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

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.

[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: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.