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Improvements in Teleportation
assaultriflesforfree writes "Here's a little update on quantum entanglement and teleportation from The New York Times (free registration, yay): 'Employing a facet of quantum mechanics that Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance," scientists have taken particles of light, destroyed them and then resurrected copies more than a mile away.' I am a little skeptical about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle statements, though. Is this really a form of Star Trek's Heisenberg Compensator?"
...more like comm badges - still kinda nifty though, then you can be anywhere on the planet and still be interrupted all the time :)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I had a long discussion about teleportation with some friends, and this is what we came up with..
If you are destroyed and then replicated, you are effectively dead. Consider if you could meet your replicate before being destroyed. He would say to you: "Ok, I don't need you anymore, so I destroy you now." Is that good for you? Maybe it is good for him, but certainly not good for the real you.
However, the copy of you would be good for me and everyone else. To us, you are the same person. You will fulfill your life's duties and make great works. However, you won't be around to witeness it.
So basically we concluded that teleporting an object by replication/destruction would be helpful to everyone except the object in question. Feel free to teleport burritos and things, but teleporting yourself would not be doing you a favor.
The only solution I can think of would be to come up with a teleportation method that does not involve destruction. If we ever want to be bouncing around the Universe like in Star Trek, we're going to need to be able to travel the speed of light or use weird things like wormholes to get anywhere. Physically transferring object data from point A to point B is just too time consuming. You'll die of old age by the time you reach Neptune.
For goodness sake, read the article. It's not an electron, it's a photon. It's also not the "same" photon. It's a copy of the photon in the same quantum configuration as the original. Now, given quantum configurations are all there is to such things, it effectively is the same - you can't tell the difference.
:)
Note that it's also effectively the same one in probability terms anyway - all electrons are just blips in spacetime's electron density probability.
The whole point of teleportation is the transmission of information instantaneously. I.e. effective at infinite speed (or zero distance, depending how you look at it).
There's a rule in QM called "no cloning" which means you cannot make an exact copy of a quantum state without destroying that state. In other words, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle prevents you from duplicating a photon precisely. It does not stop you from teleporting that photon to a new location, thereby destroying the "original" photon.
This is done through a dual process. Part of the photon state is transmitted "classically," by measuring the photon and sending the information along a wire. The other part of the photon state is not measured, but "travels" to the new location via entanglement. The two pieces of information are put back together at the other side to recreate the photon. The process of making the classical measurement is what destroys the original photon. This destruction is unavoidable -- you can't end up with an identical copy of the photon, while still keeping the first photon.
Star Trek transporters could be a theoretical possiblity. But replicators cannot exist, because that would involve exact cloning of quantum states, which is impossible.
The spooky thing is that the information about the color travels faster than the spead of light (as a matter of fact, the transfer is instantaneous)
This is bull.
Look at it this way- I have two safes. One is loaded with money, the other with scrap paper. I take one safe (at random) and fly to some far away place. I then open the safe. It contains scrap paper. Therefore, the other one has the money.
The key is, which one I had (and therefore, which one I didn't have) was determined when I randomly chose one, NOT when I opened mine to see the contents.
If you have two particles, one 'red' and one 'green', chose one and move it away from the other one, and look at it, the 'color information' doesn't travel back to the other one instantly. You always had the (for example) 'red' one, and the 'green' was always left behind. No transfer of information happens.
Just like Schrodengers cat- the cat's either dead or alive, we just don't know which yet. It's not in some weird quantum flux until we see it.
Mass and energy are not the same quantity. Although they are exchangeable through the famous equation E=m*c^2, this doesn't not mean there is no distinction between the two. Otherwise, you have to say that height and energy are the same thing since E=m*g*h (i.e. a difference in gravitation potential, height, can be used as a source of energy but the thing that is height is not energy).
Certain cells are NOT replaced regularly in our bodies, most importantly the central nervous system cells.
/. article a while ago about how every time we "remember" a memory, it's actually re-written in our cells? Sort of like a DRAM refresh process. So you get some new frontal-cortex cells grown, somehow walk through your memories, thus getting them resaved into the new cells, before you weed out the old ones.
The nerve that runs from a motor neuron in your brain down to a muscle in your lower leg is ONE cell, and that cell doesn't regenerate if it dies.
This is why spinal cord injuries are such bad news, and why stem cell research (cells that DO grow) is so neat.
So when you're 80 years old, some of your most important cells are also 80 years old! I think this will be the most limiting factor in exending human life span -- we'll figure out how to reset telomeres to cause infinite regeneration of cells, so your skin, muscles, bones will all stay 20 years old forever. But those pesky CNS cells... aren't used to dying and being replaced.
But maybe they WILL be able to convince CNS cells to die, and get new ones to grow in their place. Conceivably, every 40 years you'd need a CNS cell flush, along with some rehabilitation to train in the new cells to function properly.
Memory could even be preserved! What was the
- Peter
INsigNIFICANT
It's not just a question of time, it's also a question of degree. What this argument really hinges around, I think, is the idea of a soul. Does a person have qualities that are not described by the physical elements of their bodies? If no, teleportation is fine and dandy, reconstructing the atomic particles of a particular person at a distance will create the same person. But if a person does have a soul, this changes the equation. The general view of a soul is that its sort of "hooked" to the body during life, and upon death it is released to be destroyed, reborn, taken up to heaven, whatever. When you have organ transplants, only one thing is being "destroyed" at a time. Take out the heart, replace it, take out the lungs, replace them. But with teleportation, the whole body is destroyed, and then a bodily physically identical is reconstructed. When the body a soul inhabits is totally broken down, does it do what it does when the body dies, or does it hang around for a bit to see if the body's gonna be reconstructed somewhere else?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face