Antimatter

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ThinkingMan

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Antimatter
« on: July 09, 2012, 08:45:46 AM »
So my question is mainly directed at jric1416, but anyone is free to help answer it (given that you're not posting baseless crap).

Is anti-matter and matter annihilation a viable option for energy production?
When Tom farts, the special gasses released open a sort of worm hole into the past. There Tom is able to freely discuss with Rowbotham all of his ideas and thoughts.

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Rushy

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #1 on: July 09, 2012, 09:00:51 AM »
Assuming you can produce and contain it in an economic fashion, yes. Unfortunately, no one can produce it at any meaningful rate and the longest antimatter has ever been contained is 17 minutes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter

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Lorddave

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #2 on: July 09, 2012, 09:17:58 AM »
What Irush said.

If you could find a way to flip the charges of a proton with very little energy, that would solve half the problem. But right now antimatter requires particle accelerators to make.
You have been ignored for common interest of mankind.

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ThinkingMan

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #3 on: July 09, 2012, 10:33:16 AM »
Well I know that. I've also read the aforementioned wikipedia article. I'm looking for further information beyond that article. It is said that antimatter is produced at the very tops of large thunderstorms, and also in the ionosphere (i'm assuming from some sort of particle collisions). I was wondering how this happens, and if anyone knows, is it possible to either artificially reproduce the action, or to somehow harness what is already there? Also, are there anymore theories on what this "economic fashion" may be?
When Tom farts, the special gasses released open a sort of worm hole into the past. There Tom is able to freely discuss with Rowbotham all of his ideas and thoughts.

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Rushy

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #4 on: July 09, 2012, 11:38:11 AM »
Any method of extracting energy from antimatter would require quite a bit of the substance. When antimatter is produced via CERN (or random acts of nature you mentioned earlier) it is produced at near intangible amounts. No known method can even produce a single gram of any type in an executable time frame. Unless there is a fantastical discovery of other extraction methods, antimatter will remain the play things of theoretical physicists and won't pertain to practical use.

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ThinkingMan

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #5 on: July 09, 2012, 11:43:17 AM »
Yes I know. I said I've read the article. It's all in there. I've actually read it a few times, the subject is fascinating. I was wondering if there was anyone that knew of any other ways that antimatter can be produced, or even collected? Perhaps in some passive trap in the ionosphere? Or a passive collector of some sort using some kind of foil or gas chamber in orbit around earth that uses the sun's rays to create it? Wikipedia can't possibly sum up all known facts about this topic.
When Tom farts, the special gasses released open a sort of worm hole into the past. There Tom is able to freely discuss with Rowbotham all of his ideas and thoughts.

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Rushy

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #6 on: July 09, 2012, 11:46:16 AM »
That is the problem, there is not a lot of known facts about the topic. Most of the universe still remains to be an enigma.


Preferrably the world needs to start becoming more energy efficient before we start looking for new methods to harness untold amounts of energy. Imagine if cars ran on something other than a 15% energy efficient internal combustion engine. Imagine a photovoltaic cell that can convert upwards of 50% of the energy it receives while being mass reproducable. There are a lot of things we can improve in the world that is a lot closer to reality than what can be produced in a multi-billion dollar super collider.
« Last Edit: July 09, 2012, 11:56:10 AM by Irushwithscvs »

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ThinkingMan

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #7 on: July 09, 2012, 11:47:18 AM »
But you're still not answering my question. You're just cluttering the thread.
When Tom farts, the special gasses released open a sort of worm hole into the past. There Tom is able to freely discuss with Rowbotham all of his ideas and thoughts.

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Rushy

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #8 on: July 09, 2012, 11:56:56 AM »
But you're still not answering my question. You're just cluttering the thread.

Your question was answered in the first post, the answer is yes.

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ThinkingMan

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #9 on: July 09, 2012, 12:14:39 PM »
I'll clarify. You didn't answer my second question.
When Tom farts, the special gasses released open a sort of worm hole into the past. There Tom is able to freely discuss with Rowbotham all of his ideas and thoughts.

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Lorddave

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #10 on: July 09, 2012, 12:57:53 PM »
The second question is a big fat no.
Anti-matter is so hard to capture you need to create it in a total vacuum and use magnetic fields and ultra low temperatures just to hold it for a few minutes.  Doing that anywhere other than a lab is impossible.


