Tag Archives: Can humans see beyond intensity images?

Can we see entangled images? a question for physicists

This February 29, 2012 news item by Bob Yirka poses a challenge from a professor of electrical engineering and computing science to physicists everywhere (I have removed links from the excerpt) which may not be as farfetched as it seems initially,

Geraldo Barbosa, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University … wonders if the human eye and brain together are capable of actually seeing entangled images. This is not a philosophical question, as he has phrased the query as part of a practical experiment that someone with the proper lab could actually carry out. To that end, he’s posted a paper on the preprint server arXiv with the hope that a physics team will take up the challenge.

Some animals can see things in the infrared spectrum for example and evidence has been slowly emerging as described here, here and here, suggesting that some migrating birds are able to “see” the Earth’s magnetic field. So maybe it’s possible that we see entangled images every day, and just don’t know it.

You can find Barbosa’s paper/challenge, Can humans see beyond intensity images? here. The abstract presents the challenge this way,

The human’s visual system detect intensity images. Quite interesting, detector systems have shown the existence of different kind of images. Among them, images obtained by two detectors (detector array or spatially scanning detector) capturing signals within short window times may reveal a “hidden” image not contained in either isolated detector: Information on this image depend on the two detectors simultaneously. In general, they are called “high-order” images because they may depend on more than two electric fields. Intensity images depend on the square of magnitude of the light’s electric field. Can the human visual sensory system perceive high-order images as well? This paper proposes a way to test this idea. A positive answer could give new insights on the “visual-conscience” machinery, opening a new sensory channel for humans. Applications could be devised, e.g., head position sensing, privacy in communications at visual ranges and many others.

Good luck to everyone devising an experiment to test the ability to see entangled images.