Programming

Ha. Although, as I understand it, this is a little off

you can’t manipulate one to change the state of the other particle, which might be far away and thus break the maximum speed of information.

Entangled particles do change. If you observe one (e.g. interact with it by a detection device, etc) that property collapses but so does the one on the opposite.

So this would make faster than light communication possible right? Except it wouldn’t because you can’t know if/when the particle you “read” was already collapsed or if you did it and thus “flipped” it’s entangled pair.

So we know that they change instantaneously over a distance and can confirm it. But we have to coordinate with the other endpoint to confirm it.

This means that we can only confirm which flipped which after the fact using methods that are themselves don’t break causality.

Here’s some fantastic PBS space time video on the subject

https://youtu.be/tafGL02EUOA

https://youtube.com/watch?v=msVuCEs8Ydo

This amazing interview with Philip Wadler dances around this very topic quite eloquently.

Here's the conclusion of the paper Wadler is referring to in this interview:

Proposition as Types informs our view of the universality of certain programming languages. The Pioneer spaceship contains a plaque designed to communicate with aliens, if any should ever intercept it (see Figure 9). They may find some parts of it easier to interpret than others. A radial diagram shows the distance of fourteen pulsars and the centre of the galaxy from Sol. Aliens are likely to determine that the length of each line is proportional to the distances to each body. Another diagram shows humans in front of a silhouette of Pioneer. If Star Trek gives an accurate conception of alien species, they may respond “They look just like us, except they lack pubic hair.” However, if the aliens’s perceptual system differs greatly from our own, they may be unable to decipher these squiggles. What would happen if we tried to communicate with aliens by transmitting a computer program? In the movie Independence Day, the heroes destroy the invading alien mother ship by infecting it with a computer virus. Close inspection of the transmitted program shows it contains curly braces—it is written in a dialect of C! It is unlikely that alien species would program in C, and unclear that aliens could decipher a program written in C if presented with one. What about lambda calculus? Propositions as Types tell us that lambda calculus is isomorphic to natural deduction. It seems difficult to conceive of alien beings that do not know the fundamentals of logic, and we might expect the problem of deciphering a program written in lambda calculus to be closer to the problem of understanding the radial diagram of pulsars than that of understanding the image of a man and a woman on the Pioneer plaque. We might be tempted to conclude that lambda calculus is universal, but first let’s ponder the suitability of the word ‘universal’. These days the multiple worlds interpretation of quantum physics is widely accepted. Scientists imagine that in different universes one might encounter different fundamental constants, such as the strength of gravity or the Planck constant. But easy as it may be to imagine a universe where gravity differs, it is difficult to conceive of a universe where fundamental rules of logic fail to apply. Natural deduction, and hence lambda calculus, should not only be known by aliens throughout our universe, but also throughout others. So we may conclude it would be a mistake to characterise lambda calculus as a universal language, because calling it universal would be too limiting.