And I agree with Irush.  We need to stop using the internal combustion engine and start using electric motors with a good 90% efficiency.

As for solar, I've done a lot of reading on the subject.  50% efficiency is impossible with current materials with a strictly PV system.  The only way to get even a possible 75% is to use a hybrid PVT (Photo Volt and Thermal) which collects the heat from the sun and PV cell to heat water or some other fluid.  But those are all stationary systems that also use solar tracking and concentration.  Apparently concentrating the sunlight gives better results.

You also have the problem of band gaps.  Solar panels are generally tuned towards a specific wavelength.  You can change the band gap to get a longer or shorter wavelength but you degrade the other wavelengths when you do.  One of the ideas floating around is to absorb the light and then re-emit it as a single wavelength.
You have been ignored for common interest of mankind.

I am a terrible person and I am a typical Blowhard Liberal for being wrong about Bom.

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ThinkingMan

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #11 on: July 09, 2012, 01:45:56 PM »
The second question is a big fat no.
Anti-matter is so hard to capture you need to create it in a total vacuum and use magnetic fields and ultra low temperatures just to hold it for a few minutes.  Doing that anywhere other than a lab is impossible.


And I agree with Irush.  We need to stop using the internal combustion engine and start using electric motors with a good 90% efficiency.

As for solar, I've done a lot of reading on the subject.  50% efficiency is impossible with current materials with a strictly PV system.  The only way to get even a possible 75% is to use a hybrid PVT (Photo Volt and Thermal) which collects the heat from the sun and PV cell to heat water or some other fluid.  But those are all stationary systems that also use solar tracking and concentration.  Apparently concentrating the sunlight gives better results.

You also have the problem of band gaps.  Solar panels are generally tuned towards a specific wavelength.  You can change the band gap to get a longer or shorter wavelength but you degrade the other wavelengths when you do.  One of the ideas floating around is to absorb the light and then re-emit it as a single wavelength.

I don't think impossible should be the word for that. Before 1903, most people thought a flying machine was impossible.

Solar panels are very promising technology. As are electric cars. The problem with electric cars (trust me, I'm all for them) is that the electrical infrastructure in most places needs a large overhaul to keep up with the charging of all of those cars. And more power has to be produced.
When Tom farts, the special gasses released open a sort of worm hole into the past. There Tom is able to freely discuss with Rowbotham all of his ideas and thoughts.

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Lorddave

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #12 on: July 09, 2012, 02:11:04 PM »
The second question is a big fat no.
Anti-matter is so hard to capture you need to create it in a total vacuum and use magnetic fields and ultra low temperatures just to hold it for a few minutes.  Doing that anywhere other than a lab is impossible.


And I agree with Irush.  We need to stop using the internal combustion engine and start using electric motors with a good 90% efficiency.

As for solar, I've done a lot of reading on the subject.  50% efficiency is impossible with current materials with a strictly PV system.  The only way to get even a possible 75% is to use a hybrid PVT (Photo Volt and Thermal) which collects the heat from the sun and PV cell to heat water or some other fluid.  But those are all stationary systems that also use solar tracking and concentration.  Apparently concentrating the sunlight gives better results.

You also have the problem of band gaps.  Solar panels are generally tuned towards a specific wavelength.  You can change the band gap to get a longer or shorter wavelength but you degrade the other wavelengths when you do.  One of the ideas floating around is to absorb the light and then re-emit it as a single wavelength.

I don't think impossible should be the word for that. Before 1903, most people thought a flying machine was impossible.
Well by impossible I'm going to say not until we can extract an antimatter particle from the atmosphere in 1/1000000000 of a second.  Before it has a chance to collide with normal matter.  And doing so without using as much energy as we would get back.

Quote
Solar panels are very promising technology. As are electric cars. The problem with electric cars (trust me, I'm all for them) is that the electrical infrastructure in most places needs a large overhaul to keep up with the charging of all of those cars. And more power has to be produced.
That's only one of them.
The other is that battery technology (thank you Texacco) is lagging behind so badly that we can't go 300 miles without an 8 hour recharge on a 240v charger.
You have been ignored for common interest of mankind.

