Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I literally posted about this topic a few days ago! But for some reason it was flagged as a “Dupe” and buried by someone:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43173195

It links here:

https://chatgpt.com/share/67bde29f-a56c-800a-8e26-44a5a3ad23...

I will summarize by saying that I think our current understanding of Faster-than-Light communication is wrong, and the no-go theorem about no information transmission faster than light will be debunked (in very specific but slight ways I describe in the link) soon as quantum error-correction gets better. Before you say it’s preposterous, skim the above chat, maybe looking at my side of it for instance. This is an interesting format I often share ideas in these days.



I'm sorry but the chat format is a really poor way to share ideas.

It's long, meandering, and contains many instances of wrong and not-even-wrong assertions by you (expected, you don't claim to be an expert, but hurts your credibility) and by chatGPT (expected, hallucinations, but makes it impossible to believe any assertion without already knowing what makes sense).

If you believe you came up with something worth sharing, please take the 30 minutes to edit it into something coherent.

I tried to understand as much as I could from the conversation, but there was some much where I had to pause and consider if it makes sense or not that it's almost as much effort as if I had to come up with the idea myself in the first place, and that's too much effort for someone else's idea.

I'm sorry for the negativity, but I believe I am giving constructive criticism. You're clearly very curious and creative, but that's sadly not enough.


You're totally right that I am not a scientific expert on this by any means. But often, breakthroughs in science come not from orthodoxy or experts, but exactly the people who don't believe in the orthodoxy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

Examples include:

Einstein's theory of relativity vs luminferous ether orthodoxy

Rutherford's discovery of radioactivity vs the 100 million age of the earth orthodoxy following Lord Kelvin, Feynman noted how scientists kept staying within a certain range until the next generation suddenly felt bold enough to go further https://www.americanscientist.org/article/kelvin-perry-and-t...

Pasteur's discovery of microbes against the orthodoxy that continually ridiculed people like Ignaz Semmelweiss even decades later https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis ... people still believed in spontaneous generation of living matter

Galileo's insistence on the heliocentric model, etc. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/galileo-is-accus...

Ancient greek ideas of phlogiston, the four humours, etc. or the idea that the heart rather than the brain is where thoughts originate, were in place for millennia

So, engage me on the substance. Discuss the actual substance of what I said. I am saying that PWT explains what we observe in quantum mechanics, and preserves realism at the expense of locality. And that FTL communication is not just possible but a lot less weird than Everett's MWI. I am saying that even if we can escape the light cone that doesn't mean necessarily that we can send information back in time (the ways postulated involve a lot of assumptions) and even if we did, it wouldn't violate any major principles.

I'm saying that we have to use classical mechanics to move the entangled parties apart. So we can't escape our existing light cone, or send messages to the past. But going forward, once we do set it up, we can build e.g. security systems that can't be stopped because they "teleport" some information to another location, even if wires are cut and electrical signals are blocked. I'm saying you don't need to classically move things in order to teleport information.

Einstein's objections that you can send information back in time involve exotic constructs and massive assumptions. And even if they were true, this wouldn't cause any paradoxes. Because the effect is tiny, and the probability of it being amplified is tiny, same as the probability of you passing through a wall due to quantum fluctuations.

But, the way it would manifest is that measurements would be probabilistically biased one way or the other. If there is an intelligence on the other side, it can actually act on this information. This FTL doesn't mean sending info back in time. But even if we were able to, then eventually with enough bandwidth we could communicate with the past, through this thing. It would be like a magic 8-ball that tells you some things. With enough bandwidth you might be able to bootstrap a stronger solution, ending up with a Closed Timelike Curve. I'm saying that there are still no paradoxes at that point because if you can believe Everett's MWI of worlds forking all the time everywhere, then you can certainly believe that worlds fork in these extremely rare scenarios of a closed timelike curve. So you have a sort of corkscrew where in some worlds you bootstrapped the thing, and in other world a lot of information is arriving from the future. But all that is very theoretical and not required just for FTL communication.

The way we achieve FTL communication is to improve quantum error-correction, as Microsoft has done. Once we have enough qubits, it may turn out that the randomness was because we are just "were not able to throw the dice in a controlled enough manner". That's what the DeBroglie-Bohm's Pilot Wave Theory says. It postulates local realism (attributing the randomness to our limitations), and accepts FTL information transmission via pilot waves. And by the way the other, wackier, theories don't rule out FTL communication either.

So we will soon enter an era where we can test this. When we overcome the quantum error rates and prevent decoherence, we'll be able to actually INFLUENCE remote measurements at FTL speeds. Not perfectly, but enough that we can send information. That's my prediction. Then we'll know if PWT is actually true.

This idea that all interpretations of quantum theory are exactly the same, in that they produce exactly the same predictions, is only true while the randomness and error rate is high. Once we learn to cancel out the errors, suddenly we'll get a "clearer picture" and be able to throw the dice more accurately.


> So, engage me on the substance.

He gave you constructive criticism about the form, specifically the ways in which your form makes it overly difficult to engage with you.

> I'm saying you don't need to classically move things in order to teleport information.

Generally for QM entanglement experiments you can't interpret the result without the measurements from both sides. So while you might be able to demonstrate after the fact that impacts on the state of the system propagated faster than light, you will not be able to make use of that FTL propagation in any directly useful manner.


The point is whether we can use quantum error correction to bias the probabilities on one end, before the decoherence happens.

Modern quantum error correction techniques are dramatically improving:

Decoherence suppression: Extending coherence times of qubits.

Fault-tolerant quantum computing: Reducing errors in quantum state evolution.

Quantum memory storage: Holding quantum states stable for long durations.

So if decoherence is controllable, and if randomness is epistemic (not ontological), then this suggests we can gradually influence quantum measurement probabilities.

Look, here's what we can already do today:

Extend entanglement coherence times (already happening).

Control quantum noise with precision (e.g., superconducting qubits).

Perform weak measurements without full collapse (experimental quantum optics).

I agree that directly biasing entangled measurements nonlocally has not yet demonstrated today, but it could be in the near future, which is what I am predicting can unleash this FTL communication possibility!

Quantum error correction is already proving that decoherence isn’t truly random—it can be controlled. The interaction-free measurement paradox suggests that it’s possible to extract information without collapsing a wavefunction. Bohmian Mechanics & PWT are underexplored experimentally, and this would be a direct way to test them.


This is a list of things rather than a concise statement of cause and effect followed by a proposed mechanism or other details. It's difficult for me to make sense of.

> bias the probabilities on one end, before the decoherence happens

Let's start there. What do you mean by that? What would this look like in concrete terms if I went and did it on the bench?

My understanding is that any measurement you take will appear random and uncorrelated until you have the data from the other side. At which point you can say "oh hey look, turns out it was actually correlated" but you can't demonstrate that fact until you have both sets of data in hand.

So in simple, concise, and concrete terms, what violation of the above are you proposing?


Ah yes, ChatGPT, the tool famous for it's rigor and accuracy which can never be brought to agree with something untrue, no matter how hard you try. /s

Honestly, I think this is a horrible format to share ideas. It's a scratch pad with very elaborate but not necessarily true explanations why your ideas could be true. Either submit your ideas directly, so it's easier to point out mental leaps/errors and visible how hard you thought about it or do the fact-checking yourself and publish a blog post with sources.

Edit: 100% agree with wasabis reply and they criticized more constructive so take my comment with a grain of salt.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: