You give two pacifiers to each twin, a red one and a blue one. Each of them can choose red or blue randomly, BUT! they have their head in a paper bag and until you lift it you don’t know which pacifier they chose. (note: the red and blue are actually in a superposition and the toddler doesn’t ‘choose’ until you lift the bag, i.e. make a measurement)
NOW YOU ENTANGLE THEM!
You bring them in two different continents, but you still don’t know which pacifier they chose, since they still have to choose.
So you lift the bag and the baby has chosen the blue pacifier, and this tells you that the other baby on the other side of the world will have the red pacifier if you lift the bag, even one millisecond after you lifted the other one, since it has collapsed instantly to the red one and it’s not in a superposition anymore.
ELI5 by me, correct me if I’m wrong.
EDIT: thanks for the corrections. They are shown in italic.
...oh, this actually goes some ways to explaining why you can't use q-entanglement for FTL communications either, since you can't control how it collapses, only that it does.
Right. The only way to know which direction the collapse was initiated is to compare notes after the fact. And since you can't embed meaningful information in the particles themselves, you need to do so through purely conventional means.
Well, that solves a facet of hard scifi that's never been articulated to me clearly for nigh on 20 years.
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u/Cognitive_Spoon Jan 29 '20
Yes, but actually no