Democratic Underground - I don't follow your argument.

If I describe how I see the issue, can you tell me what I'm missing?

First, quantum entanglement, to my understanding, involves particles that begin in an "entangled" state. All the examples I've seen of this involve particles that are created together - they begin very close together. Now, the fact that they are entangled means that knowing something about 1 of the particles, tells us something about the other particle, even if that particle has traveled a long distance away from the partner. Information determined at one point, is instantaneously "realized" at another point. Certain information can be "communicated" at faster than the speed of light. But, the actual separation distance of the particles is subject to the speed of light constraint. The simple example from wiki:

Before delving into the complicated logic that leads to the 'paradox', it is perhaps worth mentioning the simple version of the argument, as described by Greene and others, which Einstein used to show that 'hidden variables' must exist.

A positron and an electron are emitted from a source, by pion decay, so that their spins are opposite; one particle’s spin about any axis is the negative of the other's. Also, due to uncertainty, making a measurement of a particle’s spin about one axis disturbs the particle so you now can’t measure its spin about any other axis.

Now say you measure the electron’s spin about the x-axis. This automatically tells you the positron’s spin about the x-axis. Since you’ve done the measurement without disturbing the positron in any way, it can’t be that the positron "only came to have that state when you measured it", because you didn’t measure it! It must have had that spin all along. Also you can now measure the positron’s spin about the y-axis. So it follows that the positron has had a definite spin about two axes – much more information than the positron is capable of holding, and a "hidden variable" according to some interpretations of EPR.

Information about quantum states is "transmitted" at faster than the speed of light. What implications do you see for travel in that?

Second, when we talk about dimensions, the dimensions are orthogonal (specifically space dimensions - I'm not clear how orthogonality relates to the time dimension in spacetime). I'm not sure that orthogonality applies to the 11 dimensions of m-theory, but if it doesn't, I'm not sure what m-theory means by dimension. But, going back to the usual 3 space dimensions - (x, y, z) - let the z-dimension be very small. Say, the x and y dimensions are infinite, but the z dimension only runs from (-10 X 10**-10) to (+10 x 10**-10). So, we have a very small z-dimension. How does that allow us to travel at faster than the speed of light in the x or y dimensions?

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