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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."
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.
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.
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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!
Data doesn't use contractions.
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.
It's not really encryption either -- it's just a way of transmitting some information, and knowing whether anybody else has intercepted the transmission. The relationship to encryption is that it allows you to transmit a key and know that it wasn't intercepted during transmission. Obviously, you only use the key if it wasn't intercepted. If memory serves, it's not immune to a MITM attack though. This is why the free-air transmission means something -- it's much easier to put your agent in the middle of an optical fiber.
In the absence of public-key cryptography, this would be a big deal, as key distribution has historically been a big problem in encryption. In the presence of public key cryptography, however, the practical significance is likely to be fairly limited. In theory, if the problems associated with PK algorithms turned out to be easier than expected, this could become a big thing again -- but I see little sign of major breakthroughs in factoring, finding logarithms in a finite field, etc. Some pretty serious mathematicians have pretty solid arguments that elliptical curve encryption is probably not even amenable to the types of algorithms used for factoring and finite field algorithms (the sieve-style algorithms only work if you can prove "smoothness" and nobody's done so for elliptical curves -- and there are some fairly solid-looking arguments that they're not smooth).
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
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.
The above post refers to a PARALLEL UNIVERSE, and is NOT making a political statement. SF writers have long used alternate political situations to show a parallel universe that is very similar to ours, but definetly different.
The above post deserves to be moderated as +1 humor, since it is the first to bring up the idea of the quantum entanglement communications device accidentally talking to another universe.
The above post is absolutely not flamebait.
hanzie.
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