Teleportation Gets a Boost

saavyone writes to tell us Yahoo! News is reporting that while teleportation may not quite be a reality yet a team of Danish scientists have raised the bar on this line of research. From the article: "The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They also teleported the information a distance of half a meter but believe it can be extended further. 'Teleportation between two single atoms had been done two years ago by two teams but this was done at a distance of a fraction of a millimeter,' Polzik, of the Danish National Research Foundation Center for Quantum Optics, explained. 'Our method allows teleportation to be taken over longer distances because it involves light as the carrier of entanglement,' he added."

Comments

Ok I will do it

[COMON$]

Someone had to ask. How is this technique going to maintain a person? Arent you essentially killing the person and reassembling their likeness in a remote location? How could an outsider tell the difference, the being that is transported would simply cease to exist while a copy lives the rest of their lives.

Re:Ok I will do it

[MoogMan]

In theory, the atoms involved get replicated in a different location. Essentially, yes, the source atom gets destroyed, and the destination atom gets "created". But the destination atom is indistinguishable from the source, so who is to say that they are not the same atom? Technically, the atom does not get destroyed, but it's spin and other state[1] gets set to the state of the original atom.

One question worth asking, is whether the relative position of the atoms are maintained through "teleportation". I would assume not. So at this stage, even if you did succeed in transporting a human, they would end up as a pool of water and carbon atoms I guess.

This is more of a philosophical question, I think. Hypothetically speaking, you could see it as killing the person, and re-assembling their likeness. But "their likeness" would know no different, and he/she would feel and act like the real person. Equally, as you say, an outsider would know no different. Would you be willing to kill yourself, knowing that an exact replica of you is about to be re-created.

It goes further, too. Does the soul exist as something other than the collection of atoms and particles that comprise us? If so, does this get left behind, or somehow carried across?

[1] This is how I understand it, at least. Maybe someone could clarify, and explain if anything other than spin would get replicated.

Re:Please...

[BeBoxer]

You've basically changed the second atom to be exactly like the first but they call that teleportation. And effectively it is.

I think most people's concept of "teleport" is something else entirely. What the physicists are doing is something more aking to "faxing". Granted, it's really high-quality faxing, but faxing none the less. But "quantum faxing" doesn't have the same ring to it.

Fundamental to the concept of "teleport" as all non-physicists know it is that the matter being teleported moves from one place to another. In this case they "teleported" atoms of Cesium. But they started with Cesium atoms on both sides of the "teleporter" at the beginning and the end. They didn't "teleport" the Cesium any more than a FAX machine "teleports" paper.

Re:Please...

[partenon]

Yeah, I realized that by reading a lot of comments here :-) Its probably more like this:

$ cp source target ; rm -rf source

(actually, I think mv does exactly this, but just to be explicit :-) )

Re:SciAm article

[Chemisor]

According to the SciAm article, all they did was measure the quantum state of a cesium atom cloud without disturbing the cloud.

Neither measurement disturbed the delicate entangled state between the light and cesium. But the researchers could use the results to apply a precise magnetic field to the cesium vapor that effectively canceled out the ensemble's original spin state and replaced it with one that corresponded to the polarization of the weak pulse

I don't know why people keep calling it "teleportation" or any other quantum crap. A very simple way of describing what happened is that they figured out a way to beat the uncertainty principle by creating multiple copies of the same information and measuring amplitude and phase of different copies. Because both copies are identical, any information obtained about one copy is valid about the others, so a complete set of parameters can be determined. It should be pointed out that this experiment clearly demonstrates that the uncertainty principle is not some fundamental property of the universe, but rather an artifact of our measurement instruments. This is the very point that Einstein tried so hard to prove back in 1927, and the one so throughly disputed by the evil Niels Bohr. Unfortunately, Bohr won the argument for some reason, perhaps just out of stubbornness, and the present unsightly state of the science of physics resulted. Perhaps now the quantum heretics can be brought back to the one true faith of objective reality!

Re:Please...

[caitsith01]

Seems to me that you would create an exact duplicate of the original person, who would feel and believe that they were the same person. However, they would not be the same person - the original person would (presumably) be dead as their constituent particles are ripped apart from their spin etc changing.

Re:Please...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

1: The 'life force' as it appears in Star Trek is a purely fictional invention that has nothing to do with reality.

2: Your stuff about the balance of matter and energy is something you made up (unless you can cite me a reference) and has no bearing on reality.

Please don't confuse the contents of your head with either science or reality. It's stupid.

Please explain

[snowwrestler]

Please describe, in a repeatable, objectively testable way, how to tell the difference between living and dead matter at the quantum level. For that matter please describe how to tell the difference between living and dead matter over very short periods of time. There's a lot about "life" that we don't understand scientifically yet.