Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: Kryptid on 16/07/2008 04:28:31
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Can quantum entanglement be used to transfer any type energy from one source to a distant receiver? If you excite one of an entangled pair of atoms, will the other atom become excited as well? If so, this sounds like it could be extremely useful.
Imagine transfering the energy generated by a power station to an entangled set of particles at that same power station. Those particles are entangled with particles at every household. The power gets from the powerplant to households without the use of powerlines.
How about aircraft that received entangled power the same way? If they were propelled by electrical propellors which were powered from a distant powerplant via entanglement, the aircraft wouldn't need to carry fuel or batteries to stay aloft. They could fly for practically forever.
Imagine distant planetary bases that could receive power from Earthly power stations via entanglement.
There's probably some kind of problem with this idea, so go ahead and burst my bubble.
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Entanglement is correlation between possible prepared states of a particle (although in a weird quantum way). The important part here is the word prepared. You have to prepare the states you're correlating in advance. Therefore if you measure or change one particle, the other particle can only assume one of the original states you prepared--it can't suddenly jump to a new state. In other words, if you want the particle you send off to suddenly get "excited" due to fiddling with the other one, you need to have given it this energy in advance, when you prepared the entangled pair.
Assuming we could engineer a large tank to store these entangled particles, you'd have to energize your entangled pairs at the power station, and then ship one of the pair off to the consumer. So you'd basically send someone a tank full of energized entangled particles. At that point, why bother entangling them at all--you could just send someone a tank full of fuel (or a tank full of energized non-entangled particles.)
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I figured that there would be a catch...