I am a terrible person and I am a typical Blowhard Liberal for being wrong about Bom.

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Chris Spaghetti

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #13 on: July 09, 2012, 02:34:14 PM »
The solution with electric cars would simply be to have easily replaced batteries. Filling stations would keep a bank of them charging and when you ran low on juice you simply take the battery out of your car, swap it for a fully-charged one from the station and carry on about your day. Your battery would then be charging for the next 8 hours to be picked up by someone who'd swap it for theirs.

unfortunately it's not going to happen, when was the last time you saw technology companies standardise anything?

As for antimatter, assuming it could be relatively cheaply manufactured, it would be more likely to find itself in the warhead of a rocket than powering your house, at least at first.

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Lorddave

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #14 on: July 09, 2012, 03:22:05 PM »
The solution with electric cars would simply be to have easily replaced batteries. Filling stations would keep a bank of them charging and when you ran low on juice you simply take the battery out of your car, swap it for a fully-charged one from the station and carry on about your day. Your battery would then be charging for the next 8 hours to be picked up by someone who'd swap it for theirs.

unfortunately it's not going to happen, when was the last time you saw technology companies standardise anything?
Standardization is easy.  The problem is waterproofing the seals with multiple removals and replacements.  Plus storage.  Plus easy replacement setup ie. lifts.
You have been ignored for common interest of mankind.

I am a terrible person and I am a typical Blowhard Liberal for being wrong about Bom.

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EnigmaZV

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #15 on: July 09, 2012, 03:54:19 PM »
The solution with electric cars would simply be to have easily replaced batteries. Filling stations would keep a bank of them charging and when you ran low on juice you simply take the battery out of your car, swap it for a fully-charged one from the station and carry on about your day. Your battery would then be charging for the next 8 hours to be picked up by someone who'd swap it for theirs.

unfortunately it's not going to happen, when was the last time you saw technology companies standardise anything?
Standardization is easy.  The problem is waterproofing the seals with multiple removals and replacements.  Plus storage.  Plus easy replacement setup ie. lifts.

Also a sufficiently sized battery would be very heavy.
I don't know what you're implying, but you're probably wrong.

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jric1416

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #16 on: July 09, 2012, 06:42:30 PM »
It is very misunderstood what people think anti matter is, it has been immortalised in science fiction as some sort of super explosive, very untrue.

What is antimatter first off?

Particles have information contained within them I won't go into detail here you can look it up if you wish, this information is charge, mass, spin or angular momentum, baryon number, lepton number, parity and the list goes on. Now what makes matter different from antimatter. Antimatter is indeed 'flipped' charge (we call it charge conjugation, and is achieved by flipping the quantum wave function in phase space) however this is not all it also has opposite spin and opposite every other quantum number. So it really cannot be more opposite from a matter particle, it is the exact opposite in every single way.

What happens when matter collides with antimatter?

When matter collides with antimatter it is an annihilation reaction, we all know that, but what does it produce? Two photons! Not much, cannot produce anymore or any less due to conservation laws, two photons (however VERY high energy) are produced that travel in the opposite direction to one another. Take a look at some radioactive materials that decay through the beta + route, you dont see them exploding into a million bits even though they are creating antimatter in the form of positrons all the time.

How would we capture the energy?

The energy in a closed system containing these reactions would have no contaminants so absorption of the photons would be low however still present as the reactants would be promoted to higher energies etc. It might be possible to perhaps collect the energy of these photons outside the reactor but Id assume the vessel would just heat up so it would have to be in a similar construction to a tokamak fusion reactor.

How can we get antimatter?

This is the hard bit, our universe is as we know it severely lop sided in matter to antimatter, we don't know why, though we have possible reasons for (K_0 mesons for one if you want to look into that). We know it is more matter then antimatter as we cannot see any annihilation fronts in space which would produce a very powerful emission of gamma rays. Antimatter is at the moment hard to make, is it hard to contain and separate? Certainly not, if we can contain protons and electrons we can certainly contain positrons and anti-protons and its not hard to separate from each other before reacting. To conclude its just too expensive to make and there is not enough of it to be viable CURRENTLY, we may see later another possible method of production then a possibility to this may occur.


