Slashdot Mirror
Breakthrough Brings Star Trek Transporter Closer
japerr writes to mention The Independant is reporting that a new breakthrough may bring scientists one step closer to a Star Trek style transporter. " A team of physicists has teleported data over a distance of 89 miles from the Canary Island of La Palma to the neighbouring island of Tenerife, which is 10 times further than the previous attempt at teleportation through free space. The scientists did it by exploiting the "spooky" and virtually unfathomable field of quantum entanglement - when the state of matter rather than matter itself is sent from one place to another. Tiny packets or particles of light, photons, were used to teleport information between telescopes on the two islands. The photons did it by quantum entanglement and scientists hope it will form the basis of a way of sending encrypted data."
Come on, guys. :-(
It is true that "Star Trek style Transporters" are used to send Data, but it is with a capital "D" and they can send other crew members too.
Misleading summary. Minus 100 points.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
...that they meant Brent Spiner here:
>A team of physicists has teleported data over a distance of 89 miles.
u-bend
This sounds like a new form of fiber optics rather than teleportation. No item was physically disassembled and reassembled in another place. Rather they used telescopes to focus light. Perhaps I misinterpreted the article.
From TFA, this sounds less like teleportation and more like another extension to the distance quantum cryptography has been successfully sent.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
If you want to teleport a brick, does its exact quantum state matter? Does it matter for life? It seems like the only use would be to teleport a running quantum computer.
The only thing spooky about this article is that the editors think data transmission and matter transmission are in any way related.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Have these guys who wrote the summary heard of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? It was in all the papers.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
But it seems to me that 'transporting' data, whether or not using quantum entanglement, isn't quite the same thing as transporting matter and really brings us no close the 'transporter' technology as seen on Star Trek.
We can already transport data through space without using quantum entanglement at all -- it's called radio.
My blog
We can beam William Shatner's ashes out into space without making a mess on the ground.
The Independant
Ugh... it's "The Independent". Now we can't even copy the names of publications correctly without misspelling them, even when there is a giant logo with the correct spelling right in front of us and numerous other text versions on the page? It's called highlight/ctrl-c, people!
The whole ent/ant thing is there/their/they're for this decade, and obviously a pet peeve of mine. Get it through your heads; there's no such thing as an "independant". An independent is not something you wear around your neck.
Anyway, to get back on-topic, is it just me or the idea of teleporting "data" 89 miles not very impressive? I realize it's probably poor wording, but I'm sure once I click the "submit" button here, this data's going to be instantly "teleported" all over the world!
Steve Ballmer as Andre Delambre, it'll be an improvement.
Until they're delivering matter, not data, this isn't a teleporter. OTOH, it is a breakthrough in secure communications, but why would I care about that? It won't cut my commute time to 40ms, it's worthless. Dugg down ... oh wait, wrong site.
than star trek, sounds more like an ansible than a transporter, though i suppose that ender's game is not as well known as star trek.
Insert witty sig here.
and I don't understand quantum entanglement very well. So I was wondering - Is it possible that something like this can enable faster-than-light communications?
-R
A lovely headline, but the only practical application of this form of "teleportation" is cryptography (you could have some pretty damn unbreakable keys with this). Even if you could "teleport" any significant amount of matter, it would be many, many, many orders of magnitude more challenging than this and you would have to get past some pretty significant hurdles (Heisenberg being one of the least of your problems).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
the National Enquirer report on quantum entanglement? What a bunch of hype. I'm happy about what they accomplished, but it's just another small step of which we'll need many.
This is less like the Star Trek Transporter, and more like the ansible, which functioned via philotic twining (which as far as I can tell is quantum entanglement by a different name) from Ender's Game. TFA also mentions that the Transporters were said to have used quantum entanglement. I don't remember that at all. Is it from the newer stuff? As far as I knew the way they worked was the computer would store all information about the object, using the ever so convenient Heisenberg Compensator, then use that data to rebuild them on the other side in the same way the replicators worked. No entanglement involved.
"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Drink deeply or not at all."
LORA - Well, here goes nothing ...
GIBBS - Hah. Interesting, interesting. You hear what you said? "Here goes nothing."
LORA - Well, I meant -
GIBBS - Whereas actually, what we propose to do is to turn something into nothing and back again. So you might just as well have said, "Here goes something and here comes nothing." Hah!
Transmitting photons has nothing to do with transporters. It doesn't exceed speed of light or go through any opaque materials like starship hulls. But most importantly, it doesn't address the little problem of moving non-light particles or else assembling the exact copy at the destination.
Basically this is no different than sending a file over a fiber optic link, except that you get some additional hardware-based security.
For the sake of the scientists that worked on this project, I sincerely hope they 'transported' data that isn't 'protected' by the DMCA or I'm sure the RIAA/MPAA will cause this technology to become still-born.
