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?"

Comments

Does this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this have anything to do with quantum pairs, where changing one particle causes the exact change in its mate, instantaneously, no matter how far apart they are?

don't beam ME up.

[MoFoYa]

Teleporting light - ok
Teleporting an object with considerable mass - ok

NOT me though. What do you think might happen to you between the time you are destroyed and the time your mass is replicated?
I would think that even if it were a very short time there would still be problems -- after all you WERE destroyed.

On the good side - imagine a future when you can purchase something online and have it in 5 min. by replicating it in your new replicator(duh) thats connected directly to your computer. You buy the item - then download the mass profile(perhaps a .mpr file) and send it to the replicator like you would a document to a printer.
- very cool stuff

Re:don't beam ME up.

[Xuther]

Yes, but if you were "rebuilt" on a particle level, no matter how long you'd be destroyed/dead, it seems logical to me that you should be in the exact health as you were when you were destroyed".


There's the problem right there though, it's not the same particles, the result on the other end is NOT you, it's a duplicate.

About the only way I ever see any sort of teleportation ever succeeding is to cause the existing particles that you're made up of to shift to a higher engery state (think mattergy), encapsulated in some sort of field, and the bubble containing you pushed/pulled somewhere else. I've only come accross it once before, but I read an article that subatomic particles can travel anywhere almost instantaniously (slipstream?).

Re:don't beam ME up.

[will_die]

They had a fun New Outer Limits on this.
called 'Think like a dinosaur'
synopsys from the outer limits web board:
Michael Burr (ENRICO COLANTONI) is the only permanent human occupant of the Tuulen station, situated on a vast empty plain of the Moon. His companions are the Hanen, an emotionless lizard-like alien species who have developed a highly advanced means of long distance travel by 'jumping' through space. Achieved by creating an exact duplicate of the jumper, the copy is reconstituted at the destination point and the original destroyed, thus leaving only one. Kamala Shastri (LINNEA SHARPLES) is one of the test jumpers to arrive for travel to the planet Gend, but in the final stage of the transfer, something inexplicable happens. Confirmation of her duplicate's arrival is not received from Gend and the procedure is temporarily aborted. When it's later determined that Kamala's copy does indeed exist, Michael is called upon to balance the equation and eliminate the original. Michael knows the human race is desperate to access a technology that would allow them to leave behind a planet now virtually destroyed by pollution and over population. He also knows it is imperative that he avoid a protocol breach with the Hanen, but can he bring himself to kill Kamala?

Re:don't beam ME up.

[moonbender]

There's the problem right there though, it's not the same particles, the result on the other end is NOT you, it's a duplicate.

Obviously, all of this depends on how you define your "self". If you are the particles you're made of, then yeah, you're gone after (Star-Trek-style) teleporting. If you are your self-awareness, your consciousness, then you'll still be you. I'd tend to the latter definition.
Parts of your body matter (like your blood) gets destroyed and rebuilt - partly from particles that are/were most definetely not you (like food) - every day. Does that mean that that blood is not yours? Okay, not a very good analogy.

(Obviously, this more a philosophical discussion than anything else. If it is possible at all, none of us will witness human teleportation.)

Re:don't beam ME up.

[pkaral]

If you are destroyed and then replicated, you are effectively dead.
...
So basically we concluded that teleporting an object by replication/destruction would be helpful to everyone except the object in question.

Not necessarily. You assume that there is a "real me" and a "copy-of-me". However, if the replication process is perfect, then both the individuals that come out of the other end will for all practical purposes be me - look like me, feel like me, think like me, remember the things I remember and all of the other characteristics that together constitute me.

The crux is, as you point out, the destruction of "the original copy" in the teleportation process. The implicit point in your argument is that the death of one of the copies matters. My question to that point is: To whom? Me-before-the-teleportation doesn't care - I will live on in the copy. The teleported copy is alive, so it doesn't matter to it. "The original copy" is "dead", and didn't mind before it happened.

So it all ends up being very philosophical: Does it matter to be dead per se, or is it the absence of a continued existence (such as in the form of a copy) that is wrong about being dead? I would say the latter, and therefore you may teleport me as soon as your device is 99,99999% secure (or even less, if the destination is an exiting place).

