Did you see the headline that Virginia Tech researchers claim quantum can “connect drones for disaster relief, bypassing traditional networks“?
Physics disagrees, but hey, what do I know? I’m just a disinformation expert. And I’m saying when you cut a press release that contradicts your own paper, you’re not doing science. You’re doing disinformation… poorly.
Virginia Tech apparently has convinced Phys.org to print that quantum entanglement allows instant communication across any distance:
Once entangled, any modification to one will also happen to the other, no matter how far apart they are—from opposite ends of the same swarm, to opposite ends of the galaxy.
We have a word for this in the vast, quiet prairie flint-filled hills of Kansas.
Bullshit.
Their published statement violates the no-communication theorem, a foundational result in quantum mechanics that every quantum compute newbie learns. You cannot transmit classical information via entanglement. Not across a room. Not across a galaxy.
The entanglement of two particles means quite literally, as you guess from the word itself, that when you measure one particle it instantly affects what you find when you measure the other one.
Einstein said this was “spooky action at a distance” because you can’t control what result you get. So the press release completely omitted that we are dealing with a randomness problem; can’t send a message using random. When you measure your particle for “1” you don’t know what you’re going to get back. That means you have to compare notes through another channel, which means a non-quantum one. No side-channel, no information, get it? Get it? That was a double-pun. Anyway, the entanglement is real; communication without infrastructure is impossible.
A fancy big name academic knows this, or should. His own paper assumes “an ideal quantum channel environment with no losses“. That’s fancy big hat talk for the framework requires a network more fragile than the classical infrastructure it supposedly replaces.
The quantum channel doesn’t bypass networks.
It demands infrastructure that would be the first casualty in any real scenario, let alone a disaster full of complicated threats to everything and anything. Smoke, fire, debris, snow, rain… forgettaboutit. We see a researcher publicly stating things his own paper contradicts. This isn’t a PR telephone game, it’s not a weak semaphore across windy mountain tops.
It’s the source.
The Actual Paper
The authors of an eQMARL framework discuss a real problem: how do you train multiple AI agents to cooperate without sharing raw observation data? Hell, I’m of course interested in THAT! Let’s talk turkey.
The solution uses quantum entanglement to couple distributed learning processes during the R&D phase. Compared to classical baselines, it converges 10-17% faster and uses fewer parameters.
These are modest, legitimate improvements to federated learning architectures. The paper is competent for what it claims. Call a chicken a chicken. A duck is a duck.
What this paper doesn’t do:
- Enable communication without networks
- Work in disaster conditions
- Function during drone deployment at all
- Slice bread
From the paper itself:
During execution, the agents interact with the environment independently and are fully decentralized.
Reality: drones run classical inference after training. The quantum entanglement is a training optimization. The deployed system uses normal classical policies. If your disaster drones need real-time coordination, this paper offers them exactly nothing.
How does nothing sound for a disaster? I’ll take none.
Pumping Shit Has a Name
We’ve seen the hype cycle many times before. New technology, low barrier to expertise, suddenly integrity disappears like a freckle on a pig in a blizzard.
Strategic Defense Initiative (1983): Reagan borrowed Carter-era missile defense research and inflated it into fictional space-based laser shit to unlock funding that physicists knew technology couldn’t deliver. The more failure, the more funding! Technical objections were ignored because benefactors didn’t care about outcomes, they cared about their income. Billions flowed into political lobbying to keep the GOP in power. Unaccountable tech was the punchline; physics was the windup.
Theranos and Tesla (2003-2018): Revolutionary! When you only have to demonstrate laboratory conditions, and say “next year” to everyone asking why it doesn’t work, you get rich quick. Timelines are compressed rhetorically while the technology stays theoretical. Elizabeth Holmes and Elon Musk talked about saving lives while their machines were so obviously unreliable they were killing more people than without them. Tesla is literally called a death-trap by courts handing victims hundreds of millions in Tesla dollars.
Quantum Supremacy (2019-present): Google glibly announced quantum supremacy with a calculation that IBM immediately contested. Pushing PR before peer review, applications before reliability, is threatening to become a norm in quantum announcements. Each press release talks revolution while the underlying paper delivers increments if anything at all.
Take a drive… to Mars, tomorrow! Step right up and give money to the charlatans. Watch them get rich and take over the government to end regulation of such obvious fraud.