...the connection setup overhead be a real pain! Now to exchange encrypted data with some place, I have to entangle some photons and physically move them to said destination. THEN all my traffic is "instantaneous". Or is it that it isn't instaneous but just some very, very, very small latency? I also wonder how long it takes to establish the entanglement between a pair of photons and how many photon pairs are needed to get a reliable signal-to-noise ratio. The article is a little light on details in that arena. Anyone know?
Paul Revere signalled using tiny packets of particles of light called photons, too.
First Paragraph: Quantum teleportation across the Danube
But of course you have to pay.
Without being able to read the actual paper (when oh when are we going to see researchers publishing information in non-fee journals as a matter of course? they are holding science hostage!) it's hard to say what this actually gains, given that it requires the transmission of a third photon to get useful information out of the original two.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Isn't it like having a pair of shoes, and you separate the shoes into two boxes. You then you take your shoe in a box away, and upon opening the box you observe that you have the left shoe.
Ahah! That means the other one was a right shoe. No information is transmitted though. How is it not like that?
Maybe someone can convert this to a car analogy to explain it better.
Wasn't the whole point of the transporter to move matter, and the state of matter? This article says they want to sent the state of matter without sending the matter.
I feel if someone tried to implement this as a transporter they would end up with a remote cloning station, like the device from The Prestige. Useful, but I think this is like saying a Fax machine moves us closer to a Star Trek transporter.
Give me a call when someone develops the Heisenberg Compensator.
Think of what this means for a moment: a high-bandwidth router capable of sending a fat data stream anywhere in the world instantaneously, a stream that nobody could jam, spy on, or even detect. This would be the worst nightmare of intelligence services everywhere, and there is just no way they'd let this technology get loose.
In fact, it's potentially so dangerous and disruptive, I'd venture to say that even the military would be denied access to it, since it would quickly escape into the wild. Of course, NASA would kill to get their hands on it. You could send more than data through this thing, remember, you could send electricity, too! Space probes powered by earth-based generators (or earth systems powered by space-based satellites).
Too bad we'll never get to see any of it.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
The article says that quantum entanglement is one of the scientific principles invoked by Star Trek to explain how transporters function, and that may be true as I don't own all of the tech manuals, but my understanding is that the main principle behind transporter operation is the idea that matter-energy conversion is possible (and practical). Same goes for holodecks and replicators.
... I've read some bits by physicists who claim that such technology is impossible or unlikely to ever be achieved, but I'll admit that I didn't really understand the first thing about their arguments.
What this would seem (at least on the surface) to bring us closer to is the ansible communications technology employed most famously in the Ender's Game series. That is, by utilizing the properties of quantum entanglement, it may be possible to achieve faster-than-light communication. This also has its problems though
But hey, this is Slashdot after all, so I guess I should just be lucky this article isn't both a dupe and accompanied by a misleading headline.
Wake me up when they teleport Lore too.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Have these guys who wrote the summary heard of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle?
Yes, but as soon as they heard of it, they couldn't locate it.
I was under the impression that there are a lot of laws in quantum mechanics that perhibits real information to be sent through quantum entanglement. If any information would be sent this way, it would appear that the information has actually travelled back through time - and that's impossible. If you have two entangled electrons, one with spin up and one with spin down, and the're existing as waves, you don't know which one has the spin up and the spin down. Now put the electrons in a box each (together with Schroedingers cat, perhaps) and put one in another galaxy. Now if you look at one of the electrons and that one has a spin up, you know that the other one must have a spin down, even though it's in another galaxy. The other electron doesn't even know this, it's still a wave in a box until someone looks upon it and it's suddenly a spin down. Hence the "spooky" part. However this information is useless to you. You have no way of telling the other guy in the other galaxy what spin his electron has because it would take millions of years for any message to reach him. Spin is also completely random, it's 50%-50%. So even if you have lots of electrons with spins, they're just noise, let alone exactly the inverse of the noise the other guy has in the other galaxy. But noise is noise and does not contain any information. So even if the other guy waits millions of years until he looks in the box to obtain information he already knew, the information is already useless to you for any practical purposes. So how can one send information with photons?
What are the other styles of transporter that's available now?
TFA mixed up both the author's name and the journal this work was published in. The author's real name is Rupert Ursin (not Robert), and the article was published in Nature Physics Online, not Nature Physics (those are separate journals). The article itself is available here as a pdf.
Ugh... it's "The Independent". Now we can't even copy the names of publications correctly without misspelling them
I've concluded that English does not need most vowels. It needs a placeholders. Example:
"Independ*nt". If the vowel does not contribute to the sound, then replace it with an ast*risks (or some other chosen character). "Hum*r" (not to be confused with Humm*r) is another one that doesn't need a fricken vowel there. The problem is not the spellers, but the language.
Table-ized A.I.
