Human Eye Could Detect Spooky Action At a Distance

[bananas]

Slashdot discussion: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/19/2338245

Human Eye Could Detect Spooky Action At a Distance
Posted by samzenpus on Thursday February 19, @08:37PM
from the I-seen-things dept.
Science

KentuckyFC writes "The human eye is a good photon detector--it's sensitive enough to spot photons in handfuls. So what if you swapped a standard photon detector with a human eye in the ongoing experiments to measure spooky-action-at-a-distance? (That's the ability of entangled photons to influence each other, no matter how far apart they might be.) A team of physicists in Switzerland have worked out the details and say that in principle there is no reason why human eyes couldn't do this kind of experiment. That would be cool because it would ensure that the two human observers involved in the test would become entangled, albeit for a short period time. The team, led by Nic Gisin, a world leader on entanglement, says it is actively pursuing this goal (abstract) so we could have the first humans to experience entanglement within months."

The physics arXiv blog has been slashdotted and is down.
edit: I had a couple of wrong links here.
The google cache of the arxivblog entry is at: http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Farxivblog.com%2F%3Fp%3D1230
"Human eye could detect spooky action at a distance"
February 19th, 2009 | by KFC |
<snip>

[lumberjack_jeff]

1. How many photons in "a handful?" n/t

[thereismore]

2. Six. nt

[scubadude]

3. Very cool, but I don't understand....

why we all aren't entangled from the point of singularity, the Big Bang....

Many paradoxes here.

Scuba

[caraher]

5. In quantum mechanics, entanglement means something very specific

Certainly we are all "entangled" in many ways with many things. But in this context "entangled" has to do with whether a quantum wavefunction can be factored a certain way... in other words, it's a matter of mathematical physics.

[Kip Humphrey]

4. If this can be demonstrated with two people then it necessarily applies to 2 eyes. Look

in the mirror.

[BlooInBloo]

6. If the human eye can detect it, it's ipso facto not spooky. Durr.

[caraher]

7. It's an Einstein quote

Einstein objected to any theory that involved nonlocal interactions, which he dubbed "spooky action at a distance." To say the human eye can "detect spooky action at a distance" is somewhat misleading, as the nonlocal interaction is something one infers from the results of experiments rather than something directly seen (or even glimpsed). What the OP refers to is really just that the human eye is sensitive enough to small numbers of photons to be useful in principle as a detector in such experiments.

[BlooInBloo]

8. hahahaah!

Um, yes, I know in very great detail where the quote is from, and specifically what it means. My comment was purposefully aware of this.

But thanks.