Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Tomminn 2071 days ago
No, just because something changes doesn't mean it can be used to send information. You need changes you can control.

The thing about the change of "colour" in this analogy is you don't know in which direction it changes. So let's say you observe you "marble" through a "purple filter", which gives has:

- a 50% chance of being transparent to your marble (corresponding to a red-blue superposition marble collapsing to a purple marble)

- a 50% chance of being opaque to your marble (corresponding to red-blue superposition marble collapsing to a green marble).

The issue is that when you learn your marble is purple, while you know with 100% certainty the marble in australia is green, there is no way you can send information to Australia using that. This is because the other 50% of the time, your marble will be green, and the marble in Australia is purple.

So if I'm sitting in Australia, when I measure the marbles in my envelopes with purple filters, all I see is purple marbles 50% of the time and green marbles 50% of the time no matter what measurements you are performing at your end. So you can't send me messages by performing measurements at your end because you can't change the statistics of those measurements.

But you'll know the answer to every measurement I performed, if you've measured the other marble with a purple filter too.

1 comments

So, how "it changes from state we don't know to a different state after measurement" differs from "we don't know what state it is, but after measurement we know"? How do you know state changes after measurement when you don't know which state it is before measurement? Does it really change, or do our knowledge of that state changes? That's why I say that state doesn't change, we only know what state it is after measurement.