Walter: A laser dismantles the molecular structure of the object and the molecules remain suspended in the laser beam. Then when the computer lays out the model the molecules fall back into place and... voilà!
Alan: Great! Can it send me to Hawaii?
Their transporter has just made my space elevator obsolete. My company is doomed.
When will the relentless pace of technology ever stop?
That I called quantum entanglement as a method of getting around Heisenberg and his principle of uncertainty. Ok, well I stole it from Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, but the point is I still said it was the way to go.
Balance the equation!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
What this doesn't offer us is anything anywhere near close to matter teleportation. What this kind of thing can be used for, and correct me if i'm wrong, is something quite similar to the Affinity communication method used in Peter F. Hamilton's Night Dawn Trilogy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night's_dawn_trilogy# Edenist_culture
Now THAT i'm interested in. Teleportation be damned, pseudo-telepathy is where it's at!
What I would like to see, and it seems that a sufficient refinement of this type of technology could allow it, is a near-zero latency connection between my laptop and my computer. I use my laptop largely as a dumb-terminal anyway, and not having to worry about having a connection/other people's networks, etc sounds lovely, particularly if I've got the bandwidth to do nice things. As an added bonus, we get to free up some amount of the broadcast spectrum for things that are actually broadcasting. Anyone with more education about the technology know what will get in the way of such?
Quantum teleportation of information is *not* what the sci-fi and fantasy communities refer to as teleportation.
Ok: 1) Data is not particles. 2) I transport data all the time on the internet 3) It's not spooky You take this article and not mine? Give me a break. I thought only digg posted shit like this.
when I can get tissues by asking "Beam me up scotties".
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
The transporter system is well conceived. There are the Heisenberg Compensators, as well as the equalizer-like control with two sets of five sliders so the person controlling the transporter can use all his fingers to adjust your molecular re-assembly in case he notices a problem such as your good and evil sides being separated.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
atom by atom, and send information on what component parts were and where they were located.
Next we can put it back together.
You'll still be dead, no longer a functioning biological biochemical organism which is in constant motion and has altering states of being at the nanosecond level, and you'll still have died in agony while we ripped your body apart.
But now we can bury you on the other end!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
First, I'll admit to not reading the article. This is slashdot, after all.
The problem with transporting people is, you have to take a "snapshot" of them, then reconstruct it somewhere else, right?
There's one, big, big problem with that. The snapshot is just that, a still image.
Think frozen in time. The key word being "frozen". As in not moving at all on the subatomic level. As in frozen solid at absolute zero, and very, very dead. All chemical reactions that take place every nanosecond you're alive stop. Upon being recreated in a presumably hospitable environment you'd also most likely shatter due to the extreme heat differential between your absolute zero body and the balmy ~72F degree air.
Question everything
Sure, this technology may be one of the steps on the road to transporter technology. Perhaps it also brings us a step closer to immortality, or artificial intelligence, or revealing the true nature of "god" and the ultimate origin and purpose of the universe.
In fact, many of the new technologies invented every day are probably steps on the road to these sorts of things! How exciting! Let's post it to Slashdot next time someone improves the mousetrap, and call is a step towards achieving human symbiosis with an intergalactic hyper-intelligent hive mind.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Yes, it does.
:-)
Transpoting data, in first place, means *having* that data.
Having the data goes hand in hand with *measuring* the data.
And measuring the data is exactly the thing you can not with with sufficent accuracy as to produce an exact copy of an object somewhere far, far away (uncertainty principle: you cannot measure a physical quantity and its conjugated counterpart, e.g. positionmomentum, at the same time). More than that, measuring one quantity irrevocably destroys its conjugated counterpart.
Cloning the original object, measure one quantity on one object and the other quantity on the other object has been proven to be impossible.
Here's where teleportation kicks in: using pairs of entangled particles (or entangled photons, or entangled whatever) however enables you to transport the exact properties of an object *without* having to measure those -- it's a kind of a trick
It works like:
Object A --- Pair of entangled Photons 1+2 --- Puppet B
where "Object A" is the original, and "Puppet B" is some kind of a "blank" form, which will later receive the properties of A (think of it as of a blank CD-R).
[1+2] is a pair of entangled photons (or atoms, or whatever... doesn't really matter for the theory). "Entangled" means that they have lost any identity they've had for themselves, their only existance makes sense if they are regarded as a *pair*.
What you do to perform teleportation is "entangle" A with 1 and then measure the properties of the system [A+1]. Of course, by measuring [A+1] and thus somehow measuring properties of 1, you destroy the entanglement [1+2]. But, because [1+2] were entangled at the point you did the measuring, by touching photon 1 you also touch photon 2. Thereby you suddenly change properties of photon 2 -- you still don't know exactly *what* you really did to photon 2, but whatever it was, it happened at the very instant you measured/entangled [A+1]. This step is the actual teleportation.