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jric1416

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #17 on: July 09, 2012, 06:47:35 PM »
I just read your ionosphere comment. Yes antimatter is produced in the ionosphere but by what? COSMIC RADIATION! Cosmic radiation is believed to be created within super novae, and are charged particles accelerated by the intense magnetic fields, they have a almost constant distribution in all directions around the Earth (flat or sphere  :P). Cosmic rays are much higher energy then we can achieve on Earth at the moment in the supercolliders and led to the discovery of a lot of particles before we had colliders. They are constantly colliding with the Earths atmosphere and produce a stream of secondary cosmic ray particles which consists primarily of muons at the ground level, as by relativistic arguments they can live the longest and all the others decay before reaching the surface.

So yeah sure they are created in the ionosphere by an almost identical to method to what we do in colliders but it is a soup of particles up there so they quickly decay and would have little to no possibility to be captured.
« Last Edit: July 09, 2012, 06:58:51 PM by jric1416 »

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jric1416

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #18 on: July 09, 2012, 06:54:13 PM »
I'll make a comment on Electric cars too  ;D, yes they are good, but are they cheap to make? NO! Are they quick to charge? NO! What we need for electric cars to be viable is firstly nuclear power plants, otherwise what is the point; burning coal or burning oil has the same issues. There is a lot of work going into alternatives to batteries for electric cars, the most promising is the idea of the super capacitors (wiki this to find out if you dont know what a capacitor is exactly), super capacitors have a HUGE farad value (can be up into the thousands) which means it can hold a lot of energy, a bank of super capacitors can be bled of energy similar to a battery so can be used in this instance but most importantly capacitors can be charged nearly instantly so it wouldnt take 16 hours to charge your car merely 1 second (don't touch the power cord though  :o). I'd be watching the development of capacitors to see what comes out.

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ThinkingMan

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #19 on: July 10, 2012, 06:56:47 AM »
I've been watching super-capacitors for some years now. They are TINY and store so much more energy (per volume) than a standard capacitor. I have a 3 farad capacitor hooked up to a sound system and a 1000w power inverter in my car, and it's 1 foot long and weighs about ten pounds. A 3 farad super capacitor is about the size of a pea and there's hardly any weight to it. A bank of hundreds or thousands of super capacitors could give you obscene range on your electric car, and like jric said, can charge almost instantly. Although you would need a very thick power cable so that it didn't melt or go to some other extreme. I believe you can do this because of carbon nano-tubes and carbon "foam", if I'm not mistaken.

As far as antimatter (which is really the topic here), since it is the quantum opposite, and I don't really know much about quantum mechanics, can it be produced using quantum entanglement methods? I'm not really sure how quantum entanglement works, so if you could explain a bit about that at well, that would be great.
When Tom farts, the special gasses released open a sort of worm hole into the past. There Tom is able to freely discuss with Rowbotham all of his ideas and thoughts.

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jric1416

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #20 on: July 10, 2012, 07:22:00 AM »
Quantum entanglement is not something you do to a particle as a verb its more of an adjective. On a fundamental level of nature we cannot infer ALL information about any object without directly observing that object in question, however this entanglement may allow us to do it. It is a method of inferring the existence of and properties of other particles without directly observing them, now this is a result of the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics which has too this day held strong but we are not sure whether is correct or not.

Bell's theorem delves into what this really means but an easily, well semi easily, understood example of what Quantum entanglement is  can be seen in the EPR paradox where we can infer another particle existed and even the properties of that particle without observing it which is really something special.

Quantum entanglement is a really deep physics topic that involves a high understanding of metric/hilbert spaces and a strong topology background.

Ill reiterate quantum entanglement is not something you can do to any particle you desire rather it is a fundamental 'link' between some particles that arose due to some event and you can infer data about another particle other then the one you are observing.
« Last Edit: July 10, 2012, 07:27:03 AM by jric1416 »

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ThinkingMan

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #21 on: July 10, 2012, 07:33:53 AM »
So quantum entanglement is basically an observation tool? The next level of a microscope? Is it like a "contactless measurement?" Observation without interference is what I got from that. Will this open the door for things such as FTL communication and Star Trek-like sensor systems?
When Tom farts, the special gasses released open a sort of worm hole into the past. There Tom is able to freely discuss with Rowbotham all of his ideas and thoughts.

