshop in January 2011 in Marin County. MIT physics historian David Kaiser describes how this idea came about and objections to it in his book “How The Hippies Saved Physics” (W.W. Norton, New York, 2011). Mainstream opinion is that the direct use of quantum entanglement as a command, control, and communication channel without a light-speed limited signal “key” is fundamentally impossible because of the linearity and unitarity of quantum theory.  John Cramer has questioned this assumption within orthodox quantum theory. [12] The act of measurement in orthodox quantum theory is non-unitary and may be a loophole overlooked in the accepted no-signaling theorems.  Beyond that is the suggestion that orthodox quantum theory is not the final theory of physical reality, but is an approximation to a more general theory in the same way that Einstein’s 1905 special theory of relativity is an approximation to his 1916 general theory of relativity.  

Coherent states including squeezing are not orthogonal like sharp number Fock micro-quantum states are. This may provide another loophole to the no-entanglement signal theorems if the degree of non-orthogonality at the sender can be modulated it will affect the response of the entangled receiver.

Antony Valentini [13] has used Bohm’s “quantum potential” with real particles to model such a general quantum theory with “signal nonlocality” that would allow instantaneous interstellar communications as described in David Kaiser’s book based on this author’s ideas from the 1970’s and later.

Valentini wrote:

“It is argued that immense physical resources - for nonlocal communication, espionage, and exponentially-fast computation - are hidden from us by quantum noise, and that this noise is not fundamental but merely a property of an equilibrium state in which the universe happens to be at the present time. It is suggested that 'non-quantum' or nonequilibrium matter might exist today in the form of relic particles from the early universe. We describe how such matter could be detected and put to practical use. Nonequilibrium matter could be used to send instantaneous signals, to violate the uncertainty principle, to distinguish non-orthogonal quantum states without disturbing them, to eavesdrop on quantum key distribution, and to outpace quantum computation (solving NP-complete problems in polynomial time).”

Just as Einstein’s general relativity uses test particles that are acted on but do not act as sources of the gravitational field, so too David Bohm [14] showed that orthodox quantum theory’s “no-signaling” theorems also assume that electrons, atoms, molecules et-al are also test particles that are acted on but do not act as sources of their guiding quantum potential that contains the entanglement to other test particles.  Another way to look at Valentini’s model is that when the particle “hidden variables” are no longer test particles, but also act as sources of their own and other test particle’s common entangled quantum potential, that they then form emergent self-organizing feedback-control loops with a breakdown of the no-signal theorems. When can we expect this to happen? [15] Soft condensed matter physics relies on the same kind of “More is different” [16] spontaneous symmetry breaking emergent order in the ground state of real on-mass-shell particles outside the vacuum that we see in the Higgs-Goldstone macro-quantum Glauber coherent states [17] of off-mass-shell virtual particles inside the vacuum that is so important in both large-scale inflationary cosmology as well as in the standard model of flavor symmetry breaking in the weak force giving small rest masses to leptons and quarks as well as larger rest masses to the W-bosons. Indeed, there is also a kind of color spontaneous symmetry breaking in the quantum chromodynamics of the much larger hadron bound states of real quarks with virtual gluons that Frank Wilzcek [18] calls the “multi-layered multi-colored vacuum superconductor” of virtual gluon and virtual quark-antiquark pair Bose-Einstein condensates. Spontaneous symmetry breaking means that the global dynamical action and its local Euler-Lagrange quantum field equations have the full continuous symmetries, but their lowest energy state does not. Examples include ordinary crystals that spontaneously break the 3D continuous translation group leaving only the discrete groups of 19th Century crystallography. The phonon is the massless Goldstone quantum.  Other examples involving different symmetry groups are ferromagnets, ferroelectrics, liquid crystals, superconductors, superfluid helium and possibly the macro-quantum coherent field in our brain responsible for both sub-conscious and conscious mental activity. This far-from-thermodynamic equilibrium dissipative structure macro-quantum coherent field is acted upon by neuroelectrical and neurochemical signals and also acts back on them in highly nonlinear self-organizing ways. It is here where we expect signal nonlocality to emerge. Indeed, the theory of these effects was developed by Landau and Ginzburg. [19] The emergent low energy dynamics is nonlinear in contrast to micro-quantum theory, it is also nonunitary in contrast to micro-quantum theory, and the c-number macro-quantum coherent field is local in ordinary space-time in contrast to the nonlocal entanglement of micro-quantum theory. In spite of this emergent locality spatially separated coherent states can still, it appears, be entangled in a way largely immune from thermal decoherence. [20] Of course the micro-quantum particles jump into and out of the coherent field in a random way according to the usual orthodox quantum rules.  That is, we have random micro-quantum noise coupled to non-random macro-quantum signal. The basic Born probability rules only apply to the noise not to the signal that has a robust “phase rigidity” making it immune to environmental decoherence especially when there are anyonic-braid topological restrictions in 2D “quantum well” nano-tech membrane layers made, for example, from graphene sheets.

