Monday, June 30, 2008

Quantum Entanglement Photographs or Ghost Pics!


You gota love IO9, they can find the stories that have science fiction written all over them. Here is one that will make your goose-bumps have goose-bumps. Quantum Entanglement Photography. Oh yeah! Say what?! Quantum entanglement is a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which the quantum states of two or more objects are linked together so that one object can no longer be adequately described without full mention of its counterpart — even though the individual objects may be spatially separated. got that? give ya a hint, Ansibles. What Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." You take 2 matched quarks, seperate them by distance X, change the state of quark a say down and quark b goes positive at the same time. What about X you say? I said SAME TIME. Ok, got that peice of weirdness eating away at the gray areas? You can use this like peice of crazy making to take photograhs of stuff that ain't there....yet. When you stop gibbering I will explain... ok now? As IO9 puts it "Within a few years, we'll be able to take clear pictures of objects through clouds, smoke, or fog. "

No, not radar or infrared or mass-spec - oh something oh so much weirder: Imagine you are trying to photograph a boat behind a bank of fog. You'll use two light-sensitive devices: aim one at a light source that's illuminating your fog-shrouded boat (such as the sun, or a searchlight); then aim the other where you think the boat is likely to be. Then you use a computer program to combine the patterns of photons you've received from the object and the light. Once the two patterns have been compared, you get a kind of black-and-white silhouette of the object you want to photograph. Scientists call this a "ghost photograph."

Did you get that kiddies? No where did it say point those light sensitive things at any boat - but a light source and another where you think its going to be - ummm your free to fumble and mumble for a bit.

<Here is the wiki on Quantum Entanglement>

<complete IO9 article>

2 comments:

Dave Tackett said...

Wow! This is brilliant! After reading this and the IO9 article I found an abstract by University of Maryland physicist Yanhua Shih, who is behind this. It's a little over my head (OK, a lot) but it does help to get the gist of what they are doing, the pictures help :-)

We are living Science Fiction. Wow again.

Anonymous said...

I had a vague idea and how it applied to something say an ansible, but light sources and where it might be? WTF!!! Thats more than spooky stuff at a distance....