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Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Not even an electrical signal. Entanglement seems to violate this. But, does it?

Imagine 100 gears lined up in sequence all the way across a basketball court. As you turn the gear under one hoop, all 100 gears simultaneously spin. Even the gear across the court would simultaneously spin.

Could you in theory connect gears a longer distance? Even Miles?

Imagine 100 basketballs in a straight line from one hoop to the other hoop with gears around the circumference parallel to the floor. You spin one ball, and they all spin. Spinning the ball under one hoop, simultaneously spins the other ball. Imagine, the in-between balls were not visible. Would this be a similar pattern to what we are seeing with entanglement?

Is it possible that it is not empty space between the two particles, yet some gear like matter that is connecting entangled particles?

Gear Theory --THE END--

Qmechanic
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Justin Time
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1 Answers1

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Gears cannot beat the speed of light limit for signal transmission. The fastest you can convey a signal with (steel) gears is equal to how fast a vibration like a hammer blow can travel from one gear to the next, which is equal to the speed of sound in steel- about 5000 feet/second.

The same limit applies to your example of spinning basketballs: the last ball in the line does not begin to spin at the same instant the first one does; it takes time for the spin "ripple" to make its way from one ball to the next because the balls have mass and are rubbery, and the limiting speed would be the speed of sound as transmitted through basketballs (which I do not know how to estimate here).

James Clerk Maxwell believed that space had to be stuffed solid with some sort of magical gears which were responsible for transmitting electromagnetic waves, and spent a lot of time trying to figure out how light and stiff those tiny, 3-dimensional gears would have to be in order to transmit waves at the speed of light. The answer is they can't be made out of any material that exists in our world- Maxwell's little gears were a fantasy.

niels nielsen
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