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jric1416

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #22 on: July 10, 2012, 07:52:21 AM »
Its not a tool its a fundamental feature of nature, when there should be two quantum wave functions describing two particles we find there is only one, so once we know this wave function we can extract info about the second particle, but take note if it were the same wave function it could be seen as the same particle a complex hard to grasp idea. Something does not come into existence without observing first off; this is when the wave function which contains all the quantum attributes collapses and only then can we view the particle this is where the multiverse spawns from, as this wavefunction collapses at EVERY possible point. But what entanglement is saying is that if we observe a particle that is entangled its wave function will collapse here AND somewhere else, very confusing.

Its not observation without interference as we have to interfere to get the initial data out, it would be more like observation with inference.

Will this allow advanced communication? We are not sure yet, watch this space. However what is very special is that in the EPR paradox it has been tested and has been shown to be true in certain controlled environments where a certain event that could not have possibly influenced another event as it lay outside of the light cone (a special relativity reference, look it up) of the first but it DID!!! Does this mean that information can or cannot travel faster then light? It may seem like it however we are not sure (yet) as Quantum mechanics is so unfathomably complex.
« Last Edit: July 10, 2012, 08:05:00 AM by jric1416 »

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ThinkingMan

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #23 on: July 10, 2012, 08:05:08 AM »
It seems that way. It's way above my head without learning a lot more about it. Which I feel would take years. I'm just an aspiring mechanical engineer lol. I want to work with space craft propulsion, life support, and simulated gravity systems, so I need to know at least some of that stuff lol (probably not the quantum mechanics, but I'm very interested in nano-technology as it can bring a HUGE advance in life support systems).
When Tom farts, the special gasses released open a sort of worm hole into the past. There Tom is able to freely discuss with Rowbotham all of his ideas and thoughts.

Re: Antimatter
« Reply #24 on: July 15, 2012, 01:41:48 PM »
Answering the original post.

Yes

The sun does it all the time.

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ThinkingMan

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Re: Antimatter
« Reply #25 on: July 16, 2012, 06:46:05 AM »
Answering the original post.

Yes

The sun does it all the time.

... The sun is a fusion reactor. Albeit a very large one. But I'm sure the antimatter reactions in it are negligible in comparison to the fusion going on.
When Tom farts, the special gasses released open a sort of worm hole into the past. There Tom is able to freely discuss with Rowbotham all of his ideas and thoughts.

Re: Antimatter
« Reply #26 on: July 21, 2012, 07:58:12 PM »
Its not a tool its a fundamental feature of nature, when there should be two quantum wave functions describing two particles we find there is only one, so once we know this wave function we can extract info about the second particle, but take note if it were the same wave function it could be seen as the same particle a complex hard to grasp idea. Something does not come into existence without observing first off; this is when the wave function which contains all the quantum attributes collapses and only then can we view the particle this is where the multiverse spawns from, as this wavefunction collapses at EVERY possible point. But what entanglement is saying is that if we observe a particle that is entangled its wave function will collapse here AND somewhere else, very confusing.

Its not observation without interference as we have to interfere to get the initial data out, it would be more like observation with inference.

Will this allow advanced communication? We are not sure yet, watch this space. However what is very special is that in the EPR paradox it has been tested and has been shown to be true in certain controlled environments where a certain event that could not have possibly influenced another event as it lay outside of the light cone (a special relativity reference, look it up) of the first but it DID!!! Does this mean that information can or cannot travel faster then light? It may seem like it however we are not sure (yet) as Quantum mechanics is so unfathomably complex.

It's not that complex. Even QM does not assert that information can travel faster than the speed of light, since that would be a direct challenge to relativity. The point that is made is locality can be broken via entanglement, meaning that although the two photons etc. seem apart, their  quantum mechanical wavefunctions are connected. They are therefore, in a sense, above space. This means that if you measure one of the two photons and 'collapse' the wavefunction, you are actually measuring both, since what you need to measure is the wavefunction, and you did, albeit a separate and distinct part of it. This is the argument that was forwarded after the results of Bell's famous experiment suggestion were published.
Der Sun do move and the Earth am Square.