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[Sergarr]

The information always crosses the intervening space. It's just not localized in each particle.

[Arx]

Pretty sure James Gleick's Information goes into it fairly thoroughly. I could just be enjoying my favourite pastime of being wrong, though.

[kaian-a-coel]

It's not even information. Seriously, try to get some information out of quantum entanglement.

If you read the link, it has been done.

And it's a cat picture.

[RedKing]

Brings a whole new meaning to "telephoto".

[kaian-a-coel]

Honestly I'm expecting the Einsteinian inquisition anytime now, because this experiment, assuming quantum entanglement disruption is instantaneous (and it seems to be), this is instantaneous transmission of information.
Barring an (extremely likely) explanation as to why it's not the case, we have unofficially crossed into friggin scifi.

[Sergarr]

This experiment is less impressive to me than a delayed choice quantum eraser tbh.

And I'm sure there's no actual way to use this to transmit information faster than light.

[Frumple]

we have unofficially crossed into friggin scifi.

Dude, we unofficially crossed into friggin' scifi when we put up the first ruddy weather balloon. We have been living in science wizard land for decades now.

Though I guess it should be science sorcerer. Alliteration is always appropriate.

[Bauglir]

And I'm sure there's no actual way to use this to transmit information faster than light.

I don't understand the physics, but I do understand the media well enough to know that if that were a possible interpretation, this would be a much bigger deal and we'd be seeing tons of headlines to the effect of "Einstein proven wrong!"

[RedKing]

we have unofficially crossed into friggin scifi.

Dude, we unofficially crossed into friggin' scifi when we put up the first ruddy weather balloon. We have been living in science wizard land for decades now.

Though I guess it should be science sorcerer. Alliteration is always appropriate.

I think it's age-dependent. I still look at my smartphone sometimes and go "WTF?". I have a handheld device that allows me to talk (and even videochat) with anyone anywhere on the planet in seconds. It can also tell me exactly where I am and how to get to anywhere I want to go, and all I have to do is ASK IT. With my voice.

For a kid who grew up on the OLD Star Trek and OLD Doctor Who, that's some crazy shit right there. I feel like James-motherfuckin'-Bond.

[kaian-a-coel]

You have two beams. One needs to touch the object. This imprint the information on the second beam by quantum entanglement. Which is instantaneous as far as we know. You can then read the data from the second beam, which has never touched the object.

Let's imagine an object, arbitrarily far from the reader. Send the reading beam towards it, and the second beam towards the sensors. Arrange for the first to arrive before the second, by an arbitrarily small margin. Tadaa, you have information on the object as it was the moment the first beam touched it.

[Sergarr]

You still need the first beam to touch it... and it doesn't move faster than light.

[kaian-a-coel]

You still need the first beam to touch it... and it doesn't move faster than light.

Yes, but you'd get an image of the object as it was when the beam got there, not when the beam was sent.
If you imagine some sort of video-feed constructed by sending a lot of pulses one after another, you'll need to wait a very long time for the contact to be established, but then the video is live.

[Helgoland]

Fairly certain you got something wrong there - that's not how entanglement works, IIRC.

[lemon10]

Quantum mechanics

Certain phenomena in quantum mechanics, such as quantum entanglement, might give the superficial impression of allowing communication of information faster than light. According to the no-communication theorem these phenomena do not allow true communication; they only let two observers in different locations see the same system simultaneously, without any way of controlling what either sees. Wavefunction collapse can be viewed as an epiphenomenon of quantum decoherence, which in turn is nothing more than an effect of the underlying local time evolution of the wavefunction of a system and all of its environment. Since the underlying behaviour doesn't violate local causality or allow FTL it follows that neither does the additional effect of wavefunction collapse, whether real or apparent.

Yeah, it seems like it should allow FTL information relay, but due to [physics technobabble here] it doesn't.

[Putnam]

"Seems like it should" means absolutely nothing. Also, "technobabble" suggests meaningless handwaves. If you misunderstand it, that's a problem with you, not the universe.

Anyway, besides that:

You have entangled particles. You observe them to see if their function has collapsed... except that observing them collapses their wave function and no information was actually gleaned from that.