Lower bound set for speed of quantum entanglement - 10,000c

[Androsphinx]

Nature

Pairs of quantum-mechanically entangled particles seem to know at once what is happening to each other. Experiments show that even if this signalling is not instantaneous, it must be really, really fast.

One piece of Einstein's theory of relativity that has taken hold in popular imagination can be summarized by the mantra "nothing travels faster than light". What is less well known is that the theory of quantum mechanics, which deals with the behaviour of very small systems such as atomic and subatomic particles, violates the spirit (if not the letter) of this fundamental principle. Quantum mechanics predicts that, in certain circumstances, an activity performed on one particle can instantaneously change the properties of another particle, no matter how far apart the two particles are. On page 861 of this issue, Salart et al.1 describe an experiment to test how fast 'instantaneous' really is.

One particularly strange feature of quantum mechanics is quantum entanglement. In an experiment involving this phenomenon, a physical property of a particle (or larger system) becomes instantly dependent on the properties that are being measured on another particle, regardless of how far apart the particles are. In a letter to Max Born in 1947, Einstein dismissively called this effect of quantum entanglement a "spooky action at a distance", and thought it indicated that the theory of quantum mechanics was incorrect.

Einstein was not the first to express repugnance at instantaneous action at a distance. Two hundred and fifty years earlier, Isaac Newton wrote2:

... that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.

Newton was writing about his theory of gravity, and it was Einstein who showed in 1915 that the action of gravity is not instantaneous but is caused by a 'mediation' signal (the warping of space-time), which moves with a finite speed. Salart and colleagues' experiment1 tests whether the interaction between entangled particles is also conveyed by a mediating signal, and if so, how fast this signal must travel.

In addition to acting instantaneously, and in contrast to other physical effects whose magnitudes vary with distance, the effects of quantum entanglement are predicted to have the same strength no matter how far apart the entangled systems are. Erwin Schrödinger was uncomfortable with this idea, and, in the very papers in which he introduced the term entanglement3, 4, proposed that some unknown process must ensure that entanglement occurs over only microscopic distances. He was wrong. The distances over which entanglement has been shown to be maintained increase every year. For example, Salart and colleagues' experiment1, which is not designed to test this question, itself measures the entanglement of a pair of photons separated by 18 kilometres.

Salart et al. entangled their photon pairs using a source in Geneva, Switzerland, then passed them through fibre-optical cables of exactly equal length to receiving stations in the villages of Jussy and Satigny, which lie respectively east and west of Lake Geneva. Here, the photons' entanglement was checked by an identical pair of interferometers. As they had travelled identical distances, the photons would have reached the interferometers simultaneously, as best as modern optics and electronics allows. Despite this, Salart et al. see consistent entanglement of their photons, which means that the time taken by any hypothetical signal passing between them is below the detection limit of the equipment.

There is one subtle feature to all of this, however. Any hypothetical signal has its speed defined in a specific 'preferred frame of reference', which is not the same as the surface of the Earth. Salart et al. were able to check their results against all possible frames of reference by using Earth's rotation. The two villages in which they placed their detectors lie almost exactly east–west of each other, and the authors ran their tests at all hours of the day and night, allowing them to probe every possible orientation of the experiment against a hypothetical preferred reference frame. Taking into account the accuracies of their experimental design and making some conservative assumptions — for example, that Earth is not moving relative to the preferred frame of reference at more than a thousandth the speed of light — Salart et al. conclude that any signal passing between the entangled photons is, if not instantaneous, travelling at least ten thousand times faster than light.

The experiment of Salart et al.1 beautifully probes the deep tensions between foundational aspects of two of our most fundamental physical theories — relativity and quantum mechanics — using quantum entanglement. From it we can conclude that any theory that tries to explain quantum entanglement by invoking a transmission mechanism will need to be very spooky — spookier, perhaps, than quantum mechanics itself.

I can be PMed for the paper itself, if anyone's interested.

[Seggybop]

So, could this enable something like an ansible?

