Macroscopic Quantum Entanglement

meckardt writes: "We laugh at the science fiction of such programs as Star Trek, but it can almost be stated as a truism that what is fiction today may be science tomorrow and engineering next week. Researchers at the University of Aarhus in Denmark report in the science journal Nature that they have been able to cause particles to interact over a distance using lasers. The effect, called quantum entanglement, has been observed before, but never with such large amounts of matter. Don't expect transporters next week, but it is interesting that this report hits the streets the same day that Enterprise debuts."

Comments

Not true teleportation

[Wind_Walker]

This is actually NOT teleportation; this is akin to an episode of The Outer Limits I saw once where they create an exact copy of a person on the other end of a "teleportation" machine, and then destroy the copy that currently resides on the transmitting end. It's a great show, but I digress...

I'm amazed that this worked with "trillions" of atoms; this kind of phenomenon is usually restricted to very small, very energetic particles. But it's NOT teleporation. Teleportation involves taking an object from point A and moving it to point Z without crossing the in-between space, C through Y. This is like taking an object from point A, running it through the world's biggest and best Fax machine, then putting the result at point Z, without crossing C through Y.

Still, it's an interesting and ground-breaking result, one that (I hope) will make it past the peer review process, which kills more scientific papers than anything else.