A good dog can smell your entangled photons

Do you have a dog who barks or sits by the door when a family member is about to return home? Besides being adorable, this curious behavior may lend some insight into the very nature of the universe.

If you’re thinking “Sure, my dog does that, but it’s just because he knows the time of day to expect us,” then: 1) You’re no fun and 2) You should take a close look at the work of British scientist Rupert Sheldrake. In his book Dogs Who Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home – And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals, he takes a topic which was once nothing but a source of quaint countryside anecdotes, and elevates it to a real scientific phenomenon worthy of scholarly exploration. His methods adhere to such rigorous skepticism that, if you’re not convinced your dog has ESP, then you at least need to start doing some serious de-bunking.

The evidence is actually even weirder than you might think. One of the more talented dogs in Sheldrake’s book would start wagging his tail and looking out the window the moment his owner made the decision to start heading home. The owner was given a random time to leave the house, a random destination (over ten miles away), and no knowledge of when she would be returning. An experimenter at another location, (with no knowledge of the study) would then telephone the owner and tell him it was time to come home. Even before the owner got in the taxi, the dog (who was being videotaped) would wander up to the window and start showing signs of excitement. The experiment was repeated enough times, with the same results, that it appeared to be much more than a statistical anomaly.

Setting aside any questions of scientific validity for the moment, let’s just say that little Fido, while he’s chewing apart a tennis ball and coughing up a pile of green fuzz onto the carpet, is actually in tune with some some naturally occurring aspect of the universe which is beyond our senses – some way of connecting to the mind of his owner over great distances. Where would we start looking for it? Is it a smell of some sort? A mysterious magnetic field? What’s going on??

As it happens, there was a breakthrough in the world of physics last month in which quantum information was passed between two photons over ten miles away. (You can read about it on Ars Technica.) The physicists, (no doubt raised on a healthy dose of Star Trek) called it free-space quantum teleportation. Unfortunately, the use of the word “teleportation” is a bit misleading in this case,  unless you’re the kind of person who thinks of a fax machine as a “document teleporter.”

For a taste of what this experiment entailed , let me quote:

The phase-locking laser is injected into the interferometer to probe phase drift for feedback control on the PTS. The results of the BSM and the time information are modulated to laser pulses with Hamming code by Encoder…

I won’t go on, as I’m sure you can guess how it ends.

The gist of this discovery is that a mechanism for knowing the state of another item in the universe, regardless of distance, is something that exists. Is it possible then, that our furry friends already knew that? From what I know of photons, (which can be summed up by this article on HowStuffWorks.com)  they are basically what light is made of. We know by looking into their droopy little eyes, that dogs have a biological tool for detecting changes in photons. Their eyes and brains can tell the difference between different wavelengths of light in the form of color. Would it be any more miraculous if they could also discern differences in the quantum state of photons?

There’s talk that quantum-teleportation could be used for instantaneous communication across vast distances with no possibility for interception. (So those naughty video-chats with your mistress on Mars will remain a secret from your political enemies once and for all.) If that happens, and we later find out that dogs have been doing the same kind of thing all along, would it really be that surprising? It wouldn’t be the first time that we find out that nature has developed a technology before us. Which came first – sonar for dolphins or submarines?

Maybe it works like this: When your dog marks you by licking your hand or rubbing up against you, he also causes a set of photons to become “entangled” like the ones in the free-space teleportation experiment. Some of those photons bounce off your body and enter your dog’s eyes. Others remain with you as you travel and are sensitive to hidden biological shifts that occur in your body when you decide to head home. When those photons near you change state, so do the ones in your dog’s brain – triggering him to run to the door with your slippers in his mouth.

Speaking as someone who knows virtually nothing about quantum mechanics, I would have to say that this is the perfect explanation for a phenomenon which we’re not completely sure even exists.