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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?"
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)
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.
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.
teleport your ass over here and get a reg free link
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.
____
ATS11=0 the secret to beating everyone else to a 1 line board.
Teleporting light - ok
.mpr file) and send it to the replicator like you would a document to a printer.
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
- very cool stuff
I teleported home one night
With Ron and Sid and Meg.
Ron stole Meggie's heart away
And I got Sidney's leg.
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To be honest, I wasn't aware there was any base in teleportation from which to improve.
Cheers,
Ian
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.
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
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.
t at ion/
u an tumintro/brassard/2/
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/telepor
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/q
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."
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.
A whole new definition of the term vaporware?
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.
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.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
"Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes."
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
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
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
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.
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?
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
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
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!
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