100TWC - Day 5: Unbreakable

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Newton's Third Law of Motion has been embedded in the zeitgeist for almost as long as it has been codified. If you give a push, the world pushes back, only in most cases it's not as poetic as that.

Investigations and theorising at the quantum level have revealed a fascinating possibility that the Third Law has an echo right down at the lowest level humans can, at the moment, conceive. The level of sub-atomic particles, where infinitesimally small lumps of matter "carry" waves of force and where intuition must be left at the door. Because these particles behave in ways that sound crazy, and you almost have to make yourself crazy to think about them, or to undertake research into them.

One such craziness is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, whereby an experimenter can never be certain of the position and momentum of a particle until it is measure, but the act of measuring it changes its state.

However crazy the lay person might believe the theories of quantum mechanics to be, the fact of their correctness is proved every day by people all over the world. People who use computers. Because computers rely on microprocessors and at their most fundamental level microprocessors are just enormous collections of microminiaturised transistors, and transistors were conceived on the back of quantum theory. A real-life creation based on some extremely counter-intuitive physics, that works perfectly everywhere, every day.

But quantum physics isn't done messing with our heads yet. Not by a long way. In recent times physicists have begun expounding the theory of quantum entanglement and have had some success proving this theory both mathematically and in the real world. This is the echo of Newton I referred to earlier. A condition where an action on one subatomic particle (for instance, inducing it to spin clockwise) will cause an equal and opposite reaction in a particle with which it has been "entangled" (it will begin to spin anticlockwise).

Thus the rudimentary building blocks of a communication mechanism are established at the quantum level. If you can introduce a signal at one end (clockwise spin) and measure the result of that signal at the other end (anticlockwise spin) then you have effectively transmitted one "bit" of information from one particle to the next. And where you have bits, you can have bytes and thenceforth characters, music and high definition video streams.

But the theory doesn't stop at merely transmitted the information. Quantum entangled particles will interact over any distance. A particle in the next room will still be affected by the spinning of its partner. So will a particle in the next galaxy. They are bound by an unbreakable bond that transcends distance. This has staggering implications for communication in space and brings to life the Star Trek concept of "sub-space communication". Life imitating art, once again.

As if it were possible, recently the theory has developed in an even more bizarre direction. Mathematically it appears the particles remain entangled even after they cease to exist. And before they existed in the first place. I warned you this stuff was counter-intuitive. But these early theories begin to shine the first faint light on the potential for real-life time travel. That's a huge leap from where we are today. But transistors were a huge leap in their day, yet here I am typing this on a computer, just as you are reading it on one. Truth, it seems, really is stranger than fiction.