The magic lies in entanglement of A with 1. It can be shown that the state you sent photon 2 by breaking the entanglement depends on the state your original object A was in -- even with all it's non-measurable properties. This still won't give you any information about what *was* A in the first place, but, whatever it was, now you know it is somehow "mangled" into 2. And quantum mechanics even tells you how exactly it was mangled. All you need to know to re-contstruct the original state of A into the dummy B using information from 2 is another piece of information, namely some numbers you gathered when creating the entaglement [A+1].
This way, you do have a "spooky action at distance" (because the unknown information about particle A was instantaneously transfered to photon 2 at a given time), but you cannot use this to effectively break relativity, because that information is encoded in 2 in a way you can not possibly use it, unless somebody "phoned" you the result of a local measure [A+1].
Are they really different though? In Star Trek, the idea is that your body gets broken down into "energy" first, and then you're "reassembled" at the destination. But if you're broken down into constituent parts, does it really matter if the same actual photons or whatnot are the ones that get reassembled? On photon is just as good as another. What really matters is the DATA that gets recorded when you're broken down. It's the DATA that allows those photons to be reconstructed into you at the other end.
So really all a Star Trek transporter does is record your makeup (which might not really be possible, Uncertainty Principle and all), disintegrate you (i.e. killing you), and then creating a copy of you somewhere else. (Whether the copy is made from the same particles from the disintegrated you or not is pretty much irrelevant.)
At least, that's how I've always seen it. Now the REALLY interesting question is whether it actually makes a difference to your consciousness if you get killed in one place and reconstructed somewhere else or not. It might not be so different from waking up from a coma or something, right? Or even sleep. Maybe every time you sleep, your brain actually dies, and a new you is reconstructed. Who knows! And does it matter?
I think we'll find that, in the end, all that really matters is information. All that really matters is the data.
Quantum "teleportation" is an interesting phenomenon, but it has little to do with Start Trek style transporters.
>Isn't it like having a pair of shoes, and you separate the shoes into two boxes. You then
>you take your shoe in a box away, and upon opening the box you observe that you have the
>left shoe.
Best
Analogy
Ever
However, I think the problem is that a shoe is a macroscopic object. Like Shrodinger's Cat, in reality it can't be two things at once. It's just a way they explain the weirdness of quantum physics, which only works at a very tiny scale.
What I'd like to know is why common sense applies at the big level, but doesn't at the tiny level.
Just another few billion steps to go then?
Home fucking is killing prostitution.
two photons can be created in such a way that they behave as a single object, even if they are separated by large distances.
:)
Sure, they look like two objects to you, but only because you don't understand the underlying structure of the universe.
I'm only half-kidding - how this works is a great open question.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
For those who don't follow such things, La Palma's volcano is going to collapse into the ocean in the next several centuries and probably smack the Eastern US with a massive tidal wave when it does.
I guess that's one way to answer the "do we protect existing coastal development?" question in a global warming scenario.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
P Of course, I'd love to be proven wrong.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
That's a big assumption. And you'd better pray you're right.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
First off, I've never slammed an article headline in all the time I've been here at Slashdot, but I'm doing it now. How in the hell is transmitting data even remotely a step in the direction of transmitting matter? Puhleeze. A step closer to teleporting matter would be to vaporize a small animal and then "shoot" the particles 89 miles away -- perhaps.
Secondly, as others have posted, it ain't gonna happen. Teleporting matter by breaking it down and reconstructing it on the other end ain't going to happen. There are so many holes in that approach that its not funny.
I read a couple of interesting magazine articles on teleportation, and the key to teleportation is really time travel. Teleportation would be sending someone on a time-ride, bending the space-time continuum, have them "arrive" at the exact physical destination but still in the same temporal location in which they left. That is the key. However, the big problem with this approach is that the matter being transported will still age the amount of time is took the "time ride" to occur. Still, any teleportation is a feat the will probably never be accomplished.
But let me go on record as saying that rather than for science to focus focusing on teleportation or time travel seems moronic. How about we just focus on building some kind of high-speed passenger transport mechanism that travels at supersonic speeds (something like Mach 3 or Mach 4)?
Personally, I'd be just fine if I could go from Los Angeles to New York in one hour. And that seems like a much more achievable goal.
The Group of Applied Physics at the university of Geneva, Switzerland is playing with quantum teleportation for some time already, visit
http://www.gap-optique.unige.ch/ for more information.
A spin-off also sells products based on this technology:
http://www.idquantique.com/
1. "Freeze" the occupant in an annular confinement beam.
2. Record all information about each individual particle in the occupant in some gargantuan memory buffer, you know like velocity and position (which we know is vis-a-vis the Heisenberg uncertainty principle).
3. Losslessly convert the matter into energy (it will need to be converted back on the other end, so you really don't want any loss).
4. Transmit the information and energy to another point... instantaneously (an interesting trick given the sheer quantity of information required).
