Quantum Entanglement Holds DNA Together, Say Physicists | Hacker News Reader

Quantum Entanglement Holds DNA Together, Say Physicists

technologyreview.com

29 pointsca98am7924 comments

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This appears to be an instance of: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174

To save you time in case you think you saw this 11 days ago - you may have done so, it was here ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1472217

... but there is no discussion there.

... and in other news, pigs have grown wings and are flying!

seriously, why QE? is base stacking plus some electron cloud sharing not a good enough explanation for dsDNA?

will the anonymous downvoter please stand up and show some gumption?

From the Guidelines:

"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

not complaining. just asking "why" ?

i hope that is considered fair. if not, then god help HN the day i get downvoting privileges.

edit:

being downvoted for a comment like this i understand and agree to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1504855

but being downvoted without a reply for what i wrote to this thread's parent... simply makes no sense!

The reason it is annoying is that 5 hours later some HN readers who actually understood your comment have upvoted your post to 4.

Now your complaint is sticking around completely redundantly and this whole thread is taking up a lot of screen real-estate.

all right, point taken. and dare i say, lesson learned.

however, it does represent, at least to me, a flaw in the whole HN voting system; given that user privileges are tied to karma points, i feel that upvotes should be allowed as they are now, but downvotes __must__ require some form of response from the downvoter(s) as to why they are downvoting anything ( a la /. ). you don't need to write a paragraph explaining why you downvoted anything, but you should be required to pick at least __one__ response tag that classifies your reason for downvoting (wrong, inflammatory, trollish or whatever).

anyways, sorry for taking up screen real estate with all this unneeded c.r.a.p. i better get back to "real life"[TM] and soon!

As far as I know, quantum entanglement has not been validated yet, as all experiments since Alain Aspect's 1982 paper suffer from flaws in experiment design, leading to what is known as "loopholes".

Wuh...? Care to cite a source for that?

Last paragraph under history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement#History

And: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopholes_in_Bell_test_experime...

I do believe there have been experiments that have successfully transmitted data via quantum entanglement.

I don't really feel like digging up a source at the moment though.

Wait, what? Instantaneously?

Yes. Instantaneously. Always. But this fact cannot be used to transfer information from point A to point B instantaneously. Nothing ever discovered in the weird world of quantum entanglement allows information to exceed the speed of light.

No, I know entanglement changes are instantaneous, I just thought exactly what you're confirming; that you can't communicate with it.

No data is ever transmitted via quantum entanglement (at least, data from the perspective of the observer). Entanglement is simply when two particles exist in the same quantum state. (Or, to be more precise, in the same superposition of quantum states.) When the state is observed (say, an experimenter examines one of the particles), then the entire wavefunction collapses to a single quantum state. The two particles in the system therefore collapse to the same state instantaneously, but no information can ever be transmitted in this way.

Erm. Isn't it possible to transmit data that way, specifically by affecting the state of one particle, and observing the other?

"Observing" is another way of saying "affecting the state of."

My understanding is quite limited, but I've believed this to be truth. Anyone know anything about this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitzur%E2%80%93Vaidman_bomb-te...

You're citing an article from 1982?

There's been a massive amount experimental work done since the mid 1990s.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=+Experimental+...

I said experiments since that landmark 1982 paper...

AFAICT, quantum entanglement is a blanket term for unexplained magic. It would be "real" if they could use this "magic" to construct something that otherwise can't be explained by anything else.

Is there proof of anything constructive coming out of quantum entanglement?

Then I guess you can't tell very far.

I think you are confusing measurable, reproducible quantum entanglement with the quackish invocation of the term to lend scientific credence to kooky paranormal theories.

There's a reason that Einstein was freaked out by "spooky action at a distance" and it wasn't because it didn't exist. It's because it did.

Have you measured quantum entanglement? I'm trying to.

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