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

And now something with mass

[James_Duncan8181]

This is defnitely kind of cool, but I will be a great deal more impressed when it is achieved with an object with appreciable mass. This said, it does seem to show me the way to cut down my lag to that Counterstike server - all I need is a fibreoptic modem!

Re:And now something with mass

[t0rnt0pieces]

This is defnitely kind of cool, but I will be a great deal more impressed when it is achieved with an object with appreciable mass.

A moving photon behaves as though it has mass and momentum. Consider the Compton effect, where a photon striking an electron causes the photon to scatter off the electron like a billiard ball. It's all about quantum theory. ;-)

Re:And now something with mass

[DrFrob]

this is IMO still all fantasy

It shouldn't be. Light does have momentum (part of the idea behind solar sails). However, light does not have mass (but you might be able to argue that since it has momentum it behaves like it has mass, whatever that means). Most people think that this cannot be since p=m*v and if it has no m, it can't have any p. Well, relativity shows that E=p*c for light so if the light has energy, it can have momentum. In this way, momentum is more of a fundamental quantity than mass or velocity and cannot, in general, be separated into a product of the two.

Re:And now something with mass

[Xilman]

Light does have momentum (part of the idea behind solar sails). However, light does not have mass(but you might be able to argue that since it has momentum it behaves like it has mass, whatever that means). Most people think that this cannot be since p=m*v and if it has no m, it can't have any p. Well, relativity shows that E=p*c for light so if the light has energy, it can have momentum. In this way, momentum is more of a fundamental quantity than mass or velocity and cannot, in general, be separated into a product of the two

Light has momentum: true.
Light doesn't have mass: false.

Light has mass because light has energy. Mass and energy are the same quantity expressed in different units. The conversion factor from mass to energy is c-squared.

What light doesn't have is rest mass.

Paul

Re:And now something with mass

[DrFrob]

Mass and energy are the same quantity expressed in different units.

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).

Not beaming...

[Snaller]

...more like comm badges - still kinda nifty though, then you can be anywhere on the planet and still be interrupted all the time :)

Without registration...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's an article from National Geographic that doesn't require registration. Sorry I couldn't find the Google News link for the NYT article.

(from Anonymous Karma Whores R Us)

Re:Without registration...

[Jugalator]

Sorry I couldn't find the Google News link for the NYT article.

In the URL of the NYT article, replace "www" with "archive".

Re:Without registration...

[Simon Field]

Does it bother anyone else that the wavelength quoted in the National Geographic article is a few orders of magnitude too large?

You'd think a science writer would puzzle over a photon with a wavelength of 0.05 inches being able to travel in a glass fiber instead of a microwave waveguide.

Probably some editor confused microns with millimeters and then converted to inches, because we all know that inches are a more familiar unit to use when talking about light wavelengths.

heineken uncertainty principle

[Anonymous Coward]

you can never be sure how much you had to drink.
Great weapon development here, I guess you could teleport bullets halfway around the world faster than the speed of light?.. ouch.

Re:heineken uncertainty principle

[machine of god]

That sounds like you'd have to time it just right. Why not teleport an anvil above somebody's head like those animated documentaries I used to watch. Their technology was way ahead of ours I guess.

No Reg. Required

[Anonymous Coward]

Light Particles Are Duplicated More Than a Mile Away Along Fiber
By KENNETH CHANG

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.

"The central issue is to move to telecom fibers and telecom wavelengths and telecom technology," said Dr. Nicolas Gisin, a physics professor at the University of Geneva and the senior author of an article today in the journal Nature. "This then allows us to go the long distance."

The experiments are a primitive realization of the transporter in the "Star Trek" television series that beams people from starship to planet. In coming years, it may be possible to use teleportation to imprint the exact quantum configuration of one atom to another. But teleporting something from the everyday world like a person that contains more than a trillion trillion atoms is highly unlikely, if not impossible.

Even with the light particles, photons, about one in a thousand were received at the other side.

"You're not very sure to arrive," a researcher, Dr. Hugo Zbinden, said about human teleportation.

Still, the experiments show that scientists can overcome a seemingly insurmountable conceptual barrier, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The principle states that the location and velocity of a particle cannot both be precisely measured at the same time. That would seem to make it impossible to teleport anything, even single particles, because without knowing their exact specifications they cannot be copied somewhere else.

Devised in 1993 by scientists led by Dr. Charles H. Bennett of the I.B.M. Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., quantum teleportation produces pairs of "entangled" light particles that can be thought of as a pair of encoding and decoding rings. A message is combined with the encoding light particle. That combination goes to the recipient, who uses the decoding photon to decipher the message. Because no one else has the decoding photon, no one else can decipher the message.

