In an article called “Universe’s Quantum Weirdness Limits Its Weirdness” Wired Science describes the limits nonlocality and how it cannot be used to solve every problem in information transmission.

The more one probes the universe at smaller and smaller scales, the weirder matter and energy seem to behave.

But this strangeness may limit its own extent in quantum mechanics, the theory describing the behavior of matter at an infinitesimal level, according to a new study by an ex-hacker and a physicist.

“We’re interested in this question of why quantum theory is as weird as it is, but not weirder,” said physicist Jonathan Oppenheim of the University of Cambridge. “It was an unnatural question for people to have asked even 20 years ago. The reason we’re able to get these results is that we’re thinking of things in the way a hacker might think of things.”

… [T]here’s a limit to how useful nonlocality can be. Two separated people can’t send messages faster than the speed of light.

“It’s surprising that that happens,” said Stephanie Wehner, an ex-hacker and quantum-information theorist at the National University of Singapore. “Quantum mechanics is so much more powerful than the classical world, it should surely go up to the limits. But no, it turns out that there is some other limitation.”

As strange as quantum mechanics is, it could be stranger.

Full article: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/11/entangled-uncertainty/