I have a framework – or more a ladder – for thinking about communication.
It contains the things that can communicate. It starts from the very small to the very artificial. I define communication as transferring data from one thing to another. I do not care if the communicating entities are of the same “kind”. I do not care if the communication is intentional. I do not care if the communicator is “conscious” or even if it is “alive”.
Keeping that in mind – let’s have a quick discussion about particle communication. But first – we need to distinguish between a few mechanisms.
There is a difference between the message and the medium.
Sounds basic, but they are often confused. When reading about “communication” we are seeing a discussion about the medium – not about the efficiency, the fidelity or the bandwidth of the content itself. The medium can be completely agnostic to what is being transferred through it. Take air, copper wires, fiber optics – they do not care if you send text, image or sound. You could beam pure thoughts through them if you had the right encoder-decoder.
Mediums do not appeal to me as much as the substance being transmitted through them. Through history we managed to harness a medium to do much more than originally planned. Take copper wires. Passing morse then voice then internet. Being able to send a single thin thread of data in one direction and then multiple ones all at once.
That being said – I intend to write about the sci-fi concept of quantum-entanglement-communication and the potential in dimensions beyond the 4 dimensions of intuitive human perception (3 we can touch and time the 4th). The concept got popular through Netflix’s (terrible… don’t bother) 3 Body Problem adaptation to the sci-fi book series where the concept is applied. Interstellar used it too, but did not call it by name.
But let’s talk about quantum-content first.
Quantum physics is mind-boggling. On this subatomic scale things behave in a way that is very much outside of human intuition. For example the concept of location – where things “are” is fluid. Particles “are” (if the term can be even applied) in a statistical location. They can be here, there, in both places or nowhere at all. They are said to “be” somewhere statistically. They can “tell” each other how to behave instantly – even when being very (very) far from each other. With no time being needed for the information to pass – even if the distance between them is light years. Oh – and they can travel back in time.
A great deal has been theorized, experimented and learned about quantum particles in the past 100 years. But allow me to venture a guess – we know very little of these little things.
So why is this interesting for communication? And more specifically – for our current poor state of poor communication? Because they hold a promise. A potential of being an infinite tool for information transfer.
Now I’m not going to go into quantum physics, quote Richard Fyneman’s QED and argue with current CERN experiments as I do not want to make a fool of myself. I have no understanding in the field as any other human does not. I would say even more – things that we feel very “confident” with today – in theory or experiments that have not been refuted yet – will be joked about when looked back in a few dozen years or centuries. “Knowing” something is very subjective to when.
But I will venture an idea and some philosophy.
Photons – the little particles that make light (and impact everything else) can be an infinite data carrying device. They have multiple characteristics (frequency, phase, arrival time, polarization, orbital angular momentum, linear momentum, entanglement.. don’t ask. I won’t be able to explain) – some of them continuous (meaning not zero/one) – making it possible to encode endless amounts of information.
On a single photon.
Here’s an experiment done at Cornell university in 2016 encoding 10bit. Here’s DARPA showing interest. But there is a spin to this (pun intended). There is a question to “what is information” that is being carried. Is it only the difference between two states of the photon – compared in advance and thus becoming “data”? Or do all photons have “all” the information (remember “infinite” can means “all”) and we only lack the knowledge of “reading” them as of now?
I would argue that considering “data” or information being “transmitted” to be only what we humans “encoded” – on a photon or hard drive – is very human-centric (“Anthropocentric” if you want to sound clever at the dinner table). How human of us to think the earth is flat and everything revolves around us.
But how about if a photon does hold “all” information. If it has the ability to hold infinite information – perhaps it already does. All past and future events (remember its ability to travel where no man has gone before?) all the data we might want is already encoded on it. I am sure it laughs at the thought of the 10bit. It already remembers the name of the scientist’s great great grandchild. And her home address. On Mars.
Now where did I put my Photon Rosetta Stone?