Other encoding techniques using quantum cryptography are simpler, and a more immediate use for teleportation would be as a repeater. Photons almost all peter out after traveling about 50 miles through optical fiber. Teleportation would enable the creation of copies every 50 miles or so, letting the message be sent across an unlimited distance.

reg free link

[imag0]

teleport your ass over here and get a reg free link

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?

0.0 latency gaming anyone?

[ageOfWWIV]

The potential application of this technology is boundless. Everything from communication to transportation, even society will be changed by the refinment and eventual mastery of this particular branch of quantum physics.

I'm sure 400 years from now people will be using spooky action at a distance to teleport to their flying cars so they can head out to stores to finally buy a shrinkwrapped copy of Duke Nukem Forever.

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.

[BlackHawk-666]

But why bother destroying the original. Let's get some cloning machines using this tech churning out thousands of copies of sexy chicks!

Re:don't beam ME up.

[hcdejong]

perhaps a .mpr file

I'd certainly hope our computers will be rid of @#$% filename extensions before we have practical applications of teleportation. Although from the current state of it (with even Apple regressing into the Middle Ages of Metadata), chances are slim.

Re:don't beam ME up.

[infiniti99]

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.

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.

[sbaker]

> If i am being teleported... teleportation would create
> copy of me and killed original.

OK Mr Hatchet, your duplicate ('you++' as we like to call
him in my line of work) is now at your destination being
Heisenburg compensated. Boy are --you lucky --you won't
have to go through *that* indignity!

Please stand perfectly still while I blow --you away with
this zap-o-matic ray gun of mine. No, No, it won't hurt
a bit. Well, actually, it hurts --you a hell of a lot - but
since you++ are now at your destination, you++ won't remember
a thing about it.

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?

poem

[mlush]

I teleported home one night
With Ron and Sid and Meg.
Ron stole Meggie's heart away
And I got Sidney's leg.

Douglas Adams
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

"Improvements" in Teleportation...?

[mccalli]

Salesman: "It's state of the art!"
Customer: "But it doesn't work."
Salesman: "That is the state of the art..."

To be honest, I wasn't aware there was any base in teleportation from which to improve.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Probably a dumb question, but

[almaw]

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).

Photons VERY different from massive particles

[DrLudicrous]

Photons are massless particles. They are part of a large class of particles known as bosons. All particles are either bosons or fermions. Most massive particles with which we are familiar are fermions. These include electrons, neutrons, and protons, the basic building blocks of matter. Quarks too. Bosons are the particles that mediate the four forces between the fermions. Photons, for instance, are the carrier of the electromagnetic interaction. Gravitons are the bosons that give rise to the gravitational interaction.

My point? It is one thing to teleport a photon, which is a massless boson. It is quite another thing to teleport a massive fermion, let alone a collection of them as would be found in any massive object of appreciable size. The physics of teleportation would most likely be very different, since the quantum mechanics and statistics of bosons are quite different from those of fermions. So don't get your hopes up yet regarding teleportation a la Star Trek.

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?

Heisenberg

[MacDuff]

No, this is not a form of Star Trek's Heisenberg Compensator. The whole point of Heisenberg Uncertainty is that it is fundamental and unavoidable. You can get down to that magic h-bar/2pi, but no further. Period.

If you could get around that uncertainty issue, it would blow away quantum cryptography entirely; the beauty of it from a security standpoint is that any eavesdropping can be detected, because observing the qubits (in this case, photons with particular spin) necessarily disrupts a certain portion of them.

Yes, this means that a determined eavesdropper could mount an effective DoS by reading all the bits, but with that kind of access, there are easier ways. (Uh, how about cutting the fiber?)

And it's not really teleportation. It's still fundamentally limited to the speed of light. "Teleporting" anything more complicated than a hydrogen atom is going to be insane due to (here it comes again) Heisenberg Uncertainty - you have to extract its state, but you can't do that to within that certain magic tolerance ...

Transporting Mass

[CleverNickedName]

I can just imagine all the boffins pacing around the lab trying to decide who will be the first to test the new mass trasporter.

One of them is wearing a red sweater...

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!

Quantum Teleportation

[Karhgath]

Ok, before everyone freaks, Quantum Teleportation isn't what most think it is. I've had a class and attended a few lectures by renowned Gilles Brassard from the University of Montreal, one of the founder of the field and especially quantum encryption, along with Charles H. Bennet from IBM and many others.