5. Convert the energy stream, again losslessly, back into matter, and with assiduous detail to the enormous blueprint you were provided along with it (what, in the packet headers?).
6. Pray like hell that you didn't transmit through anything that might disrupt the stream... guess we'll need a lot of CRC checks, eh?
Now I know why McCoy was always so apprehensive about stepping into one of these things. Poor Commander Sonak.
Derek Parfit is an interesting philosopher who's done a lot of work on personal identity just by examining various Star Trek transporter scenarios (like what if you're reconstructed at the other end but don't disappear at the start).
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
whats the big deal?
at the moment all it seems they have done is transmitted data(with small d). We have been able to do that since morse code... Can somebody explain to me what the big deal is becasue apart from the ultimate aim, I'm failing to see how this is a breakthrough.
www.tdobson.net #### Dare to Dream #### blog.tdobson.net
What about if you transport a million entangled particles to mars, then leave their brothers on Earth, then have a pre arranged scheme where if you want to send a binary 1 you destroy the entangled state for the particle pair for that particular time, otherwise it is assumed to be a 0? So there would need to be 1024 entangled particles sent to mars for a rate of 1 kilobyte per second of one way communication.
they used telescopes to form a fibre link.
they didn't teleport anything.
they used a giant remote control.
They're using their grammar skills there.
...FUCKING BITE MY NUTS!!!!! I made a good point (that observing a photon with a telescope from a remote location has nothing to do with quantum entaglement) and you are a fucking geek who sits in front of a computer all day moderating posts based on your personal views. Go fuck yourself!
I was reading one of Dr. Hawkings writings, and he specifically addressed this issue, and described very nicely what some of the possibilities were, should this kind of technology ever become reality.
One of the interesting ideas is that since you would have every possible particle of information about an object, or person -- that you would not only be able to transport things, but also duplicate them much in the same fashion that a computer can copy and duplicate files.
Spooky..
I am open source, and Linux baby!
The reason why this is always attributed with teleportation is very subtle.
Let me define 'teleportation' like this: A short process after which, an object X does no longer exists at place A, but at a distant place B.
In my understanding it is okay, if the object at place B is not object X, but an indentical copy of it, as long as the object at place A ceases to exist.
One could now disasemble the object into atoms, while writing down the position and momentum of each atom. This information could be transmitted by radio to place B, and there one could reassemble the object from different atoms.
The only problem is, that we would also have to transmit the atom's quantum state in order to really obtain an identical copy. The problem actually already starts with measurement of position and momentum, as one can not measure both quantities with great accuracy (Heisenberg principle). Bottom line, you cannot possibly know everything about the object. It is just not possible, quantum physics wise.
What does guys did, was transfering the quantum state from the object to a different media, the photon. Since this photon was entangled with another one (at place B), one automatically als transfers the quantum state to this other photon, thereby teleporting the quantum state from A to B. The trick is not to measure the quantum state in order not to destroy it.
So, on one hand, one has apparently moved something from A to B in no time. (As it is neither matter nor data the theory of relativity is not violated. It is on the other hand also disputed, if you really have moved something). This already can be called teleportation.
Furthermore, one could imagine, that one could use this technolgy to transmit more complex quantum states and eventually would be able to take of the entire quantum state of an object, disassemble transmitting an exact blueprint of the object by radio, reassemble the object and reapply the teleported quantum state, thereby having a really exact copy of the object and hence the whole thing could be called teleportation.
Say I buy a pair of gloves that are randomly separated in two boxes. I keep one box and send the other to the moon. If I open my box and find a right-handed glove, I instantly know that the other box contains the left-handed glove. No information is transfered from the moon to me, it's knowledge that is instantaneous. In another example, it is possible that a theory could be developed (maybe it already has) using knowledge of nuclear physics to predict the current state of a star based on the light we are receiving now. Again, no information, just knowledge. To communicate, SOMETHING must actually move from the source to the destination, and as far as we know, nothing can move faster than light. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation
So they can transport data through thin air. Hmm, now it is my understanding that to perform the sort of transport that the Star Trek did, it would have to break our particles down to their base units, send it through space and atmosphere with an accuracy almost unheard of, especially with moving vessels, and then reform our matter into a solid.
Oh yeah, so we can send data over thin air now using quantum setups? We'll be able to do this next week then!!! Or not.
Seriously though, this is interesting and all on it's own but trying to make it sound like this is star trek level teleportation is a sad day, and just silly to boot, and from the sound of it an attempt to get rubes (like our lovely editors) to post the story because it's about star trek not about the very interesting and unique transfer system these physicists have created. +1 for their PR department, -1 for honest journalism.
Call me when they have the Heisenberg compensator working.
Back then, it was too expensive to actually land ships every week on a different planet on an NBC budget (those bastards over at Lost In Space, that's another story). Now, you just send the script to CGI and they do it in Post. So don't knock yourselves out, scientists.
