Superconductors: Faster than light communication and Instant answer computers?

Factual Questions
1

I am reading In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat by John Gribbon…

And he mentions an experiment by Terry Clark in Sussex where they used a Josephson junction to demonstrate some very interesting quantum non locality.

Basically he said that all the electrons in this superconductor changed states at the SAME TIME, so that in essence a change on one part of the superconductor did not travel via the speed of light around the superconductor, but rather instantaneously was transferred to all parts of the superconductor.

He goes on to mention on going research to use this phenomena for faster than light communication and computers that respond instantly with an answer.

I remember this from High School as being an area researched in computers…

Is any research continuing on these two things? It seems to me that if this experiment really did what they claim, that taking advantage of it for communication or computing wouldn’t be that difficult.

Anyone know? Chronos? All help appreciated. :slight_smile:

2

Research is definitely going on in this field. Do a google search on “quantum computer” or “quantum computation” for lots more information

3

Physicists are pretty certain that quantum non-locality can’t be used to actually transmit information faster than light. That said, there are a lot of tricks that a quantum computer could do that would mimic hyper-fast information transmittal and processing. For example, a quantum computer could theoretically perform a series of calculations on all possible values of a set of bits. When it was done you would have an answer to your calculation in a state of indeterminacy. Then if you supplied the data representing the actual values of the bits, the final answer would appear instantly, the calculations being “preprocessed” so to speak.