Austrian Physicists 'Teleport' Light Over 600m

openSoar writes "The BBC is reporting that: 'Physicists have carried out successful teleportation with particles of light over a distance of 600m across the River Danube in Austria. When physicists say 'teleportation', they are describing the transfer of key properties from one particle to another without a physical link.'"

Comments

as someone else said....

[numbski]

rsync at the speed of light. ;)

I could find some uses for that. My brother in law would like to rsync music collections for backup purposes for example. :D

Ok so why cant we?

[MortisUmbra]

Since, obviously, you are not actually teleporting the photon itself, but rather its properties. Why can't we use this as a sort of limitless instantaneous data transfer method?

I.E. Use the manipulation of these properties to single a sort of photonic 1's and 0's (or potentially much more, possibly instead of binary, it might be possible to make it trinary, or better).

Think about it, you put a pack of these entangled photons into a sort of "storage" device, stick it on your next mars rover, and instead of there being a huge delay, your commands are sent instantaneously. Obviously eventually these entangled photons would be all used up (or could you continue to modify them after the first time?) but still, rovers, for example, are a consumable at this point too.