Why does everyone get so hung up with transportation of matter, when data is so much more exciting and more relevant to the world we live in.
What I want to see is the first two-way transmitter/receiver that works via quantum entanglement. Instant communication over any distance!
Just imagine the possibilities -- real time communication with probes throughout the solar system, or even further. Eventually it might be possible to have a mobile phone that works anywhere in the world, without the need for a satellite network and with no signal blind spots. Countries could increase their backbone bandwidth without the need for more fibre cables. TV and Music could be broadcast from anywhere, to anywhere in real time. I'm sure you can think of hundreds of other applications for this.
Arghhh! I hate it when people try to hijack pop-culture to SELL their research.
How many times do we have to go through this? This is NOT matter transportation. The "transportation" of data via entanglement is COPYING NOT TRANSPORTING matter.
The Star Trek concept was to take a SINGLE INSTANCE of a collection of matter, convert the matter into its energy form (there by not destroying the instance) and then transmitting the energy which would then go through a reverse process of converting the energy into its material form. The instance would not get copied, but would get transported.
Entanglement on the other hand basically makes a COPY of the INSTANCE. In the end you end up with more than one copy. In other words if you tried to beam yourself to you neighbor's house using the fundamental process mentioned here you'd create a clone of yourself and you would never make the trip.
This is closer to the Star Trek food dispenser than anything else. It created copies of food.
This is all just a sales pitch for funding. Get a clue!
If I read the notes on the article correctly, they didn't duplicate the photon, they reversed its spin to avoid deleting the original, and it came out with a goatee and a decidedly evil nature.
This has little if anything to do with transporter technology, and everything to do with FTL communications.:P
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
That wouldn't do you much good if you were 89 miles away from where your penis went.
or we are dealing with Lore
When all else fails, try.
This method is pretty damned close to the method they "use" in the series to communicate INSTANTANEOUSLY over distances of MANY lightyears.
Come on guys! Keep your geek-references straight!
Let's see, you invent a frackin' teleportation device, and then instead of using it to transport hot naked amazonian babes to you, you get all excited about being able to send encrypted data back and forth?
One off the top of my head is the SF book Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan - the interesting bit here is that religious folks would be against teleportation of humans (I guess because it begs the question of who gets to keep the "soul", in the event of duplication...)
Etc... it's a rhetorical question, right up until the time it happens.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
new product from Hayes, coming Real Soon Now(tm) to your nearest WallMort!
There's a seeker born every minute.
Plus ca changes, plus c'est les meme choses.
It sure would freak her the hell out though.
You can't take the sky from me.
Like many /.'ers, I've had relatively few sexual encounters with women. (Multiply my amount by any number and it's still the same...) With a holosuite, however, it'll be he hottest chicks, but w/o the STDs or unwanted pregnancies. Just don't jerryrig it and put Quark's face on the body...
The point that energy (ie. information; negentropy) was transmitted has been adequately made.
s hup/).
l ) in the planet's surface. One would assume one would need to be pretty pissed at said planetary body (not to mention said Ensign) to blow a hole in it in this way. That antimatter represents a good piece of Enterprise's fuel. Keep in mind that 'burning' it in a controlled manner is going to require a piece of the output to keep it contained, and so the go-value of the fuel won't be near what the boom-value is when burned uncontrolled.
The difference between that and transporting matter is a little problem in conversion. Luckily, we have the math.
Take one red-shirted Ensign Fodder at 75 kg (~165 lbs). Take it in grams: 75000.
Convert him to energy, which is measured in ergs. How many ergs? To get this, multiply the mass times the speed of light in a vacuum, in centimeters per second (29,979,245,800) squared (~9 x 10^20).
75000 x (9*10^20) = 6.75 * 10^25 ergs. That's hard to chew. One erg is about the amount of energy expended by an ant doing a push up (http://www.astronomybuff.com/an-erg-is-an-ant-pu
Convert that to something that seems a more reasonable to our minds. One megaton = 4.22 * 10^22 ergs. Thus, one Ensign Fodder converted to energy == 1600 megatons suddenly happening in the transporter room. Even in the best of circumstances, that 100% of said ergwise Ensign Fodder being moved to the landing coordinates before the energy gets released, and you have just transported between 80 and 160 Tunguska events, and your landing coordinates have just become a ground zero to rival the worst imaginings of any multiple MIRV targeted site in the minds of even the most hardened cold war strategic arms general.
Where do you get this megatonnage? One assumes anti-matter conversion. At 43 megatons per kilogram on antimatter (plus matter, of course, but that's trivial), you're burning up 2 to 4 kg of antimatter just to use one Ensign Fodder to create a crater 4 to 8 times the size of the Arizona meteor crater (http://www.psrd.hawaii.edu/Dec97/impactBlast.htm
The next time the Independent or any other media blurble plays pseudo-geek and insists on cramming in a sci-fi reference despite the fact that the people interviewed pretty much denied the comparison, ask them how big a hole in the ground was left by the test. If there isn't one, there was no matter conversion and so none transported.
