Documents / Official release
This Defense Intelligence Reference Document, dated 30 March 2010, was prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Warning Office under its Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program. It reviews quantum entanglement, nonlocality and EPR experiments, and asks whether nonlocal quantum effects could carry observer-to-observer signals faster than light. The paper describes proposed experiments and an example of real-time Earth control of a Mars rover. It concludes that there is no compelling answer yet and that experimental tests are needed.
From the source:Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 3/30/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD reviews quantum entanglement and nonlocality with a focus on whether those phenomena might be usable as a means of faster-than-light communication between observers, especially for real-time space operations over interplanetary distances. The report surveys the relevant quantum experiments and no-signal theorems, then examines proposed communication schemes based mainly on momentum-entangled photons, including scenarios involving superluminal and retro-causal signaling. However, it repeatedly acknowledges that the central question remains unresolved experimentally, and it gives substantial attention to the coherence-versus-entanglement tradeoff and other features of standard quantum mechanics that may prevent usable signaling even if non-local correlations are experimentally validated. Overall, the document is an exploratory analysis of whether quantum nonlocality could conceivably support a practical communications application rather than a demonstration of prospective utility.
UNCLASSIFIED/ /FOR OFFI@IAL li!I! er~t I conditions. Thorne and coworkers showed that "nearby" to any inconsistent paradoxical situation involving timelike wormholes there is always a self-consistent situation that does not involve a paradox. As Sherlock Holmes sa id, "When the impossible is elim inated, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." These speculations assert that equipment failure producing a consistent sequence of events is more likely than producing an inconsistency between the send and receive events. The implications of this are that bilking itself is impossible, but very improbable events could perhaps be produced in avoiding it. The other issue raised by retrocausal signaling might be called the "immaculate conception" paradox. Suppose you are using the setup described above, and you receive from yourself in the future the manuscript of a best-selling novel with your name listed as the author. You sell it to a publisher and become rich and famous. And when the time subsequently comes for transmission, you duly send the manuscript back to yourself, thereby closing the timelike loop and producing a completely consistent set of events. But the question is, Just who wrote the novel? Clearly, you did not; you merely passed it along to yourself. Yet highly structured information (the novel) has been created out of nothing. And in this case, nature should not object, because there was no bilking, and you produced no inconsistent t imelike loops. It is not known how to resolve either of these paradoxes. Here are a few possibilities: • If nonlocal signaling is impossible, then the paradoxes need no resolution, but better, more "air-tight" proofs of the impossibility of nonlocal signaling would be needed. • If nonlocal signaling is possible and can be used to form timelike loops, then paradoxes become important subjects for further experimental testing, study, and theoretical treatment. • As suggested by Stephen Hawking (Reference 24 ), perhaps nature "abhors" timelike loops, so that if one is about to be created, quantum vacuum fluctuations will grow without limit and destroy the apparatus that is attempting to produce the loop. Even in this case, use of nonlocal signaling might still be possible, provided timelike loops were carefully avoided in such systems. (See below.) X. Superluminal Communication Without Paradoxes One path to avoid the retrocausal paradoxes outlined above would be to make sure there were no timelike loops in the communication system. This can be achieved by careful arrangement of the propagation delays in the sending and receiving ends of the hypothetical nonlocal commun ication. Consider the space-time interval 5, as defined by the equation: 5 2 = x 2 - (ct)2, where x is the spatial distance separating two events (for example, send and receive), t is their separation in time, and c is the speed of light. A positive value of 5 2 means the interval is spacelike and s=O is a lightlike interval, and a negative value of s2 means the interval is timelike. The interval s is a Lorentz-invariant quantity that, in particular, retains its sign independent of the choice of inertial reference frame from which the two events are viewed. As long as the nonlocal communication system is arranged so that the space-time interval between the sender and the receiver is always separated by a spacelike or UNCLASSIFIED/;'FOR OFFI@IAI: WSE OHl:l/ 19
Not linked to a story yet.
Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 32 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.