“ENTANGLING TWO QUBITS TOGETHER ALLOWS FOR FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT COMMUNICATION”

General scientific consensus is that no, that faster than the speed of light communication is not possible. This myth came around through this simple but misleading thought experiment explaining entanglement:

You have two lights. One can flash red, the other can flash blue. You put one in a box, and the other in another box. You send ONE of the boxes to Pluto. When you open your box on Earth and trigger the light and see that the light is flashing red, you KNOW that the box on Pluto has the blue light.

This implies “instantaneously” and “faster than the speed of light”.

Here’s the issue — no information is actually passed between the lights. The lights are ‘collapsed’ before the ‘measurement’ of opening the box. We were messing in the initial state preparation, by ‘knowing’ that one light will be red, and the other blue, and collapsing them before they are sent. We interfered in the original creation of the ‘entanglement’, saying that one light should be red, and the other should be blue.

We can apply this same metaphor to real qubits. Measuring one qubit and immediately knowing the state of the other implies we knew all along how they were entangled, just as we knew how the lights were entangled.

In quantum entanglement, while the qubits themselves exist in a superposition of 0 and 1, and only upon measurement, the qubit collapses into either a 0 or 1. They remain in that superposition until they are measured far apart. At first glance, this does seem to be information transfer.

However, if we don’t mess with the initial state preparation, we will receive the measurement information, but we won’t be able to interpret it. Are the qubits going to correlate and be both polarized up, both polarized down, or opposite polarizations (assuming our qubits here are photons)? You don’t know what the information means without the classical channel — which is limited by the speed of light.

Now you see the fallacy in the light experiment, where we know how the lights will be entangled beforehand. Since we interfered in the initial state of the lights, we get misled into believing there is faster than the speed of light information transfer, when actually we knew the entanglement all along.

Read more at these Wiki articles: EPR Paradox and No-communication theorem and try not to be overwhelmed.