Re:don't beam ME up.

[IamTheRealMike]

Hmmm, this is where the whole argument gets into the realms of philosophy. After all, just what is real? If the "replicant" is truly identical to the original, then logically it must be as real as the original. Therefore if one is destroyed as the other is "created" and the two are truly identical, then no-one will be able to tell the difference, even the person being "teleported" in the first place.

That assumes that there is no component to a sentient being that we cannot presently measure. If you believe in the soul, then clearly that isn't the case.

I read an interesting theory some time ago, which stated that the mind/soul is a separate thing from the body. How exactly does the interface work? It said that the mind could influence quantum probabilities. The Russians did experiments in ESP (apparently) that showed that certain gifted individuals could control the rate of decay of a small particle of a radioactive material. The larger the particle, the harder it became for them to control. They "controlled" it by watching a counter with the rate on, and attempting to make it move faster or slower.

Inside the neurons in our brain, there is a column of something, I forget what. Anyway, it is at the level where quantum probabilities (?) affect it. The theory goes that the mind controls the body by controlling/influencing the probabilities at the neuron level, acting as a kind of giant control panel.

This theory is of course difficult if not impossible to test, but it begs the question - is it possible to interrupt that connection?

Heisenberg

[CleverNickedName]

Just to be pedantic... The Heisenberg Uncertainty principle does not just state that we cannot know both the velocity and position of an object, but that neither really exist independently until we measure them. Then measuring one effects the other.

If we measure an object's velocity 100% perfectly, then it no longer has a definite position.


Is that cool or what?

State of the Union

[Ryatt]

Just think... we'll never have to complain about crazy teleporters cutting us off on the way to work again. Or potholes, I hope. ("Sorry I'm late to work, I hit a pothole while teleporting.")

Now if this data was released just a little earlier, Bush could have addressed this in the State of the Union, rather than something as "old school" as hydrogen-based vehicles. Like those will ever see the light of day!

What kind of power are we talking here?

[DrFrasierCrane]

I'm curious - just how practical is this going to be in terms of the power required? Is this going to be one of those things that takes so much power consumption to work on a large scale that it's impractical?

Re:What kind of power are we talking here?

[Paddyish]

I have a book titled 'The Physics of Star Trek' ... If I remember correctly, the power consumption for completely dissassebling all atoms of one human being was on par with the total power output of the sun for several seconds. Weenies, anyone?

Re:Hidden variables

[Kibo]

Man did that bad analogy get out of control.

Anyway. I think the idea behind the cat was to show the absurdity of an indeterminate state like something being both spin up and spin down. Under the copenhagen interpritation it doesn't really matter what the inscrutible secret reality is, but many extremely clever experiments have shown repeatedly, and perhaps most dramatically in investigations of 'spooky action at a distance', that the universe really is that wierd. The thought experiment is wrong, because, for the most part, that quantum nature were discussing disintigrates as things get bigger. The cat wouldn't be alive and dead, the cyanide wouldn't be contained and released, the vial smasher wouldn't have spared and smashed the vial, and radioactive particle will either have decayed or not. It might 'think' about it in a maelstrom of virtual particles, but once it decays, it quickly joins the larger system. And before you know it PETA is suing your ass. I think this particular thought experiment remains popular because it spotlights a flaw in our intuition, and how we interpret uncertainty.

If you're religious you can believe god watching the universe is what makes it go, if you're a Kari Wurher fan maybe there's an alternate universe where she'll rub up against you, or, if you're like me, you favor decoherenece (not that I wouldn't favor Kari). It's just important to remember these comfortable ways of framing or describing what's happening aren't nessecarily what's acctually happening where we aren't allowed to look.

Teleportation, destruction or movement?

[Peaker]

Many people here express worry that teleporting humans actually destroys them before recreating someone else in another position.