[Gullible Jones]

Short answer... No. Observing entangled particles breaks the entanglement.

[Androsphinx]

So, could this enable something like an ansible?

Not with Quantum Mechanics as generally accepted. Besides, any form of FTL communication gets you into very big problems with time travel and causality violations.

[Singular Intellect]

So, could this enable something like an ansible?

Not with Quantum Mechanics as generally accepted. Besides, any form of FTL communication gets you into very big problems with time travel and causality violations.

Is there a simple example that would demostrate what problems FTL communications would cause?

I think I grasp the whole trying to move matter from one point to another FTL causing problems, but just information like one's and zeros?

[Androsphinx]

Try this.

[Junghalli]

Is there a simple example that would demostrate what problems FTL communications would cause?

As I understand it, a big problem is it would let you do something like this:

Take an ansible and load one end on a ship. Accelerate the ship to .999 c and send messages from Earth to the ship. The ansible would allow simultaneity testing, so time would pass the same on Earth and the ship. However, the ship is also experiencing time dilation from relativistic travel. Now say the ship travels in a circle of a few light years, ending up back at Earth. From its perspective (and Earth's) it has spent X number of years on the journey, but due to time dilation it has also spent Y number of years on the journey, which means it would arrive at Earth at a time after it arrived at Earth from the perspective of the Earth-bound observer at the ansible. Which, if you take it to its logical conclusion, means the ansible just became a time machine the observer could use to send and recieve messages from the future. Oh snap!

[Androsphinx]

The ansible would allow simultaneity testing, so time would pass the same on Earth and the ship

I don't see how that follows.

[Junghalli]

I don't see how that follows.

It could be wrong, I'm no expert.

[Ariphaos]

Is there a simple example that would demostrate what problems FTL communications would cause?

Either there is some sort of preferred frame (breaking relativity), or causality can be violated. I'm not aware of any other way around the situation that does not go against observational evidence in some manner, if you have FTL in reality one of those two situations must apply, and the former has some caveats.

Though a third alternative in this specific case may be that entanglement is not quite what qm says it is.

I think I grasp the whole trying to move matter from one point to another FTL causing problems, but just information like one's and zeros?

Matter and information are interchangeable concepts - ones and zeros can be used to reconstruct matter.

It's important to realize that, in relativity, time is also relative. How fast you move through 'time' with respect to someone else is not necessarily constant, for example - if you are moving at .86 of c away from someone, you perceive them to be experiencing time half as fast as you are, and they perceive you to be experiencing time half as fast as them. So, if there is no preferred frame and you fire an instantaneous signal at t=10 seconds, they should get it at t=5 seconds, and you receive their reply at t=2.5 seconds.

A preferred frame would mean that instead you get their reply at 10 seconds, but a preferred frame goes against relativity and must satisfy a number of observed conditions about our Universe.

[Hotfoot]

Is there a simple example that would demostrate what problems FTL communications would cause?

As I understand it, a big problem is it would let you do something like this:

Take an ansible and load one end on a ship. Accelerate the ship to .999 c and send messages from Earth to the ship. The ansible would allow simultaneity testing, so time would pass the same on Earth and the ship. However, the ship is also experiencing time dilation from relativistic travel. Now say the ship travels in a circle of a few light years, ending up back at Earth. From its perspective (and Earth's) it has spent X number of years on the journey, but due to time dilation it has also spent Y number of years on the journey, which means it would arrive at Earth at a time after it arrived at Earth from the perspective of the Earth-bound observer at the ansible. Which, if you take it to its logical conclusion, means the ansible just became a time machine the observer could use to send and recieve messages from the future. Oh snap!

Time would not be made identical through the addition of an ansible. Assuming, for a moment, that you're saying that the ansible is still transmitting data at the same relative time frame as its entangled cousin, then all that would happen is that the crew aboard the spaceship would receive the message at a faster rate, their perception of time is just the same as before. All you're doing beyond that is recreating the twins example and throwing in ansibles for communication, nothing new has really been added. At best, relativistic travel makes going forward in time less of a pain in the ass. Want to see what the world is like in 50 years by only living the next 5? Go on a realativistic trip.


