this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
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The two particles are in different but directly related states. For example in some circumstances with two entangled photons, it will necessarily be the case that one photon has horizontal polarisation and the other vertical polarisation. The two will never have the same polarisation.
You can't know which photon is in which state without measuring one. The effect of taking the measurement travels faster than the speed of light. Measurement is not manipulating though; you can't say "I want this photon to be measured as vertically polarised", you can only ask "what is the polarisation of this photon?". So you can't transmit information faster than light, unfortunately.
Quantum is a struggle for me to understand because, I feel like the current explanations don’t suffice why you can’t transmit information. To me, this still sounds perfectly viable for information transfer… just don’t encode information via polarization. You would encode it as a primitive derived from whether or not state collapse has happened yet or not.
Using the same/similar mechanism they can use to determine collapse happens to both entangled particles at the same time (faster than light), can they not also determine whether or not collapse has happened at all?
Maybe it’s that checking for collapse will actually cause collapse, thus ruining the information channel. But, perhaps then, you just add more entangled particles. Have some mechanism established with “throwaway” particles that can have their state collapsed either as a chain reaction or via the polling process.
Obviously I’m not the smarted person here… probably a lot wrong with my above assumption. But my point is really that explanations about quantum seem to be unsupportive to the claims they make about quantum.
AFAIU you can't determine whether the state on the other side has been collapsed. All you can say with certainty is the state on the other side after you have collapsed yours.
I'd recommend this excellent series if you want a good grounding:
https://www.rigb.org/explore-science/explore/video/arrows-time-back-future-1999
And I also found this video which I haven't watched but I expect will be good and probably attacks your pondering more directly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_0o2fJhtSc