I want to counter that with two points:

According to Quantum theory, no particles or physical entities have an identity other than the collection of their properties. This means that two particles of the same type and with the same properties are completely indistinguishable. This means that a human being destroyed, but replicated exactly somewhere else, will have the exact same properties aside for position, in other words - moved. If you're worried that changing your position is a problem, you're already dead :)

Many human cells are constantly dying and get replaced. Not many of the cells in the human body existed when the human was born. This means that your existing body/cells have been destroyed and recreated already - you simply didn't know.

Telefragged?

[chiller2]

So what will happen if you leave something in the same place that the cloned atoms are reassembled in?

Wouldn't there always be something there, even if it was just air, in which case what happens to the atoms that existed in the space before? Do they have to be destroyed in order to make space, or are they displaced / merged?

The SPEED of Destruction makes people uncomfortabl

[FreeUser]

The crux is, as you point out, the destruction of "the original copy" in the teleportation process. The implicit point in your argument is that the death of one of the copies matters. My question to that point is: To whom? Me-before-the-teleportation doesn't care - I will live on in the copy. The teleported copy is alive, so it doesn't matter to it. "The original copy" is "dead", and didn't mind before it happened.

The crux of the problem is really the SPEED of destruction. IIRC, over the course of seven years or so our bodies flush out and replace every cell in the body. That means that essentially we are composed of entirely different matter than we were seven years ago. Because the process is gradual and slow, we don't consider this to be a personal death and resurrection, we consider ourselves to be the same person we were seven, ten, or twenty years ago, though materially we are not.

Or put another way, if we had perfect organ transplanting technology and could replace bits of ourselves as they wore out, when would we stop being us? After the first new knee-joint? Most would say no. After the first brain graft to replace that failing visual cortex? How about after the 79th brain graft, which replaces the last of the old, decaying material?

Why should replacing this process, whether it be a natural one through the course of eating and shedding old cells or an artificial one through gradual organ replacement and grafts, with an instantaneous one be any different? Surely the mere compression of time doesn't fundamentally alter what is happening.

So we are left with two choices. ONE: we do die over the course of 7 years, and we are not the same people we were 7 years ago, we are merely self-deluded copies, or TWO: we are the same people, in which case the length of time is irrelevant, and a teleported person will be as much the same person they were before, whether or not the atoms that comprise them are the same ones (teleported) or new ones with a quantum signature imposed.

As to which belief one subscribes to, that is more of a religious or philosophical discussion, but whatever belief one chooses, one must apply it consistently to the natural replacement of ourselves, and any forthcoming organ transplant technologies, as much as one would to a hypothetical teleportatioin technology, and accept the implications of said belief.

Personally, I believe I am the same person I was 10 years ago (modulo gradual personality changes), and I would have no problem teleporting myself around the universe at lightspeed if such facilities were available to me. And if I am deluding myself, I'm not deluding myself any more than all of us already are every time we look back on the myth of our own past, so either way it is a wash.

A fascinating abuse of language

[radtea]

The important thing about this "teleportation" process to remember is: if you stick your hand into the region between the transmitter and reciever you will still get a hole burned in it by the perfectly ordinary beam of energetic, physical photons that is "teleporting" the information.

--Tom

Let me get this straight...

[tassii]

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.

Previous experiments in so-called quantum teleportation moved particles of light about a yard. The findings could aid the sending of unbreakable coded messages, which is limited to a few tens of miles.

The new experiment used longer wavelengths of light than earlier ones, letting the scientists copy the light through standard glass fiber found in fiber optic cables.

So what they did is destroy light, use light to transfer the "destroyed" light a mile away and "ressurrect" that light? That doesn't sound like teleportation to me. Its like using a laser beam to send a laser beam.

Unraveling the mysteries of Teleportation...

[Adeptus_Luminati]

" But teleporting something from the everyday world like a person that contains more than a trillion atoms is highly unlikely, if not impossible."

The teleportation of humans, objects and anything else is already possible and has been for thousands of years, but not with the aid of technological gadgets. The ability to create something out of nothing has been spoken about in religion since it's very conception and up to modern times.

