In a week where we are celebrating the -50 year anniversary of First Contact with Zefram Cochrane on 5th April 2063, it reminds me of another recent story. This one concerns quantum entanglement of particles, which Einstein famously called “spooky at a distance”.
A team of Chinese physicists have clocked the speed of spooky action at a distance — the seemingly instantaneous interaction between entangled quantum particles — at more than four orders of magnitude faster than light. Their equipment and methodology doesn’t allow for an exact speed, but four orders of magnitude puts the figure at around 3 trillion meters per second.
That’s warp 10,000 by my reckoning. Scotty, crank those Di-Lithium crystals up!