Now, this is me at 4AM glancing over the article, but here's what I take from it:

The idea that causality is broken if you move faster than light is based on the concept that their is no other barrier beyond the lightspeed barrier, along with some other considerations for the relative nature of time itself. Primarily that once you hit the speed of light, time naturally stops for you, ergo, if you go past it, you can move around freely within time.

The choice bit here is that the speed limit regarding quantum entanglement is working via another medium. NOT LIGHT, but something much, much faster. This has the potential to fuck with relativity and do so hard, but first the medium must be found and tested to see if it is viable as a communication medium.

What I've always wondered (and what nobody has ever explained away to my satisfaction) is what if there is another cone? As it stands, light cones are arbitrarily depicted as 45 degree cones in spacetime, with the concept being that all the observations any individual has can be confined to these cones. Anything without is impossible, and can potentially break causality, because there is no other limit. However, if there were another limit, like the one hinted to here, at many times (in this case, many thousands of times) the speed of light, what then? It's not instantaneous, there's a defined limit on speed, so you would have another, shallower cone, without the causality breaking issue of being able to observe an event before it happened and being able to alter it somehow.

To date, all I've heard was, "there is no other limit" and "light is the only limit" and so forth, but given how many holes the current model has, I remained skeptical, and while I don't know if this is what I was looking for, it has some damned good potential.

However, it could also just be a laser spun from a light minute away: impressively faster than light, but useless.

[Androsphinx]

There is still no other limit - and for all we know it could be instantaneous. But if there is a limit, it's not less than 10,000c

[Hotfoot]

There is still no other limit - and for all we know it could be instantaneous. But if there is a limit, it's not less than 10,000c

The very concept that there is a transmission medium that allows for instantaneous transmission of information without violating causality itself is another limit. The issue at hand is that the current model specifically says that no information may go any faster than the speed of light, period. If that is, in fact, no longer true, then the current model gains a very, very large hole that needs to be addressed.

I should also like to point out that on most scales that we are capable of observing, something so ludicrously fast as 10,000c to 100,000,000c would appear as instantaneous. I doubt we have equipment sensitive enough to really tell a difference on Earth.

[Androsphinx]

Information cannot be transmitted through quantum entanglement. And the whole point of the paper was that the most sensitive equipment we have could only say that it wasn't under 10,000c.

[Themightytom]

There is still no other limit - and for all we know it could be instantaneous. But if there is a limit, it's not less than 10,000c

The very concept that there is a transmission medium that allows for instantaneous transmission of information without violating causality itself is another limit. The issue at hand is that the current model specifically says that no information may go any faster than the speed of light, period. If that is, in fact, no longer true, then the current model gains a very, very large hole that needs to be addressed.

I should also like to point out that on most scales that we are capable of observing, something so ludicrously fast as 10,000c to 100,000,000c would appear as instantaneous. I doubt we have equipment sensitive enough to really tell a difference on Earth.

That would b a sweet experiment to give the mars mission

[Hotfoot]

Information cannot be transmitted through quantum entanglement. And the whole point of the paper was that the most sensitive equipment we have could only say that it wasn't under 10,000c.

Like I said, I read this article at 4AM, so there may be serious gaps in my interpretation.

In any event, the fact is that there is some medium by which two particles share a state, that the medium cannot be observed to carry information does not mean that it cannot, but rather that we have not yet found a medium by which to transmit information. Right now the only method we have of observing any information sent destroys the state.

Simply put, it is an assumption that we cannot transmit data at a rate faster than light. It is a further assumption that no method could exist because obviously relativity must apply to anything that breaks or bypasses the lightspeed barrier. Now, obviously nothing has been shown to yet, but to deny the possibility that such a thing could exist is to needlessly limit ourselves in our observations into how the universe operates. Quantum Physics itself is evidence that we do not understand a multitude of things about how our universe operates. Things happen that, frankly should not. Superposition of states itself violates all we know about how things SHOULD work. Tell any scientist a hundred years ago that a particle could be in two positions at the same time and you would have been laughed out of every laboratory you walked into, unless you could prove it.