First, "teleportation" only teleports "DATA", quantum information, like the spin of an electron. You won't see any beam me up scotty, despite how much people wants to and how wrong reporters are in artciles =)

Second, here's a VERY brief info page on Quantum Teleportation on IBM's page:

http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleport at ion/

For more in depth info, try to find articles in magazines and books, especially one written by Charles H. Bennet and/or Gilles Brassard.

One lecture by Brassard can be found online here, there's even a PDF:

http://www.msri.org/publications/ln/msri/2002/qu an tumintro/brassard/2/

They will explain this much better than my understanding will do. It's MUCH funnier and interesting when Brassard presents it, and it's MUCH harder to understand too. The few pictures and bits at the begining of the lecture are what Quantum Teleportation is NOT. Even renowned scientific publication are fooled by bad journalism, and even IBM went over it's head with this, it's kinda funny =)

Anyway, "Beam me up Scotty" will never result from Quantum Teleportation, so don't hold your breath =) The article briefly states this tho, but only seems to gloss over it and even says "maybe", which is completely wrong.

Also, Brassard stated MANY times that is does not violate ANYTHING, and especially not Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The original DATA must be destroy, then it is "rebuilt" on the other side, and because of a property of EPR, "entanglement", you never mesure the quantum information completely, thus not violating Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

One last note, the following bit on the article is probably the most simplistic non-explanation of what is Quantum Teleportation:

"A message is combined with the encoding light particle. That combination goes to the recipient, who uses the decoding photon to decipher the message. Because no one else has the decoding photon, no one else can decipher the message."

Tele-magic 9000

[GenusP]

Now I just have to sit and wait for them to come out with a comercial version of a tele-magic 9000. I could find about a thousand uses for the thing. Running marathons in under a nanosecond, teleport myself straight into a MGM Grand vault, go to Jamaica for lunch...I'm getting dizzy, better stop.

Hidden variables

[iangoldby]

Not quite. That's more like a 'hidden variable' version of Quantum Mechanics. The box that the poison treat is in is a hidden variable because it has a definite value (albeit unknown to you). The standard interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is that there are no hidden variables. So the poison treat would have to be simultaneously 'in both' and 'not in both' boxes until you observe one of the cats.

The original Schroedinger's Cat thought experiment used a truly quantum-mechanical device to determine whether the cat should live or die. I don't think you can remove that quantum element and still have a valid analogy. The point (or one of them) of the thought experiment is that the cat 'magnifies' the quantum effect.

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.

Vaporware? ;o)

[Seahawk]

A whole new definition of the term vaporware?

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?

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.

Old Bumper Sticker

[eric2hill]

"Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes."

Improvements in secure optical commincation

[scotay]

This isn't a transporter story, this is a story about secure communications.

If you can transmit messages with entangled photons over an optical network, you can prevent anyone from "tapping" the line and observing your communication without you knowing. If someone fucks with one of the entangled photons, the other party will know.

Are they violating uncertainty?

[pclminion]

No violation here.

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.

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!

Re:Neither did Albert

[The_K4]

That's not true in the quantum world. In the quantum world the jelly beans don't know which color they are, in fact they are BOTH colors. It's not until they are actually exaimned that they decide which color they are and retoractivly enact that policy. This is the idea behind quantum encryption. The act of reading the key changes it, therefor if anyone taps into the signal, and reads it, both parties (sender and reciever) know that the line has been comprimised. If your still confused I would recommend a book on quantum computing. Most will give a HUGH description on this, more then I care to give here. The man thing to remember is that the Jelly Beans are qubits....not jelly beans. Therefore your assumptions about jelly beans don't hold true.

Teleportation's already been standarized

[tincho_uy]

by the IETF. At least it's so according to this RFC.

I think this'll be included in the next version of KMail

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:Neither did Albert

[moominpapa]

> Schrodenger's cat is NOT either alive or dead,it's BOTH until we observe it.

Our cat is also both, until you poke it with your foot or open a can of tuna fish within 100 yards of it. Then, unfortunately, it proves to be just alive.

Worst physics joke ever.

[fonetik]

Heisenberg is driving along, and a cop pulls him over. The cop asks "Do you know how fast you were going?" And Heisenberg says "No... But I know where I am!" Badum-ching!

Re:The SPEED of Destruction makes people uncomfort

[jerde]

Certain cells are NOT replaced regularly in our bodies, most importantly the central nervous system cells.

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 /. 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.

- Peter

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.

Re:The SPEED of Destruction makes people uncomfort

[LordLucless]

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?