Which begs the question, how would we know if anyone ever managed to do this, unless someone were left to measure the crater? "Really big catastrophes don't leave anyone behind to tell the story." (Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon The Deep).
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Now consider a proceedure where you are asleep, exactly duplicated, with the original destroyed. The duplicate wakes and has all your memories, so in a sense "you" wake up. this is not really much different than your nightly experiences of sleep. Now you probably don't give a sceond though to destroying parts of yourself with a haircut, or nail clippings.. all you have to do is just get used to the idea of destroying the rest of it. and you'll be ready.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
Quantum teleportation is about replicating quantum states between two locations, not disassembling and then reassembling matter!
i did not read the article, but it seems like an entirely expensive undertaking to me. on a almost unrelated note, i've always felt that the best way to send anything over massive distance would be to open a gateway to another dimention or whatever, put your item through, then the person on the other end opens a gate to the same spot and picks it up. and from a laymans view, that would be easyer to find out how to do. lol.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
You just contradicted Christianity!
You are reading a sig. Cancel or allow?
DOOOOD.
ansibles are from Ursula LeGuin (possibly the best sci-fi author EVAR due to her attention to character and the human condition in general), not Orson Scott Card. perish the thought.
Micro$oft own the patent for this already !!
or better, be teleported bad and be the red shirt instead of wearing it.
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This is simply not how the Stargate works. Dinky robot first, followed by a team of four highly individual individuals wearing the same colour and style of uniform. Morning phone calls are apparently an essential pre-requisite.
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
ok... shoot me
The Admin and the Engineer
I have always wondered could such a device be used for medical use? If you detect a cancer cell could such a device simply not copy that cell or any qauntum particle that goes with it so that the cancer is simply not copied?
...unobserved and immortal.
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
I think that effect can't be possible unless we are simulated livings and they found a bug in the system. "Oh! I found a way to transmit information by no channel!" Come on, that can't be possible in the real world, so this is not the real world.
Because I still have nightmares about that cat ...
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
>> You can't send information faster than the speed of light.
Correction: You can't send information faster than the speed of light in current models.
Science is about devising consistent mathematical models, using them to create hypotheses that should be observable in reality, and then determining the degree of correlation between the prediction and the observed behaviour of reality. If the correlation is good then the model is considered useful. That's it, that's all there is to the scientific method.
Our current scientific models say that you can't send information faster than the speed of light, and that's an inescapable property of these models, built into their mathematical basis, but it is not a property of reality herself. We have no means of knowing what reality will or will not permit. We'll need to devise new models in order to test deeper properties, as it's beyond the capability of current models.
Don't confuse models with reality, nor properties of models with properties of reality. The two are quite distinct.
I think these "physicists" just wanted to hang out in the Canaries, a very nice holiday resort.
Real physicists work in cold and rainy places with lots of ugly cheap concrete buildings. Everyone knows that.
I won't believe this until it gets reproed somewhere less glamourous.
"Particles (photons, electrons, etc.) do not have some values (eg, spin, charge, etc.) defined until they are observed."
The situation reminds me of polygon clipping in 3d applications: if the polygon is not visible, then do not render it. Same thing with particles: if they are not observed, then they do not exist.
Could this be used as an argument in favor of the universe being someone's video game?
Card got the ansible and it's name from LeGuin, practically acknowledged in the novels themselves. "The official name is Philotic Parallax Instantaneous Communicator," explains Col. Graff in Ender's Game, "but somebody dredged the name ansible out of an old book somewhere"
:)
Wiki on Ansible
I know it's a minor point, but I like LeGuin better.
The above explained crudely and innacurately using ascii diagrams.
/Y/ has been traveling rapidly to the /right/. As such, only half of half an hour has passed for her, and her watch says 9:15.
X and Y are at the same location. It is 9 o'clock
XY
9
X has a sudden, irresistable urge to get as far away from Y as possible. He departs rapidly to the left at Mystery Speed(tm)
X {- Y
Y's Tale
Y stands around for an hour, at which point she feels needy and clingy and rings him with her Nifty Ansible(tm). Her watch says it is 10 o'clock.
Now, from Y's perspective, X has been travelling so fast to the left that he has reached relativistic speeds. As such, only half as much time has passed for him. His watch says it is 9:30.
X {- Y
9:30 10
He gets a phonecall. Y says "I miss you I need you come back (bring me a magazine)"
He replies "Fine." and hangs up.
X's Tale.
X realise he didn't know which of the seventy million identical celebrity magazines Y wanted. But from X's perspective,
X -} Y
9:30 9:15
She gets a phonecall. X says "What magazine do you want?". Y says "OMG YAY YOU WERE THINKING OF ME a people would be nice."