Now before you scoff at the rest of the post thinking it is religious crap please consider the following scientific aphorisms:

1) There can only be one truth/one set of laws that govern the Universe. A simplistic example, gravity does not go both up and down and/or sideways, when you drop an object it always falls down. Over the last many centuries our scientists have proved over and over again that things in our physical universe behave according to a set of laws. Laws which even to this day science is discovering, which means we do not as of yet know or understand all of these laws. Therefore one can conclude that the very scientific community we praise and cheer for thinking they have all the answers - that very same community admits their ignorance. Every single day they claim to be discovering this or that. If you are at the discovering stage, then you can not possibly know everything.

2) If you read both ancient religious texts from several different religions (Christian, Buddhism, Hinduism, to name but a small few), all of them contain accounts of so called "miracles". What is a miracle? Is it really something that defies the natural laws of the Universe? No, that's hogwash. You can not claim the Universe is has 1 set of laws and in the same breath claim those laws can be somehow put aside and something takes place which defies those laws. That is just absolutely ridiculous - if we've learned anything from science it is exactly THAT! What is more likely as I've stated is that we don't know how all the laws work yet and when we see or hear of something which seems to defy the few laws we do currently know, we tend to say it is lies, or magic, or miracles or anything but something NORMAL. However; let's wind the clock back a few centuries and let's pretend we could teleport/travel back in time and bring with us some gadgets with us, say a video camera. We walk into the most advanced city on Earth at that time, say the Roman empire for example, and we tape Julius Caesar giving a speech.. then we walk a few miles away and show somebody who was not able to be at the speech presentation and we hit the play button. To the ignorant watching the movie playback on the LCD screen this is nothing short of a miracle, a magical act, how can after all Caesar and his entire palace fit inside this little box? And how can you possibly make him give the same speech exactly the same time after time???? I think you get my point. Those that have performed great feats in the past were not doing something beyond what is physically possible. A video camera that works in 2002 will work just as well in the year 1000 B.C. The laws of the Universe have not evolved over 3000 years - they are the same. Eternal and Immutable!

Miracles are given that name, IMO by those who do not understand how a specific feat was conceived. How did Christ turn water into wine? Or resurrect, or cure people with touch? How do Indian Yogi's or ZEN Masters perform acts of levitation or how are they able to accelerate the growth of plants by a factor of 20-100 times, making them grow right before your very eyes? How have so many Christian saints and Hindu Yogis performed acts of Bi-location (being in 2 places physically at the same time, witnessed being there and having conversations by different people at different locations at the same time?) These are just truly very few examples of the so called acts we name miracles and they have not all been performed by a single person, or claimed by a single religion. In fact at the core of every major religion you will find such miracles and claims of the so called super-natural, more correctly assigned the name of the occult mysteries (occult meaning hidden - do not confuse this world with some of the crazy cults going around). But the reality is not that it is super-natural... the reality is that it is natural, the average person just does not understand how such an act is performed. And this may sound like a surprise to you but believe me intellectual understanding will NEVER allow you to mimic such miraculous acts. The very same people

At any rate here, my point is, man can only accomplish what he is capable of imagining. If he can not imagine it, he can not create it.

But let's get back on topic, so how can teleportation be accomplished? Well, let's take a look at a simpler version of teleportation - clairvoyance. What is clairvoyance as most people understand it? It is the reading of thoughts, in particular images from the past or future and somehow having access to them in the present. This is a very common so called unexplained miracle performed today, however it is not called a miracle as much by most people because it has become far more common place and therefore a little bit more acceptable and considered closer to normal, yet not quite there because even the people who perform such feats can not explain in scientific or any other intelligible words how this is accomplished, at least not to the satisfaction of a scientist wanting to replicate the feat.

The fact that not Jesus, nor any Yogi, Zen Master, Christian Saint, or any high ranking Buddhist master are considered to be extremely high intellects possessing at the tip of their tongues the answers to all scientific questions serves to us as proof that it is not through scientific intelligence that teleportation can be accomplished today. It is therefore an act feasible today not by scientists possessing great intellect, but by their counterparts - the true spiritual man!