I mean let's face it, Quantum Computers should not work, but somehow they do. By using superposition of states, every 1/0 switch is in both positions at once, so long as the switch itself is not observed. This ties into my point, that just because we cannot observe the transmission of information doesn't necessarily mean that there is no information transmitted in the process. It's unlikely, sure, but the possibility exists, and while nothing may ever come from it and it could just be another spinning laser at a long range*, it needs to be explored. I recall some test that indicated that data can be transmitted faster than light by cheating with Quantum Tunneling (naturally, over an extremely short distance), so the idea that c is an absolute is already weakened in my mind. Einstein was a genius, but even he could not reconcile the very small and the very large. He was able to feel more of the elephant that anyone before him, but he was just as blind as the rest of us when it came to the whole thing.

*To clarify to anyone who doesn't know what I'm referring to with these comments, I'm talking about the effect by which a laser creates a dot on a faraway surface and is then spun at a rate of one rotation per second. The dot itself will eventually move over the surface it is projected on faster than light, but it is not actually transmitting any data faster than light, because the light from the laser is still travelling at the speed of light, and that is the medium by which information is carried in this example.

[Steel]

As it stands, light cones are arbitrarily depicted as 45 degree cones in spacetime, with the concept being that all the observations any individual has can be confined to these cones.

Thats not what a light cone is at all.

They appear to be at "45 degrees" because they are drawn in a diagram where the speed of light is set to be 1. The light cone is just the path of a light ray travelling from the observer, so the cone is the line x=ct where we have chosen c=1, so x=t or a 45 degree line.

Given the concept that nothing can travel faster than light, that means that nothing outside the light cone can communicate with the observer as that would require ftl travel.

[Hotfoot]

As it stands, light cones are arbitrarily depicted as 45 degree cones in spacetime, with the concept being that all the observations any individual has can be confined to these cones.

Thats not what a light cone is at all.

They appear to be at "45 degrees" because they are drawn in a diagram where the speed of light is set to be 1.

Well, yes. Are you saying that's NOT an arbitrary decision? I mean, I could make the same diagram and set the speed of light to be 5. Everything would still hold true, but the diagram would look different. It's not like I'm saying that in an actual 4D view of spacetime that light cones are actually 45 degrees.

The light cone is just the path of a light ray travelling from the observer, so the cone is the line x=ct where we have chosen c=1, so x=t or a 45 degree line.

Given the concept that nothing can travel faster than light, that means that nothing outside the light cone can communicate with the observer as that would require ftl travel.

Right and wrong. Communication does not require travel, though that's a bit of a nitpick. I fail to see, however, how my admittedly simplistic statement that a light cone consists of all the observations an individual makes being confined to the cone. By your own statements, you've even indicated that I'm right, but logically, look at the facts: Once something enters a subject's light cone, it is capable of being observed. If it is outside, it cannot be observed. The angle of the light cone is irrelevant as it is merely a visual aide, but if something does exist that transmits data faster than light, it doesn't necessarily violate causality if it actually has its own cone, however much more obtuse than the cone light makes.

So I'm left wondering what the point of your post was. You start off by indicating that I'm completely wrong about what a light cone is, and then proceed to state what I've already said, just in a slightly different manner. Moreover, you fail to even address the issue of breaking causality under the current model of FTL, instead just stating the circular and meaningless "you can't send FTL messages without FTL". I mean, that's obvious. If you're going to chastise me, at least work in some causality into the equation, otherwise it just looks like you're being needlessly pedantic.

[Steel]

As it stands, light cones are arbitrarily depicted as 45 degree cones in spacetime, with the concept being that all the observations any individual has can be confined to these cones.

Thats not what a light cone is at all.

They appear to be at "45 degrees" because they are drawn in a diagram where the speed of light is set to be 1.

