"Greg Egan - Mitochondrial Eve" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

toss… they’re both still giving equal numbers of heads and tails, at random.
So there’s no way of encoding any message into the data. You can’t even tell,
from Mars, when the correlation starts and stops – not unless the data from
Earth gets sent along for comparison, by some conventional means like a radio
transmission – defeating the whole point of the exercise. EPR itself
communicates nothing.”

Lena contemplated this thoughtfully, though she was clearly unsurprised by the
verdict.

She said, “It communicates nothing between separated atoms – but if you bring
them together, instead, it can still tell you what they’ve done in the past.
You do a control experiment, don’t you? You make the same measurements on
atoms which were never paired?”

“Yeah, of course.” I pointed to the third and fourth columns of data on the
screen; the process itself was going on silently as we spoke, inside an
evacuated chamber in a small grey box concealed behind all the electronics.
“The results are completely uncorrelated.”
“So, basically, this machine can tell you whether or not two atoms have been
bonded together?”

“Not individually; any individual match could just be chance. But given
enough atoms with a common history – yes.” Lena was smiling conspiratorially.
I said, “What?”

“Just… humour me for a moment. What’s the next stage? Heavier atoms?”

“Yes, but there’s more. I’ll split a hydrogen molecule, let the two separate
hydrogen atoms combine with two fluorine atoms – any old ones, not correlated
– then split both hydrogen fluoride molecules and make measurements on /the
fluorine atoms/… to see if I can pick up an indirect correlation between them:
a second-order effect inherited from the original hydrogen molecule.”

The truth was, I had little hope of getting funded to take the work that far.
The basic experimental facts of EPR had been settled now, so there wasn’t much
of a case for pushing the measurement technology any further.

“In theory,” Lena asked innocently, “could you do the same with something much
larger? Like… DNA?”

I laughed. “No.”

“I don’t mean: could you do it, here, a week from tomorrow? But – if two
strands of DNA had been bonded together… would there be any correlation at
all?”

I baulked at the idea, but confessed, “There might be. I can’t give you the
answer off the top of my head; I’d have to borrow some software from the
biochemists, and model the interaction precisely.”