The Illusion of Superluminal Signaling

Steven Weinstein

S. Aravinda, R. Srikanth

Sibasish Ghosh A

Hrvoje Nikolić

We explore some implications of the hypothesis that quantum mechanics (QM) is universal, i.e., that QM does not merely describe information accessible to observers, but that it also describes the observers themselves. From that point of view, "free will" (FW) - the ability of experimentalists to make free choices of initial conditions - is merely an illusion. As a consequence, by entangling a part of brain (responsible for the illusion of FW) with a distant particle, one may create nonlocal correlations that can be interpreted as superluminal signals. In addition, if FW is an illusion, then QM on a closed timelike curve can be made consistent even without the Deutch nonlinear consistency constraint.

Norman Hugh Redington

Alicki has demonstrated that a travelling Gaussian pulse subject to damping is indistinguishable from an undamped pulse moving with greater speed; such an effect could create the illusion of a pulse moving faster than light. In this note, an alternative derivation of the same result is presented. However, it is unlikely that this particular illusion could explain the superluminal neutrino-velocities reported by OPERA.

Thilo Sauter