Y, having gotten the reply 45 minutes before she sent the initial call, thinks X called off his own bat. She feels happy and validated, and does not ring him 45 minutes later. So he never calls her. So she feels lonely and calls him. So he calls. So she doesn't. So he doesn't. Then the universe explodes.
X BOOM Y
And that's why relativity and relationships don't mix.
The answer to your riddle, "How can you transport a living thing while keeping it isolated from the environment?" is quite simple.... You do not have to put the being in a vacuum (thus, killing it.) You need to transport it, along with the air in its chamber, to the destination location. But I can't see how the teleportation process can take ANY amount of time at all without the thing dying.... that's the problem. Either transport ALL of his atoms instantaneously (simultaneously), or he's dead!
I think we will be much more successful transporting rocks!
Its called synchronized swimming. We use a photon called light to see what the other swimmer is doing and then mimic the other swimmer.
Levon Barker
Sig erased via substitution of an identical one.
A good example of what the parent is describing is in the move The Prestige (some spoilers ahead). When the magician Angiers uses Tesla's teleportation machine, it creates an exact copy of Angiers a short distance away. Each time he uses the machine, he murders the clone by drowning him in a water-filled sealed box, which he later disposes of. At the conclusion of the movie, Angiers reveals that he was terrified every time he used the machine, because he never knew whether "he" would be the applause-receiving prestige or the drowned clone.
So quantum entanglement is a new encoding system for optical data transmission. I wonder what the top end of the bandwidth would be...
It should be something pretty massive, assuming you can keep the photonic loss between objects to a minimum, yes?
Main Entry:
subspace
Function:
noun
1: a subset of a space; especially : one that has the essential properties (as those of a vector space or topological space) of the including space
2: the "spooky" and virtually unfathomable field of quantum entanglement
This is obviously not only the age of tabloid journalism, it's the age of tabloid science.
I'm surprised there's no stories on re-animating anna nichole (and ultimately elvis). Or maybe dr. frankenstein lost the pr battle a long time ago.
quantum entanglement (spooky action at a distance or whatever you want to call it) is a fascinating sci-fi-ish concept anyway - except that it's real. Such a thing should be fascinating for anyone with a modicum of curiousity and by the sounds of it, their research is actually doing something to expand knowledge. Sometime in the future, if and when we ever spread out from the earth, such a mechanism might be the instant radio stylecommunications across vast distances. It doesn't need to be hyped and tied to cancelled television show that existed prior to the birth of most of the people on this planet.
The total worthless BS of a startrek transporter that requires the energy to totally dismantle every molecule of an object and send the information somewhere else was nothing more than deux ex machima solution to solve the obvious problem that the big starship wasn't designed to land and shuttles seemed too inefficient to transport sufficient people and supplies.
Heck the very notion was obscene. Imagine someone stepping into a disintergration chamber just so some identical twin could be replicated somewhere. It's either that, or some never mentioned notion of an ability to transfer the 'soul' in the information stream as well. The primary benefit of the transporter was that it offered new venues of exploration for writers with writer's block.
I saw it in the movie, Deja Vu.
that's interesting too!
any physicists care to comment?
Maybe there is a dimension where time has no meaning, at which point all locations would also have no meaning, and everywhere would coexist at once in the same place at the same instant. Perhaps these entanglements occur because in part the intersection of this dimension where time/space is meaningless and our own familiar dimension results in a distortion or translation we can see much like a 3 dimensional cube must be distorted to be represented as a 2 dimensional picture.
In all honesty, I have *no idea* but I do recognize that many natural phenomena existed long before we had the ability to perceive them. Radio waves existed long before people could detect them, yet they remained there waiting for us to discover. Who is to say that the limitations imposed upon the physical world we understand aren't simply limitations of our understanding vs. the actual limitations of our reality?
Didn't read the Article, just responding to the post title.
The summary says this : "...the state of matter rather than matter itself is sent from one place to another..." This sounds like its sending a copy of the object instead of the object itself. I guess its ok if you send "things", but this might be a little problematic for people. Invasion of the Body Snatchers comes to mind.
slashdot stories have the attention span of a gnat ;)
only very very very few people actually ever really follow up on anything past day 1
... what's reconstructed 89 miles away is someone else, as you have been killed in the deconstruction process.
Star Trek transporters retain the "you" part so that you are literally put back together elsewhere.
From the The Holy Bible, George Bush Edition, c2168AD: On the 8th day God created Antimatter and Adam had to go and mess with sticking matter with it and thus Sin was born. To assume that the antimatter just evolved from some complex reaction is "Ludacris"
Cool! Amazing Toys.
would this theoretically let you transmit information from point A to point B at the speed of light if, for example, point A was entirely isolated from point B (by a 400-foot thick hollow globe of lead, for example)?
+++ATH0