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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.
This is a message bearing laser beam composed of billions of photons.
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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.
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Suppose they get this working with matter. Then it's just a matter of time before humans would walk into a chamber and be rematerialized somewhere else. The question is, who walks out of the destination chamber? Is it me or is it a reconstructed "me" with a different awareness, while the original "me" was destroyed? Even if it's a perfect copy, it's not worth the risk.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
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
The team was understood to be using a device known to insiders as a "video camera", although how it functions exactly was not disclosed during their press release
For all practical purposes, it is like if you die (and disappear) each time you go to sleep, and your complete copy gets reconstructed at the instant you wake up.
Given that cells of your body don't live long, you are a new, reborn person, every N years.
The key to perceived continued existence is the slow transfer of your consciousness into another body, with clear departure from the old one. The copy operation (cp) is not good enough, you need the move (mv) here.
Can anyone give a layman's explanation of how the information is getting passed from point a to point b?
Magic.
I have been pwned because my
Yeah I thought that was pretty funny too. I think the reporter is wrong, though -- the spooky part is that it happens *faster* than the speed of light. I'm pretty sure about this, in fact, because there's a famous Einstein line about "spooky action at a distance" referring to faster-than-light quantum effects, which I'm pretty sure the scientists quoted would be aware of.
That being the case, everyone here is totally missing the point. And in fact, the reporters who wrote the linked-to story missed it to, despite this quote:
The bits about teleporting solid objects (including humans) were just humoring the reporter -- sort of like the whole "could this experiment destroy the universe" thing surrounding supercolliders. The true interesting practical application of this is FTL communication -- vital for any space missions going much further than, say, Mars -- and pretty handy even if you're only that far away.
The "spooky action at a distance" is a weird consequense of the heisenberg uncertainity principle. It 'appears' to be an interaction, but in fact it's just the result of the coherency between two 'entangled' wavefunctions.
the 'yes' part is that to receive a teleportation, you have to have one of the entagled particles, and a measured quantity.
the 'no' part is that since the measured quantity is transmitted classicaly, there's no FTL transfer of anything.
-Kz-
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.
As any teleportation device could clearly be used to replicate 'N Sync CDs, its use will be obviously be prohibited by the DMCA.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
The blueprint analogy shows a lack of understanding of entanglement. There is no blueprint at the receiving end, and no measurement and communication of instructions to replicate the properties of the sending photon. What happens is a seemingly spontaneous change in the properties of the receiving photon.
Whether this is teleportation or replication is more of a philosophical question, or maybe a matter of semantics. Is an object (or a laser beam) equal to the sum of its properties? If you can make the sum total of an object's quantum properties disappear from one place and reappear in another place, have you merely copied the object or have you moved it?
I think you've moved it, but questions like these deserve more than offhanded answers.
I'm still considering very fast traveling of the light. If there was an impediment between the 1 meter, I'd consider teleportation.
There's a relativly (pun intended) interesting experiment on NEC Institute's web page. It proves that light can go faster than C. Here for NEC Faster than C webpage
It seems that this beam of light traveled about 3C. However, there's conjecture that it traveled slower, but time dilation made it seem 3C. That's unprovable at the time though.
Here is an informal talk by Samuel Braunstein on the problem of teleporting humans.
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The article says:
Using a process known as quantum entanglement, the researchers, led by 34-year-old physicist Ping Koy Lam, have disassembled a laser at one end of an optical communications system and recreated a replica a metre away
and
But the radio signal survives and is sent electronically to a receiving station, where within a nanosecond an exact replica of the beam - with the radio signal intact - is retrieved and decoded.
I'm having trouble working out whether that nano-second is the elapsed time from when the original beam is destroyed and the new one is created, or whether it's the amount of time required to recreate the beam from the received radio signal.
If it's the former then we're talking faster-than-light teleportation here because it takes light 3 nanoseconds to travel a yard.
"An encoded radio signal is embedded on an input laser, which is combined with entanglement and then scanned. The laser is destroyed in the process. But the radio signal survives and is sent electronically to a receiving station, where within a nanosecond an exact replica of the beam - with the radio signal intact - is retrieved and decoded."
First, a simplified definition from my very limited research into Quantum Entanglement: The supposed link between particles that have once interacted, enabling them to influence each other instantaneously over indefinite distances.
I'll mention before hand I'm not a quantum physics major of any sort, but if I'm reading this correctly, they have encoded a laser beam with a radio signal and "quantum entangled" the two mediums which is then "scanned" (whatever the hell that is) in which the laser is destroyed in the process. So now we should supposively have an intact radio signal with a "destroyed" laser sub-atomically anchored to it in ether somewhere. Sending this radio signal downrange to a receiver will recreate this signal and "pull" the laser back into reality (pardon my butchering of terms).
My problem here is perhapse not how unbelieveable this sound, but how damn vague the artical is. Scanning? How the hell was the beam recreated? Did it appear from thin air? Did it have to be "un" entangled? It doesn't seem as if the laser is infact destroyed at all... How do you go about "entangling" something to being with? This artical doesn't simply bog you down in scientific explanation; In fact it doesn't bog you down in ANY explanation for that matter-- it throws some words in and stirs them up with teleportation references. Hell, the only way I could figure out ANY details was independent research, and oh, how fun that was. The above definition was as easy as it got. After that? Whew... Maybe I'm just bitching, but I'm asssuming this article was written for the common man, but goes far beyond watering things down. It leaves out key pieces nessisary for understanding to occure. Jeez, that's shitty writing...
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I have a great idea for a device which will employ this new technology...
How about a device that will teleport the laser back into the eye of the dumbass teenager shooting his laser pointer on the movie theater screen?
-- We live in a world where lemonade is artificial and soap has real lemon.
It would be even better if it didn't have propagation time but hell, I'll settle for the speed at which a laser normally travels through a fiberoptic cable. That wouldn't disappoint me at all.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
My big question would be what the "speed" of the information propogation was. Some say it should be c, some say it should be "instantaneous" - either way, the results will have substantial impact on our view of several well accepted physical models.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
The original Mona Lisa, in good condition. Bidding starts at $20 million.
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I teleported home one night,
With Ron and Sid and Meg.
Ron stole Meggie's heart away,
And I got Sidney's leg.
"Information wants to be paid"