12/24/2023 0 Comments Particle faster than lightOne physicist who was immediately attracted to Dragan and Ekert’s ideas is quantum information scientist Vlatko Vedral. And though it went viral upon publication in 2020 and has amassed over 30,000 downloads and counting – by far the most out of all the papers published last year in the journal – the duo had (and still have) a fight on their hands to be taken seriously by the court of scientific opinion. Unlike Dragan’s previous solo attempts, the paper passed through its first test with the journal’s academic reviewers unscathed. Ekert encouraged and assisted Dragan to go further, and see if it still worked in the real world of four-dimensional spacetime. Up to then, Dragan had only explored his ideas in a toy world with one space dimension and time. When Dragan finally shared his ideas on how quantum randomness might emerge from special relativity, Ekert was keen to get involved. Immediately realising an intellectual affinity, over the course of several visits Ekert and Dragan developed a friendship, becoming as comfortable talking about quantum algorithms as they were teasing each other with mathematical puzzles. The email invited Dragan to Singapore to discuss links between their respective research. Ekert was and is a leading figure in quantum information and pioneer of quantum cryptography, who has dual Polish-British nationality and holds dual professorships at the University of Oxford and National University of Singapore. Then, in 2010, he received an email from Artur Ekert that would bring him right back to his musings on relativity and quantum mechanics. Outcomes can be random, just as they are in quantum mechanics.ĭragan moved on from his disappointment and was happily working in a branch of quantum computing called relativistic quantum information. Moreover, if a physicist in this world tried to measure certain properties of this particle multiple times, they would not get the same result every time. In this world, instead of a particle following a well-defined path, its motion is hard to pin down, described by layers of complex probabilities that correspond to different possible outcomes, much like what is known as superposition in quantum physics. So Dragan thought, why not keep the faster-than-light solutions and see what happens? When he did, he uncovered a world that would look more familiar to quantum theorists. But, mathematically, these solutions are still valid. He remembered that special relativity’s equations allow for two branches of solutions: one that leads to the familiar world where matter travels below light speed, and another where it always travels faster than the speed of light.īecause there is no physical evidence that anything can travel faster than the speed of light, the faster-than-light solutions are always thrown away. “It's almost as if quantum theory does exactly what relativity allows and not a bit more.”įollowing this line of thought, in 2008 Dragan began to dig into the maths. But it does it in a way that regards them as two independent and distinct pieces of a wider puzzle.ĭragan felt that this connection must run deeper: “It's more than just being part of quantum field theory, more profound,” he says. In fact, quantum field theory – which forms the basis for our modern understanding of how the building blocks of matter interact – unites quantum mechanics and special relativity. Dragan comes at this problem from a different angle, attempting to describe nature through the lens of relativity.ĭecades before he first started pondering the connections between the quantum world and relativity, a link between special relativity (Einstein’s first theory describing space and time before he added acceleration in his general theory of relativity) and quantum mechanics was already well established. But it has also left physicists frustrated, unable to match juggernaut equations to reality. This approach has given the world rich and complex ideas like string theory. To try to reconcile them, physicists generally assume that quantum mechanics is more or less the true description of nature and then tinker with relativity to get it to match up.
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