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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."
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.
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
ugh. how are they not related? what is matter? how could you possibly distinguish 1 photon from another with equal properties? you cant. there is no difference.
and "spooky" is a reference to Einstein's phrase "spooky action at a distance"
That relation is mentioned in the fine article as the headline, so it's not the fault of the Slashdot editors. It does seem that it's more of an encryption method than anything after reading the content of the article.
On that note, I think that encryption of a transmission of matter in data form is extremely important. Can you imagine what an intercepted transmission of that nature would do? It would bring an entirely new meaning to identity theft. What about in a war situation, if the leader of the enemy was intercepted, and there was an extra copy of him, with memories intact, that was captured? It would change much more than you'd see on the face of it.
All in all, I think that it's not directly related to a transporter, but it could be used if one were invented. It really is not the best title.
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
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
How are they NOT related?
:)
:D
:P
Let's put it this way - there are two sects in the field of teleportation that I'm aware of right now.
Sect 1 defines teleportation as the tearing down of matter, converting it into energy, transport that energy, and convert it back into matter.
Sect 2 defines teleportation as scanning all of the information about an object, transport that INFORMATION to destination, create replica, then tear down the original.
Star Trek subscribes to version 1, unless of course you're watching a very particular episode.
Anyway, in both cases, you recall hearing the term "pattern buffer" in trek, right? In either case, you have to break Heisenberg's Law (Heisenberg compensator anyone?) about knowing the exact state and location of all particles that make up an object. You store that information, transmit it to the other site, and from that site you either reconstruct the original, or duplicate the original.
The frightening thing is, I see this program in my head writing an XML document, with trees and braches going something like atom/particle/state, and gzip compress it, then transmit it over the fastest method available, decompress on the other side. Just add matter.
Wow I'm sick.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
There are lots of other problems, though. First of all, they can't even teleport single photons yet. All they can do is teleport a single degree of freedom of a single photon, such as polarization or transverse spatial state. Secondly, scaling the teleportation process up to macroscopic objects would require isolating the object to be teleported from its environment in order to preserve quantum coherence. I imagine vacuum exposure would make this procedure uncomfortable for... you know... living things.
It should be noted that quantum teleportation is not able to transfer matter or energy from transmitter to receiver. All the protocol can do is transfer the quantum state of a particle (or, in the future, groups of particles) from transmitter to receiver. That doesn't mean that humans can't be teleported, though; the receiver would simply keep a stock of raw materials such as carbon, hydrogen, calcium and oxygen atoms out of which to reconstruct the person.
For the moment, quantum teleportation bears little resemblance to its sci-fi namesake. It's still useful for sending secure messages because of one bizarre property of teleportation: a teleported state can be sent between points A and B without ever existing between those points. It's also the best way to network quantum computers.
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].
On the other hand, the rest of your post makes very little sense to me. As long as the teleportation process is carried out at sufficient resolution to capture all the relevant details of my consciousness, and I emerge on the receiver pad with all my memories and personality, I don't understand how it could be anything but successful. If you're referring to the psychological strain of instantly seeing a new room... maybe all teleporter rooms can look exactly the same, down to the smallest perceptible detail.
Really, the only way teleportation (or brain-to-computer transference) could work is if each individual part (for some definition of "part") were duplicated, placed in sync with the original, and then the original part destroyed. Since consciousness consists of the whole and not the parts (assuming we're not going to invoke the supernatural), the consciousness remains continuous with only one instantiation at any one time.
Probably, but consider this: can you really prove your consciousness remains continuous every time, say, you go to sleep and wake up the next morning.
The same paradox occurs: you think you are the same consciousness, but there's no way to know.
People take enough risk to die already by using a much simpler transportation device, a car. Maybe this invention is distant enough in the future to allow for our values to change, and realize that in the big scheme of things, it doesn't matter if you're an instant and perfect copy of yourself, using "generic energy" for the process every time you go back from work.
Of course not many people from today would accept such a destiny ("wake up, honey and get ready to die in the teleporter to work").
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!
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.