Well, yes. Are you saying that's NOT an arbitrary decision? I mean, I could make the same diagram and set the speed of light to be 5. Everything would still hold true, but the diagram would look different. It's not like I'm saying that in an actual 4D view of spacetime that light cones are actually 45 degrees.

Yes you could choose any angle for the cone, through a choice of units/scaling for time and or space, but the cone would still be the path of a light ray in whatever system of units you have chosen. The inside of the light cone represents the portion of space time that can be reached by a signal starting from a given event in space time, so it is the portion of spacetime that can "see" a given event without needing FTL communications.

The light cone is just the path of a light ray travelling from the observer, so the cone is the line x=ct where we have chosen c=1, so x=t or a 45 degree line.

Given the concept that nothing can travel faster than light, that means that nothing outside the light cone can communicate with the observer as that would require ftl travel.

Right and wrong. Communication does not require travel, though that's a bit of a nitpick. I fail to see, however, how my admittedly simplistic statement that a light cone consists of all the observations an individual makes being confined to the cone. By your own statements, you've even indicated that I'm right, but logically, look at the facts: Once something enters a subject's light cone, it is capable of being observed. If it is outside, it cannot be observed. The angle of the light cone is irrelevant as it is merely a visual aide, but if something does exist that transmits data faster than light, it doesn't necessarily violate causality if it actually has its own cone, however much more obtuse than the cone light makes.

So I'm left wondering what the point of your post was. You start off by indicating that I'm completely wrong about what a light cone is, and then proceed to state what I've already said, just in a slightly different manner. Moreover, you fail to even address the issue of breaking causality under the current model of FTL, instead just stating the circular and meaningless "you can't send FTL messages without FTL". I mean, that's obvious. If you're going to chastise me, at least work in some causality into the equation, otherwise it just looks like you're being needlessly pedantic.

But what i was saying is that anything that goes outside the forward light cone of a person is necessarily going to be capable of breaking causality by going back in time and arriving before it was sent. It doesnt matter if your method of communication is only capable of 1.001c (and therefore a minutely wider cone than the light cone), it will still be possible to bounce it around and have it arrive before it left.

What exactly do you mean by "communication does not require travel" as well?

[Hotfoot]

The idea that anything moving faster than light breaking causality is a direct result of the limitations of speeding up in a relativistic fashion, or, for lack of a better term: "normal spacetime". If we, however, discover another medium which has a different limit, and is not affected by relative time the same way as information sent through normal spacetime, then you do not have a breach in causality. In short, a wider cone does not magically warp around to before an event happened.

As for communications do not require travel, it's simple meant that you do not need to be able to move an object, like a person or ship, at speeds near what you can communicate at. Sending something with significant mass at high speeds is incredibly difficult. Case in point, right now we have lightspeed communications with radio and fiber optices. We have nothing that can even approach .5c without months or years of thrust.

[Steel]

The idea that anything moving faster than light breaking causality is a direct result of the limitations of speeding up in a relativistic fashion, or, for lack of a better term: "normal spacetime". If we, however, discover another medium which has a different limit, and is not affected by relative time the same way as information sent through normal spacetime, then you do not have a breach in causality. In short, a wider cone does not magically warp around to before an event happened.

Actually it can. See the diagram in the article posted by Androsphinx earlier: In that there is a diagram showing how an ansible instantaneous communication device can do it. The same argument still works (with very slight modification to the diagram) if your signal is any amount faster than c. So no matter if the signal speed is bounded in any other way, as long as it is faster than c you can still bounce it around and get it before it left.

As for communications do not require travel, it's simple meant that you do not need to be able to move an object, like a person or ship, at speeds near what you can communicate at. Sending something with significant mass at high speeds is incredibly difficult. Case in point, right now we have lightspeed communications with radio and fiber optices. We have nothing that can even approach .5c without months or years of thrust.

