“Wait a minute, Sy. If Einstein’s logic proves we can’t have faster‑than‑light communication, what about all the entanglement hype I see in my science magazines?”

“Hype’s the right word, Vinnie. Entanglement’s a real effect, but it doesn’t play well as a communication channel.”

“OK, why not?”

“Let’s set the stage. We’re still in our personal spaceships and we’ve just ordered pizza from Eddie. The entanglement relationship is independent of time and distance so I’m going to skip over how fast we’re going and pretend that Eddie’s using transporter delivery technology, ok?”

“Fine with me,”

“Good. You order your usual double pepperoni with extra cheese, I ask for Italian sausage. Two pizza boxes suddenly appear on our respective mess tables. No reflection on Eddie, but suppose he has a history of getting orders crossed. The quantum formalism says because our orders were filled at the same time and in a single operation, the two boxes are entangled — we don’t know which is which. Before we open the boxes, each of us has a 50:50 shot of getting the right order. It’s like we’ve got a pair of Schrödinger pizzas, half one order and half the other until we look, right?”

“Won’t happen, Eddie’s a pro.”

“True, but stay with me here. I open my box and immediately I know which pizza you received, no matter how far away your ship is from mine. Is that instantaneous communication between us?”

“Of course not, I’m not gonna know which pizza either of us got until I open my own box. Then I’ll know what my meal’s gonna be and I’ll know what you’re having, too. Actually, I’m probably gonna know first because I get hungry sooner than you.”

“Good point. Anyway, entanglement doesn’t transmit human‑scale information. The only communication between us in our spaceships is still limited by Einstein’s rules. But this is a good setup for us to dig a little deeper into the quantum stuff. You rightly rejected the Schrödinger pizza idea because pizza’s human‑scale. One of those boxes definitely holds your pizza or else it definitely holds mine. There’s no in‑between mixtures with human‑scale pizzas. Suppose Eddie sent quantum‑scale nanopizzas, though. Now things get more interesting.”

“Eddie doesn’t mess up orders.”

<sigh> “Even Eddie can’t keep things straight if he sends out a pair of quantum‑scale pizzas. What’s inside a specific entangled box is called a local property. John Stewart Bell proved some statistical criteria for whether a quantum system’s properties are local or are somehow shared among the entangled objects. Scientists have applied his tests to everything from entangled photons up to little squares of diamond. They’ve tracked quantum properties from spin states to vibration modes. A lot of work went into plugging loopholes in Bell’s criteria.”

“What’d they find?”

“The results keep coming up non-local. Our quantum pizzas truly do not have separate characteristics hiding inside their boxes unless Eddie marked a box to destroy the symmetry. All the objects in an entanglement share all the applicable quantum property values until one object gets measured. Instantly, all the entangled objects snap into specific individual property values, like which box holds which pizza. They stop being entangled, too. That happens no matter how far apart they are. Those experimental results absolutely rule out the local‑property idea which was the most appealing version of the ‘underlying reality‘ that Einstein and Bohr argued over.”

“Wait, I can’t tell you anything faster than light, but these quantum thingies automatically do that instant‑like?”

“Annoying, isn’t it? But it’s a sparse form of messaging. My quantum pizza box can tell yours only two things, ‘I’ve been opened‘ and ‘I hold Italian sausage pizza.’ They’re one‑time messages at the quantum level and you as an observer can’t hear either one. Quantum theoreticians call the interaction ‘wave function collapse‘ but Einstein called it ‘spooky action at a distance.’ He hated even that limited amount of instantaneous communication because it goes directly against the first principle of Special Relativity. Relativity has been vigorously tested for over a century. It’s stood up to everything they’ve thrown at it — except for this little mouse nibbling at its base.”

~~ Rich Olcott