On October 4, 2022, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the Nobel Prize for Physics in a press release /a>. It went to three physicists who conducted groundbreaking experiments to elucidate the nature of particle entanglement further. Entangled particles – usually photons – are mysteriously connected, even over long distances, such that when one reads out a certain state of the proximal twin, the state of the distant twin is determined.

What wasn’t clear to me was whether this connection is causal or merely correlative. Most sources I consulted with and people I talked to claimed it was merely correlative, which would exclude the possibility of actively changing the state of the distant twin by manipulating the proximal twin. That was bad news for the scientific plausibility of my novel “Life, Unedited.” (published under my pen name, L. Dieudonné Lemmert): One key assumption of the novel is that entanglement can be exploited for instantaneous communication across distances measured in light years in a device I called Tangle Phone.

The experiments for which the Nobel Prize was awarded indicate that entanglement can be used for long-distant communication. The causal relationship I was after is now called quantum teleportation. While in principle teleportation of matter could work (like in Star Trek!), all I am interested in is the transfer of information from proximal to distant particles. And quantum teleportation enables exactly that, as most clearly expressed in this piece of the National Science Foundation. Some sources still claim that the transfer of information would be bound by the speed of light according to Einstein’s universe, but I can’t see that because in this kind of information transfer, no electromagnetic waves whatsoever are involved. Note the word “instantly” in the NSF article.

In summary, it seems very much that cutting edge research in physics converges to the imagined realities in my novel!