Science News: By linking the electrical currents of two superconductors large enough to be seen with the naked eye, researchers have extended the domain of observable quantum effects. Billions of flowing electrons in the superconductors can collectively exhibit a weird quantum property called entanglement, usually confined to the realm of tiny particles, say scientists in Nature.
"It's an exciting piece of work," comments physicist Steven Girvin of Yale University. "People are interested in pushing the boundaries of quantum mechanics."
After I read the recent report in Science News, that quantum entanglement was observed between two sub-millimeter superconducting circuits that were separated by a distance of a few millimeters, wherein when a current in one circuit was observed to be traveling clockwise, the current in the other circuit was observed with a high degree of probability to be traveling in a counter-clockwise direction, I began to speculate as to how such a phenomenon could be applied to propulsion systems for interstellar space craft and in general the paradoxes that might arise between entangled circuits traveling at relativistic velocities with respect to each other.
One of the ideas centers around the production of very large numbers of individually entangled pairs of such sub-millimeter scale circuits or other systems wherein the total rest mass of the circuits would be on the order of say 2 million metric tons. One half of the set of entangled elements would be brought along as space craft fuel while the other half would be kept back in the solar system at a safe distance from Earth.
Now imagine if one or perhaps even a few of such sub-millimeter entangled objects could be placed in a rocket chamber or an energy extraction chamber in a precisely cataloged and timed predetermined manner while their conjugate partners back here in the solar system where blasted with a beam of electromagnetic energy, a charged particle beam, and/or the like, where in the total energy of the beam energy interacting with a given conjugate object was many many times, and perhaps even many orders of magnitude greater than the total rest mass energy density of each object of a given pair of sub-millimeters scale objects.
If the energy was departed quickly enough throughout the conjugate partner back here in the solar system so that the entangled state of both partners of a pair remained as the partner back in the solar system was sublimated, perhaps the partner located within the rocket cone or energy extraction chamber within the ship would undergo an explosion wherein the energy of the explosion would be equal to that of the energized debris produced immediately upon the onset and termination of the beam/ conjugate partner interaction process that occurred back in our solar system.
Assuming that the interaction energy as such was an arbitrary multiple greater than unity of the total rest energy of a completely entangled conjugate partner located within the space craft energy extraction system and that the partner aboard the space craft would explode with the same energy as the interaction energy within the partner back in the solar system, and that the explosion at the location of the space craft was converted completely to space craft propulsion energy with 100 percent efficiency.
These speculations are a bit spooky, but if the conjectured kinematical phenomenon are real, then we have in theory, one heck of a rocket fuel, wherein space craft could truly reach arbitrarily high speeds.
Regards;
Jim