Space Station Could Beam Secret Quantum Codes by 2014

"We can do a lot of physics experiments with a relatively small budget" of a few hundred million euros, he says. I like that... For hmmmm. around 300 million dollars, not much you know. Not much at all in the whole scheme of things. Cool idea, kinda reminds me of the ansible in the 'Enders game' books.

I'm planning my own experiment at work. It includes a laser into fibre, a splitter, a polarization device on one leg of fibre and none on the other. This will all be run through a particular type of fibre that maintains the polarization of the light entering it.

Cost? a couple of pieces of equipment off of eBay, and the fibre is on the house.

"...was tested in a 2007 Swiss election."

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An election way too close to call, or so I've heard, as no one quite seems to know how to count (much less re-count) quantum chads.

Seems the problem has to do with a peculiar principle of Quantum Mechanics (QM) called the "Election Uncertainty Principle." Basically, the EUT (pronounced "yoot") says that "Until each and every q-chad is accounted for, all candidates whose names appear on any given ballot both win AND lose simultaneously, with the number of simultaneous outcomes being computed as 2^c_s; where C_s is the number of candidates - including write-ins - that appear on the given ballot. Got that?

"This complicates matters greatly," lamented Dr. Irwin Schwartzinger, Chief Theorist and Lead Mechanic for the Swiss Election Commission, "because now each q-chad must be paired with its original parent, a q-ballot whose location and momentum cannot both be known with arbitrary accuracy," He went on, "So, what we've got here, basically, is little more than just another one of those tiresome, Immutable Laws of Nature designed specifically to make life hell for gentle folk like us." He continues, "This whole debacle - an election held in 2007 and we still don't have the friggin' results back - made me realize that I should have majored in ballet or music; probably in clarinet or something, or maybe the tuba, or I should have joined the army and just hid behind a friggin' desk job until I could retire with a nice pension. But no. I had to do it the hard way and so look at me now, a friggin' PhD and expert in Quantum Mechanics. Gawd! What a waste of a life..."

"Oh!!! Were we taping? You mean that's a hot mic???"

Schwartzinger takes a moment to regain his composure, then ruminates about the 2007 Election outcome and that it may never be known. He laments, "The outcome cannot be known; not even in principle! The pox on quantum entanglement! Gawd! What a friggin' mess!"

For a moment Schwartzinger wallows in self-pity, but then suddenly brightens, "By the way, some recent findings by a group working in Colorado suggest a radically different solution to our little problem: force the election outcome by means of a bizarre state of matter called a Bose-Einstein Condensate. Or BEC, for short.

What is a BEC? "It is a system of particles in which all the components of the system share the same quantum state; usually the ground state or one close to it," explained Dr. Schwartzinger. "And once the particles have all converged on that state, they immediately meld together into a kind of "super q-chad," and that, my friends, reveals the election winner. This is good news indeed," he said cheerfully, "because if this works, some lucky chap will win this election by a landslide. Not only this one but every other election from now on. All landslides, except it's not the same guy each time. Cool, huh?"

Downside? "Just one, and not a big deal," said Schwartzinger. " BECs have this annoying property whereby you simply cannot predict the outcome of the election. Not one little bit! With BECs you either know perfectly well who the winner is, or you haven't a friggin' clue at all. It's as simple as that. Straight one-bit, yes/no, on/off binary. There are no 'trends' you can graph, no 'intermediate values' you can extrapolate, no statistics you can measure and project. Nothing. And lemme tell you it sure pissed off those insipid TV pundits! Now they all have to go out and get Real Gigs."