You still need to move the signal however, i mean you never needed to move yourself if you could shout loud enough. For everything except quantum entanglement (where buggery knows whats going on, perhaps something does travel) you have a signal that travels between the people. So yes, you are right that communication does not require mass to move, but it does require a signal to move. Eg hit a wall and a pressure wave will go down it and someone can detect that, but no part of the wall has gone anywhere, however i would say the wave had to travel.

[Hotfoot]

Actually it can. See the diagram in the article posted by Androsphinx earlier: In that there is a diagram showing how an ansible instantaneous communication device can do it. The same argument still works (with very slight modification to the diagram) if your signal is any amount faster than c. So no matter if the signal speed is bounded in any other way, as long as it is faster than c you can still bounce it around and get it before it left.

You're not listening to what I'm saying. I'm talking about a wider cone, not something that's necessarily instantaneous. Moreover, we're talking about something that would arguably be using a medium that is unhinged to reality as we recognize it. Something that allows two objects in vastly different areas of spacetime to be linked and respond to something at the same time (or close enough to it, since to don't know what the upper bound of the speed is here).

Quantum Physics, as I've stated before, makes little sense. The things we've seen should not logically follow. Single photons should not create diffraction patterns. Electrons should not create diffraction patterns when unobserved, only to act as particles when observed. Light carrying information should not be able to tunnel through solid matter without actually passing through it. Electrons should not spin in two directions at the same time.

And yet they are all true. Experimentation has born out that these seemingly impossible events are not just possible, but essential, you see? While causality is important, and may well remain true on the level of reality we are most comfortable with, even if FTL comms and even travel come true, the bottom line is that right now, something IS violating FTL somehow. The how may likely not be useful at all, but the speed of light has been outpaced by over 10,000 times. If this medium CAN transmit information, our perception of the universe around us has to undergo a major shift, because otherwise we are going to violate causality, create a paradox, and destroy the universe (which seems unlikely), or we will have proven that light is not the upper bound of information, and our civilization will advance. If not, it's a weird little thing that might be useful later on for figuring out something else and we should keep an eye on it anyway.

See, right now the fundamental difference between you and I is that you are demanding that the status quo must be true, without acknowledging what would happen if you were wrong. I, meanwhile, accept that the model is currently as accurate as we can make it, but we need to look at these weird little bits we don't understand to try and improve our set of knowledge.

By the by, I can't read the article itself, because I have not shelled out the $18 they have requested for the privilege of reading the article. Andro's offer to share the article through other means is, of course, something that should be a little more carefully thought out. I'm not sure, but I suspect it may be considered piracy.

You still need to move the signal however, i mean you never needed to move yourself if you could shout loud enough. For everything except quantum entanglement (where buggery knows whats going on, perhaps something does travel) you have a signal that travels between the people. So yes, you are right that communication does not require mass to move, but it does require a signal to move. Eg hit a wall and a pressure wave will go down it and someone can detect that, but no part of the wall has gone anywhere, however i would say the wave had to travel.

Well yes, you need to move the "signal". That's what makes photons so fucking weird: they make their own medium. I mean, it's a self-perpetuating source, and it's fucking weird. We don't even really understand everything about photons.

You see, photons are unlike most things we see in the universe. It's a wave that doesn't require a medium. Every other kind of wave needs a medium, sound, water, stadium, a medium is required, and it is simply energy that perpetuates through the medium. This is where we fall apart. You are not talking about a "signal" to move. A signal, to be specific, is a message, not a force that causes movement. Despite what Serenity teaches us, you can stop a signal but disrupting it and making the information contained within utter gibberish. What you can't stop (at least not easily) is the transmission, which is when you transmit energy that can carry a signal. I assume that this is what you meant, though I don't get the "move yourself" bit.

The fact is that this experiment seems to be measuring how fast the effect actually is, and I'm commenting that there could be communication potential in here, and if that is the case, we'd be looking at a very significant increase in our communications potential somewhere down the line. All we need to do is figure out how to transmit information along it, we don't even need to fully understand the effect per se, after all, we certainly don't understand everything about photons, but we know enough to communicate with it and build tech around it.

