Physics Asked by IronicalCoffee on December 12, 2020
I was thinking and I have this question,
entangled pairs of particles collapse at the same time. Knowing this, could we measure the one way speed of light by having 2 entangled particles, one at the base where the clock is located and one at the end of a tube. At the end of the tube we also place some kind of device that measures the particle upon receiving light from the laser. We shoot a laser from the front and the clock starts ticking, on the other side the collector measures the particle, this ‘collapses’ the particle at the base which is the signal for the clock to stop. Knowing the length of the tube and these 2 times we have essentially measured the one way speed of light..
This most probably doesn’t work (someone smarter should have come up with this if it did) but why not?
Thanks in advance for answering
I'm going to start by restating your experimental setup.
Two massive particles are entangled and separated by some known distance.
A photon is emitted from the location of particle 1.
It interacts with particle 2, collapsing both particles' wavefunctions.
You can determine speed of light by measuring the time interval between the photon being emitted and particle 1's wavefunction collapsing with the same clock.
The problem is knowing the time of particle 1's wavefunction collapse. You can't just watch it and see it jump from a mixed state to a fixed state.
You cannot tell that particle 1 is in a fixed state without measuring it. When you measure the state of particle 1, you don't know whether you just collapsed the wavefunction or it was already collapsed by the photon interacting with particle 2.
Correct answer by Paul T. on December 12, 2020
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