It's even worse that my simplistic example of firing something at what we are trying to look at. Even if we didn't fire a photon in and just looked at the output of the system our act of observing it still changes it's state.
Imagine a dime sliced down the middle, into a heads half and a tails half. One half goes to a person who then flies to the moon, and you keep the other half here on Earth. When you look at your half, and see that it is heads, there is no need for you to talk to your moon-bound friend to know she has tails.
But here's the startling difference between two halves of a dime and two quantum particles. In the moment before you look at a quantum particle, - according to the Theory of Quantum Mechanics which has successfully explained many phenomena, but may be incorrect (it is certainly incomplete) - it is neither heads nor tails. Rather, it is both at once. When you look, it becomes one or the other. Your mere act of observation has changed its condition.
Weirder still, a quantum particle's quirkiest talent may be its ability to be intimately linked, or entangled, with another. Even when two entangled particles are far apart, a change to one always affects the other.
Two entangled particles can be coupled so that they must swivel in opposite directions. Forcing one to spin clockwise will set the other spinning counterclockwise, no matter how far they are separated in space. They are fatefully entwined.
Einstein called this phenomenon "spooky action at a distance". An Austrian team recently carried out an experiment showing the entanglement of particles on opposite banks of the River Danube in Vienna. Even from two buildings nearly 600 meters apart, during a night of 50 km/h winds, across trees and power lines, the particles stayed entangled. In effect, one particle could "communicate" with the other in an instant, without any visible connection bridging the two. I had a discussion with Prof Ian Stewart about this during lunch in November and he thinks the particles may just have the same hidden variable that they are dancing to and only seem to be entangled - not sure I understand how changing one can effect the other in that case.
The researchers envision a global network of satellites that would allow entangled particles to send instant messages far and wide. Experiments with entangled photons involving satellites can now actually be done and are in plan. Therein lies time travel perhaps? Entanglement equation attached.
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We have a person over here in the UK called Derren Brown. He can do all that clairvoyant stuff and says it's just technique - not supernatural power - I believe him. I agree with you, why do these people charge money? If you can see into the future then you'd be a multi millionaire - just ask Biff in Back to the Future Part 2. But people are looking for some kind of direction/certainty - perhaps prayer would be better, at least that is free - I think ! :-)
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