My friends, I could go on, and on and on... My point is science may one day be able to explain in intelligible language how teleportation of a human being can be accomplished, but I guarantee you it will not be within our life times and whenever it does one day become possible - if by scientists - it shall require very fancy highly complex and expensive machines. If you wish to teleport within your life time, your best bet are to not only study, but in particularly practice the occult sciences - i.e. Alchemy (the founding science of Chemistry initiated by Paracelsus - a science which combined chemistry and spirituality and philosophy in one great art, but the 2 more important parts of it have now been thrown out by those who chose not to see beyond what their eyes show them in the physical), Astrology (the founding science of Astronomy - Astrology combined the science of Astronomy with the spiritual and philosophical, but again modern-ignorant man has stripped out 2/3rds of that and chose to look at only what he could see. If you chose to ignore 2/3rds of reality, then do not expect to be able to understand the whole of the Universal laws! If modern scientists would learn this, we'd be centuries ahead in every aspect of evolution than we are today).

Enough said. "Seek and ye shall find!"
Now go seek.. I have ;-)

-Adeptus

PS. "The wise every seeketh that which once known, ALL is known!" - One may come to realize this scientifically through yet to be conceptualized "theory of everything" or one may achieve it today through spiritual enlightenment. The latter of which will provide you not with mere knowledge, but with the experience of the ALL - to experience ALL there is, was and there will be is to be omnipresent, omnisencient and even omnipotent - That my friends is to truly know GOD. Once this takes place, the act of teleportation will be as amazing to you as a grain of sand in the Sahara!

New Technology?

[heathcaldwell]

Yes. This brand new technology is acheived by using a photo transistor to detect photons and then creates a copy of the photons at a different location using a special new device called a Light Emitting Diode.

Same vs Similar

[AGMW]

I think you'll find that two pieces of information where every bit is the same are, technically, similar unless they are the same instance of that data, in which case they can then be said to be the same.

A lot of people don't realise it, but "same" actually means something specific and is (scientifically, at least) not some woolly playground approximation. If Disk A is the same as Disk B (or whatever we are comparing), then Disk A IS Disk B.

A copy of something is just that, a copy, and may well be similar if your copy is good enough!

Timeline by Michael Crichton

[Carnivore24]

This talk of teleportation reminds me of Timeline. Its totally fictional but pretty interesting.

Spoilers....

This company stumbles onto time travel through experiments in teleportation. They attempt to send some drones through a teleportation device and some do not come through on the receiving end. They discover the drone was sent to another dimension. They then strap a camera to one of them and find out its been sent to another time(by aiming the camera towards the sky and checking out the star positions.) the story unfolds as an adventure where someone wanders to far from a time travel device and his friends go back to rescue him.

They are making a movie for this also and it comes out later this spring. Hopefully it will stay pretty close to the book.

speed of teleportation?

[j3110]

Has anyone measured it? Wouldn't it just shoot relativity to hell if quantem teleportation transferred information instantaneously?

For instance, I could measure exactly how fast we were moving and in what direction by measuring our time skew by synchronizing to a quantum state to measure the ammount of time it takes for a photon to travel so far. Basically, I would have an independant, third party perspective of time. You might just be able to measure the time skew by carrying a clock from point A to B, then point A recieves information from point B, and they both record the time. Either the clock traveling from point A to B was traveling faster, slower, or the same as the person from A (depends on weather the Earth is moving toward A, B, or neither). This means you could measure the discrepancy, and calculate if relativity is true, thereby proving or disproving the theory once and for all. (Though it would seriously be undermined in a lot of ways, you could prove part of it being true.) Either that, or we can patch the theory some more to make it work in another way it doesn't seem to. Einstein knew about these situations, a good study of this may help lead a little closer to a unified theory?

The only problem I could see is that you wouldn't know what you were sending, but how could quantum computers be useful if you couldn't set at least some value?

Re:The SPEED of Destruction makes people uncomfort

[revery]

Speed is not the problem. Is there more to us than quanta is the question and the problem.
What if you could build a quantum duplicate without destroying the original. Which one would be the real you?

If the entire sum of our being is composed of our physical components as opposed to stored in our physical components, then there is no difference.

Either way, it's not speed that's the problem, it's a question of identity.