The answer assumes that we’re using light as our medium of observation. What if the aliens shot neutrinos at us which had been subjected to quantum entanglement. The particles would arrive and the aliens would observe the neutrinos they still have and interpret the interactions with our planet.
Yes that occurred to me as well. Filtering out some wavelengths. Losing a lot of photons in the filter. Also that gravitational forces along the path will shift the path of the photons. So you might actually get some sort of angled, distorted view, if you got any at all. Thanks for letting me know about some actual use of the concept. I did not really expect it to work that well for various reasons. That is why I included “theoretically”. Losses would be immense. Number actually captured would be low, if any at all.
I like that idea. Remote viewing via quantum entanglement. ( I am still skeptical of the reality of entanglement in many ways ) I have an idea for instant interstellar cell phones etc with no time lag, using entanglement. Neutrinos are so hard to use. As they are so aloof to interaction with anything. My idea for no lag communication is a particle in one device, it’s entangled mate at the central switchboard, where it’s actions are then connected to the mate of pair you are calling.
I guess it would be like saying “a light-year corresponds to the amount of time it takes light to travel 1 light-year distance”. Not very illuminating.
Quantum entanglement does not work like that. Even if the state changes “instantaneously”, whatever that means, it doesn’t carry any classical information. You can use it to, for instance, encrypt information, but the encrypted information then still needs to be transmitted in some other way.
Yes but how long is a year, ( here you are defining a year by the term year)? Due to relativity time and space are related by the speed of light, I suppose plank length and plank time also do this, but isn’t plank time the time it takes for light to move one plank length (therefore, basically the same thing, a factor of the SoL)?
I think plank length and plank time are measures relevant to pirates.
Or so we believe today. My point was that there maybe other methods of remote viewing which the aliens could be using to watch you other than by visual light. I’m not a physicist but I had an idea that seemed interesting to me anyway.
It’s also true that schoolchildren today know more about atoms then the greatest experts 100 years ago. It wouldn’t surprise me if that is true in 100 years as well.
The thing is, when physicists find out something new about the universe, it’s never because their previous model was entirely wrong - it just wasn’t an adequate description of all phenomena involved when the scale changed relative to our general existence. Quantum mechanics is an extremely well-developed theory that makes predictions about experiments that are correct where classical theories, those that actually make a modicum of sense and aren’t just mathematical constructs whose axioms we have no reason to believe, get it wrong. We are extremely unlikely to be wrong about any fundamental issues of quantum mechanics; the main place where we will be “wrong” is what we don’t understand at all - a quantum theory of gravity. String Theories are a yet even more abstract series of mathematical constructs that attempt to do this, but no one has found something yet that actually works, or at very least we have no means to test whether they are true or not. We don’t expect that anyone solving the conundrum of quantum gravity will overthrow the last hundred years of quantum mechanics - it will just add to it.
Eh, not really. Most schoolchildren think that this is what an atom looks like, when that’s at best a cartoonist’s artist conception of the best expert model of 1912. The really bright students, if they were paying attention and had good teachers, will at least know that that model is incorrect, but they won’t know how.
Yeah.
When I was a kid I read an episode of “The Atom”, where he shrunk to subatomic size and visited residents of an electron “planet”.
I later read a science fiction story (can’t recall by whom) where the method of FTL (first trial was a passenger ship!) involved a side trip through a weird realm- they ultimately recognized it as the interior of a Bohr atom, which is a step closer to “reality”, but still far from electron cloud orbitals.
BTW- I didn’t really understand what they were talking about with the Spaceship in the atoms with electron shells, but I do think it may have slightly helped me when I did learn about The Bohr model later. I don’t remember if they mentioned Bohr in the story or not.
Found the story- “Nor Iron Bars” by James Blish, in a collection of short stories called “Galactic Cluster”. Overall the collection is rated 3.5 of 5 on an Internet review. This story was rated 3. I only mention that to say, prob not worth searching hard for this story.
pssshhht yeah, like I’m in a hurry.
The problem with watching distant planets with telescopes and seeing what happens is that a planet only reflects or emits a certain number of photons. Those photons are scattered out into the universe. And the farther away from the planet you are, the fewer photons from that planet you can intercept with your telescope.
Imagine a bomb strapped with thousands of arrows, all pointing in all directions. When the bomb goes off, the arrows are flung out in all directions. If you’re close, you’ll be hit by lots of arrows. If you’re far away you’ll only be hit by one or two. And if you’re even farther away you might not get hit by even one arrow.
So a planet that’s really really far from us might be emitting lots of photons, but it might be so far away that by the time a photon reaches the distance of our detection device, not even one photon from the planet interacts with our device. In that case we wouldn’t be able to detect the planet at all with our device, not even in theory.
Of course we could build a bigger device that will interact with more photons and have a better chance of detecting the planet. That just means we can detect things farther away, there are still objects even farther that we still could not detect, even in theory.
And this doesn’t take into account the problem that all sorts of other photons from other sources are zooming around, or that photons emitted by the planet might be absorbed by material in the way.
Even a telescope the size of a solar system won’t let you get clear images of car license plates from light years away, because not enough photons were reflected off that license plate and traveled light years away to be intercepted by your telescope.