Unitarity of quantum time evolution operator  , where the Hamiltonian  is Hermitian with real energy eigenvalues, is the crux of the claim of L. Susskind and G. ‘t Hooft against S. Hawking that information is not lost behind the event horizon of an evaporating black hole. Cosmological horizons will also evaporate of course, but over an enormous time scale. We are outside black hole horizons, but inside cosmological horizons. It is also claimed that energy would not be conserved if we allow non-unitary time evolution. This is debatable. It’s a pyrrhic victory because one must wait over many aeons to recover the lost information from the evaporating horizon. Practically speaking information is lost in any real operational measurement sense. Unitarity of the time evolution of micro-quantum states implies that total probability is strictly conserved.  However, would mean that new order at lower energy large scales could not emerge. That is the space of possible outcomes is fixed in the unitarity approximation. Therefore, the Sacred Cow of unitarity is shaky ground on which the no-entanglement signaling theorems rest.

12. J. G. Cramer,  "Faster-than-Light Implications of Quantum Entanglement and Nonlocality." M.G. Millis (Editor), E.W. Davis (Editor). Frontiers of Propulsion Science (Progress in Astronautics and Aeronautics). AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics & Ast), 2009.

 

13. A. Valentini, “Subquantum Information and Computation”, Proceedings of the Second Winter Institute on Foundations of Quantum Theory and Quantum Optics: Quantum Information Processing, ed. R. Ghosh (Indian Academy of Science, Bangalore, 2002).

 

14. D. Bohm, B. Hiley, The Undivided Universe (book) Routledge, Oxford & New York, 1993

 

15. J. Sarfatti, “Retrocausality and Signal Nonlocality in Consciousness and Cosmology”, Journal of Cosmology, Vol 14, April 2011.

 

16. Anderson, P.W. (1972). "More is Different". Science 177 (4047): 393–396.

 

17. R.J. Glauber, Coherent and incoherent states of radiation field, Phys. Rev. 131 (1963) 2766-2788.

 

18. F. Wilzcek, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces. Basic Books. 2008.

 

19. V.L. Ginzburg and L.D. Landau, Zh. Eksp. Teor. Fiz. 20, 1064 (1950) ... Original paper of Ginzburg and Landau.

 

A.A. Abrikosov, Zh. Eksp. Teor. Fiz. 32, 1442 (1957) (English translation: Sov. Phys. JETP 5 1174 (1957)].) ... Abrikosov's original paper on vortex structure of Type II superconductors derived as a solution of G–L equations for κ > 1/2

 

L.P. Gor'kov, Sov. Phys. JETP 36, 1364 (1959)

 

A.A. Abrikosov's 2003 Nobel lecture, V.L. Ginzburg's 2003 Nobel Lecture

 

Ginsburg VL (July 2004). "On superconductivity and superfluidity (what I have and have not managed to do), as well as on the 'physical minimum' at the beginning of the 21st century". Chemphyschem. 5 (7): 930–945.

 

20. B.C. Sanders, “Entangled Coherent States”, Phys. Rev. A 45, 6811–6815 (1992)

 

J. Joo, W J. Munro, T. P. Spiller, Quantum metrology with entangled coherent states, Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 083601 (2011)