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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."
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"
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.
Think of entanglement this way: you've got two particles, each of them in a superposition of two states (horizontal and vertical polarization, for example). The "spookiness" of entanglement lies in the fact that the particles are created in a state where (for example) they have to have opposite polarizations. Thus even though each particle is in a (literally unknowable) superposition of horizontal and vertical, when you measure the first particle and find that it's horizontally polarized, that automatically means that a measurement on the second particle will show that it's vertically polarized. This occurs even if the second measurement is made a millisecond after the first measurement, and the two particles are on opposite sides of the galaxy.
At first glance, this is remarkable. At second glance, it's just conservation of momentum: say the two particles are created from another particle with angular momentum=0. Then the sum of the two angular momentums needs to be 0, so their polarizations must be opposite. The "spookiness" Einstein referred to lies in the fact that quantum mechanics says that both particles are literally horizontally AND vertically polarized, up until the point where the first one is "collapsed" onto horizontal (or vertical). Then all of a sudden the states of both particles are well defined, which occurs even if both particles are separated by a great distance. Einstein took this spookiness to mean that quantum mechanics must be incomplete (namely, that each particle DID have a well defined state that quantum mechanics simply can't describe), but 30 years later a physicist named Bell found a way to experimentally test the issue using "Bell inequalities". Quantum mechanics predicted the outcome of these experiments (google Aspect experiments in the 1980s) up to very high sigma values.
The problem with using these correlations for superluminal correlations is that each measurement just gives you a random horizontal or vertical outcome. The only interesting facet of these measurements is that, when you meet up with the guy who has the other entangled particles (at sublight speed), you find that your answers correlate perfectly. This isn't useful for communication! The only way that it could be used for communication is if quantum mechanics has small nonlinear terms which would allow one party to "bias" his collapse preferentially onto horizontal or vertical. Unfortunately, decades of testing have shown that any nonlinearities in the Schrodinger or Dirac equations underlying quantum mechanics are very, VERY small.
Bummer. On the other hand, FTL communication automatically implies backwards-in-time communication (and thus travel) so at least we don't have to worry so much about being killed by our own grandchildren.