Laser Beam Teleported

Michael Wardle writes "ABC Australia reports that a team of scientists from the Australian National University have successfully teleported a laser beam. It seems that teleportation of solid bodies is still a way off, but at least we're a little closer to Slashdot's favorite super power." Another Australian newspaper has a more detailed story.

Comments

Teleportation, or recreating?

[Wire Tap]

It seems to me, that there is a huge difference:


Team leader Dr Ping Koy Lam says it involved creating a laser beam, its disembodiment and the recreation of the original beam in a different location.


To me, that sentence can be translated as such:

Team leader Ping Koy Lam says it involved creating a ball point pen, its destruction and the recreation of the same ball point pen using a factory blueprint in a different location.

This isn't the first time I've read about "teleportation" of some particle or another, when it seems that they are simply re-creating, mirroring if you will, the particle(s) quantum states in another place. That's not teleporting - that's mimicing.

Re:Teleportation, or recreating?

[tq_at_sju]

Is it really teleportation? Obviously it depends on what you believe a duplicate of an object is, if you think a duplicate is purely physical then yeah they are transporting one object to another place, notably a laser beam. However, as the objects get bigger and more complex the question lingers, is this really duplication when it comes to animals, humans ? After you get to this point the question gets very philosphical and hinges on consciousness, can consciousness of a human being be duplicated. There are many arguments that say NO, consciousness cannot be duplicated especially if you are using just blue prints on the person's physical nature. I.E. if you believe that there is something not physical to us then we couldn't be teleported in this purely physical fashion. one such argument is Jackson's Mary argument "Imagine Mary, a person who knows all there is to know about the physical processes that give rise to color vision. She knows how the neurons interact and what happens with the brain and eyes. But, Mary has spent her entire life in a black-and-white room and therefore has never experienced color vision. So there is something missing from Mary's knowledge of color vision, conscious experience." This thought experiment criticizes materialism because if materialism was correct, then Mary would know everything about color vision (including conscious experience) because she knows everything about the physical processes. But she does not know about conscious experience so materialism must be wrong. Jackson's argument is as follows: 1. If materialism were correct, then knowledge about the physical would lead to knowledge of conscious experience. 2. Mary has knowledge of all the physical processes associated with color. 3. Mary does not have knowledge of conscious experience. 4. Materialism is wrong.

Re:Link

[lex_weaver]

The URL you have provided is for a page published by a student undertaking a first-year physics course. Whilst it may (or may not) contain some good content, I doubt the student is part of the research team, and the page should not be treated as authoritative.

The page at http://photonics.anu.edu.au/qoptics/ is somewhat more official.

Re:Wow, teleportation of waves

[BobTheBooser]

This is compleetly different from transporting sound by using a microphone and speaker.
1 these are billions of photons, not the average of air preasure over the cone of a microphone.
2 They are the teleportation makes an "exact" replica of the photons in the lazer at the other point.
3 these are photons not waves, if you remember your high school physics light waves and light photons are two different (interconected) things.

5 in mic -> speaker you are basicly making an electrical aproximation to the air preasure waves, sending that electrical signal down a wire, and the speaker aproximating movement of its cone via the magnetic interactions from that signal.
In quantum teleportation such as this, the quantum states of the molecules at each end are directly conected.

6 im sure someone eles could give a better explanation and more reasons

On teleporting humans

[Vadim Makarov]

Here is an informal talk by Samuel Braunstein on the problem of teleporting humans.

transporter was budgetary device

[pmineiro]

it's so funny ... the original transporter on star trek was introduced because they lacked the budget to handle shuttlecraft scenes. the famous roddenberry quote is "what if they just appeared there?"

and here it is, inspiring cool science. neat.

-- p

Re:It's faster than light teleportation

[guybarr]

superluminal photons are old news.
IIRC, though, superluminal communiaction , i.e. passage of information is considered impossible .

(the fact the WF collapses does not imply passage of information, as you need to know the information measured at source to decipher the destination state)

I very much doubt they achived this.

Re:Quantum Entanglement

[pboulang]

Quick correction: Einstein's theory never said that the speed of light was the fastest that things could travel. Is in an impossible barrier to anything with MASS (due to the fact that mass will increase asymptotically to infinity as it approaches the speed of light) But then this argument also does not bring up tachyons, which would work with the theory happily.

The ERP theory *was* proposed by Albert to attempt to disprove instantaneous communication. However, since relativity makes the whole concept of instantaneous moot what are we talking about anyways??