The eQMARL coverage fits this shit template unfortunately. The press release promises a whole new look at disaster relief because quantum. Yet the paper delivers marginal training improvements and evidence that quantum couldn’t help. The timeline compresses radically (“10 to 15 years” versus “coming quickly into focus” within the same article). A fantasy generates the coverage; the contradictory physics sits in footnotes.
Here’s a narwhal tusk. It’s proof that unicorns are real. How many do you want to buy? Unicorn meat is the next big thing, solves world hunger.
Follow the Infrastructure
Virginia Tech’s Institute for Advanced Computing in Alexandria sure sounds impressive. The framing flaws perhaps are not accidental.
“Disaster relief drones” and “wildfire response” are grant magnets. They invoke urgency, public benefit, and national security simultaneously. A paper about “10-17% faster convergence in distributed ML training” doesn’t get you status and Ronald Reagan sized corruption tickets to the handout train. A paper about super network drones that communicate “through the fabric of space”… CHA-CHING!
The actual legitimate use case—privacy-preserving federated learning—serves defense contractors, healthcare systems, and financial institutions who want collaborative AI without data sharing.
That’s a real market. That’s a real natsec benefit.
It’s also not a headline.
These researchers (or their institution, or both) apparently made a choice to frame laboratory simulations as disaster response as a form of social engineering. Frame training optimizations as communication breakthroughs. Frame physics violations as innovation.
Fact-Checking Theater
Phys.org flagged this article as “fact-checked” by editors Sadie Harley and Robert Egan. Their editorial process produced a summary stating:
Quantum entanglement enables secure, network-independent communication between devices such as drones.
No. This is the opposite of true.
It’s not a simplification or a minor error. This is a fundamental misstatement of entanglement capability, endorsed by a publication’s credibility infrastructure.
The summary continues:
Entanglement allows information transfer by correlating qubit states, bypassing traditional connectivity limits.
Again: no.
Entanglement correlates states. It does not transfer information. The distinction is not subtle. This is the entire point of the no-communication theorem.
A credibility badge, an integrity seal, has been applied to a total fiction. The “fact-checked” label provides cover for claims any basic checking process should have caught and lit up like a Christmas tree.
It’s the Physics
Quantum entanglement is real and useful for specific applications. Here’s what it actually does:
- Creates correlations between particles that persist across distance
- Enables certain cryptographic protocols (quantum key distribution)
- Can couple distributed computational processes during training
Here’s what it cannot do:
- Transmit classical information without a classical channel
- Enable faster-than-light communication
- Bypass the need for network infrastructure
- Function in degraded RF environments like disaster zones
The no-communication theorem isn’t a technical limitation waiting to be overcome. It’s a mathematical consequence of quantum mechanics’ structure. Claiming entanglement now enables network-independent communication is like announcing a triangle has four sides.
Integrity Breach
Quantum computing is real and approaching useful applications. It’s coming and people need to saddle up and get ready to ride a whole new beast of burden.
Cryptography is the near-term example that I work on almost constantly now. Quantum systems will soon enough break current encryption standards, and quantum-resistant protocols are already being deployed in response.
That’s right. Deployed.
Every shit-flinging press release makes the real work harder. When researchers claim physics-violating applications to secure funding or headlines or whatever gets people up in the morning in Virginia, they create an environment where legitimate quantum advances get dismissed.
The credibility cost is huge.
These people could have framed their work accurately: a novel approach to privacy-preserving distributed learning with modest performance improvements. They chose instead to let a whole institution promote claims their paper obviously contradicts.
As soon as I saw text saying quantum drones will be communicating through space, I saw more red flags than a Chinese military parade.
How could this be? Well, it isn’t.
The defense-adjacent research is marketed with physics-violating claims to justify continued funding from Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and federal sources. The “disaster relief” framing is the civilian cover story for military communications research.
Did the researchers review the press release before publication? If yes, they approved physics violations with their names attached. If no, Virginia Tech is fabricating claims without consent. Either answer is evidence of a serious integrity breach.
The pattern continues. Theranos, Tesla… what’s next?
The paper is here: DeRieux et al., “eQMARL: Entangled Quantum Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Distributed Cooperation over Quantum Channels,” arXiv:2405.17486.
It’s actually a good read for what it claims. The press release and coverage are… shit.