Moreover, your examples are non-functional. You're talking about sound waves, which require a medium to go from point A to point B. This is not how photons operate, and it almost certainly has nothing to do with how quantum entanglement operates. I mean, I don't even understand how what you've written here is a counterpoint to anything I've said.

You initially said that you needed FTL travel for communications. I corrected you and said that communications and travel are two different things: We can communicate at the speed of light, but we certainly cannot travel it. In fact, according to relativity, we would need more energy than the universe contains to accelerate matter to the speed of light, because as you approach said speed, the mass of the object increases. I assumed you were aware of this fact, but I guess I was mistaken. The point remains that so long as the phenomenon can be used to transmit and receive information, that is all that matters for communication

Everything past that seems to be entirely dependent on if you assume that what was written before you was inviolate, or if there are exceptions to be found that while not disproving the initial observations and their measured effects, help us better understand the universe as a whole.

By the way, you do move the wall a little when you hit it (just not much), and you move air as you speak. Simple experiment: hold your hand over a speaker. You will feel the vibrations of the sound. That's air hitting your hand. Ask yourself, how does air hit you, if it doesn't move? Medium waves like sound are all about passing kinetic energy from one place to another. The idea that nothing moves in that process is rather silly. In the case of a solid object, the wall moves, but bounces back, unless the force of the wave was enough to break the bonds of the medium, which of course can happen. Resonance Frequency is a fun thing.

Case in point (Volume DOWN kids, this is loud and annoying)
Wine Glass Meets Sound

If nothing moves when a wave hits it, how did the wine glass fly apart? Magic? Nothing else touched that glass, just sound at a specific frequency.

[Ariphaos]

You're not listening to what I'm saying. I'm talking about a wider cone, not something that's necessarily instantaneous.

Steel is quite aware of what you are saying, assuming you are actually making sense (your idea of 'wider'). Any spacetime diagram in which a signal is moving at > c can allow a causality violation if relativity holds.

Moreover, we're talking about something that would arguably be using a medium that is unhinged to reality as we recognize it. Something that allows two objects in vastly different areas of spacetime to be linked and respond to something at the same time (or close enough to it, since to don't know what the upper bound of the speed is here).

If that is the case then relativity has a flaw, as it implies a preferred reference frame. Relativity declares that there is no such frame.

Relativity can be wrong on this, it's just a Very Big Deal and would be quite a revelation.

The how may likely not be useful at all, but the speed of light has been outpaced by over 10,000 times.

They made a statement about Earth's frame of reference in the article for a reason. Something moving at "x times c" has no meaning without such a qualifier.

[dragon]

Information cannot be transmitted through quantum entanglement. And the whole point of the paper was that the most sensitive equipment we have could only say that it wasn't under 10,000c.

This might be a bit over my head, but according to this article by physorg they were able to violate Bell's inequality which is what says info can not be exchanged fater than light. Or does this have absoluty nothing to do with the matter at hand.

The team synchronized the two lasers with a timing jitter of less than 2 femtoseconds (a millionth of a billionth of a second, or 10-15 seconds), and maintained that synchronization for more than 24 hours. This “perfect interference” of multiple photon sources enabled the physicists to violate a stipulation called “Bell’s inequality,” which places a limit on the strength of correlations between distant particles based on local realism. Part of Bell’s inequality includes that distant particles cannot exchange information faster than the speed of light – while entanglement occurs instantly. Violation of Bell’s inequality in this experiment allowed the physicists to generate and then swap entangled photon pairs, along with the information contained within them.

link

[Hotfoot]

If that is the case then relativity has a flaw, as it implies a preferred reference frame. Relativity declares that there is no such frame.

Relativity can be wrong on this, it's just a Very Big Deal and would be quite a revelation.

And there is my point. This very well could be huge, as in just as big or bigger than finding or not finding Higgs-Boson in the Hadron Collider. This kind of stuff IS the cutting edge of research, and it can radically alter what we know about the universe. It's not like it completely invalidates what we have, but it certainly puts it in a new light.