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."

Comments

Bad Summary

[Zenaku]

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.

Re:Bad Summary

[RealGrouchy]

It is true that "Star Trek style Transporters" are used to send Data

He woke up the next day and told Geordi he didn't think he'd be able to go to the holodeck.

"Sorry, but I woke up feeling really encrypted"

- RG>

Re:Bad Summary

[Tablizer]

[Data:] "Sorry, but I woke up feeling really encrypted"

Explains why Data had the urge to write Perl ;-)

-1 Troll

Re:Bad Summary

[Viraptor]

Data: Cpt., I feel encrypted by that last teleportation...
Cpt.: What do you mean?
Data: All my video data has been modified... and there is a number burned in my mind... it's 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.

Re:Bad Summary

[thre5her]

Data doesn't use contractions.

Re:Bad Summary

[big_oaf]

Sorry to nit, but since we are flexing our geek muscles here (the only muscles I have), Data has actually used contractions on occasion. According to Memory Alpha, "...Data also had trouble using contractions in regular speech although this was part of his programming by Dr. Soong." So apparently, it was possible for Data to use contractions, but not without difficulty and, therefore, rarity.

Re:Bad Summary

[revengebomber]

That wasn't informative. Everyone on slashdot already knows that.

Teleport?

[jshriverWVU]

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.

Re:Teleport?

[Tablizer]

This sounds like a new form of fiber optics rather than teleportation. No item was physically disassembled and reassembled in another place.

In other words:

No red-shirted crewman were harmed in this experiment.

Re:Teleport?

[brunascle]

you missed the part about quantum entanglement, which is not simply fiber optics. Niels Bohr is rolling in his grave right now.

Re:Teleport?

[nelsonal]

Wouldn't he only be rolling in his grave if you try to observe him?

Re:Teleport?

[UnHolier than ever]

It is teleportation of information, not of matter. We scientists define teleportaion as "moving something between point A and point B without ever being in between", which is different from the Star Trek "transforming matter in energy and into matter again". It does get us a whole lot more funding than if we had called it something unfashionable like "Communication through entanglement".

By the way, IAAT (I am a teleporter). I don't get to work work in the Canaries though. It's a shame.

Re:Teleport?

[Lockejaw]

He'd be spinning both clockwise and counterclockwise until you observe him.

Re:Teleport?

[LoveGoblin]

Hah. I read that as "No red-shifted crewman were harmed" and thought "Well, they would be moving pretty fast..."

Re:Teleport?

[sabernet]

mod up. by the way, is the cat dead or alive? Yes, I believe it is. But I'm not certain.

Re:Teleport?

[dave420]

I have a quantumly-entangled scale model of him on my desk, and it's rolling like a bastard right now. Just knocked my coffee into the middle of next week. But that's a different problem all together.

Accurate headline?

[Verteiron]

From TFA, this sounds less like teleportation and more like another extension to the distance quantum cryptography has been successfully sent.

Einsteins view at least

[jshriverWVU]

Albert Einstein described quantum entanglement as "spooky action at a distance" and it relies on the fact that two photons can be created in such a way that they behave as a single object, even if they are separated by large distances. In behaving in this way they are acting as a teleportation machine because any changes to one causes similar changes to the other.

Re:Einsteins view at least

[TwilightSentry]

IANAphysicist, but from what I know about entanglement, the idea is as follows. Particles (photons, electrons, etc.) do not have some values (eg, spin, charge, etc.) defined until they are observed. The fun happens when you have a process which is guaranteed to produce two identical particles, but does not cause the attributes of those particles to take a value. You can separate the two particles, and when one is observed, you have a guarantee that the other will take the same values, even if there hasn't technically been enough time for information to flow from one particle to the other.

You can't actually transmit information using entanglement. (From my even more limited understanding, in quantum teleportation, the entanglement is used to extract the quantum state of an object and store it in a photon, which is then sent somewhere else using something like fiber.) You don't control the state of the particle when you first observe it; it is completely random. If you actually change one particle, the two particles are said to "decohere" and are no longer entangled.

Again, I'm just an interested amateur, so please correct me if I'm wrong.

Call me dumb...

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

Re:Call me dumb...

[digitalderbs]

Exactly right. The hurdle for teleportation is the conversion of data and energy into matter. In theory, a Star Trek starship could beam crew members over 250 years time using 802.11g. (assuming, of course that a average human being contains exactly 55.8 petabytes worth of data).

Re:Call me dumb...

[khayman80]

Actually, I recently wrote a paper on quantum teleportation, and I was surprised to find that teleporting a human being with current telecom equipment would take longer than the age of the universe.

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.

Re:Call me dumb...

[JeanPaulBob]

Actually, I recently wrote a paper on quantum teleportation, and I was surprised to find that teleporting a human being with current telecom equipment would take longer than the age of the universe.

Oh, I dunno. Six thousand years doesn't seem like that long to me.

Re:Call me dumb...

[autophile]

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.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Proof:

Scan yourself down to the most fundamental level (regardless of what that is), and build an exact duplicate without destroying the original. Press the start button on the duplicate, assuming instantaneous duplication and starting. Since the original's consciousness has maintained continuity in the original, even if the duplicate is an exact copy of the original's state, it cannot be continuous with the original's state because the duplicate exists at a different location and time. (I considered using "space-time locus", but it's difficult enough talking about this without resort to high-falutin' words :)

Therefore, the "you" that existed prior to duplication is the "you" of the original, and not the "you" of the duplicate. "You" suddenly don't perceive two different realities, one from the POV of the original, and one from the POV of the duplicate.

The conclusion is that if someone destroyes the original, "you" die. Really die. The duplicate may have all your memories and skills, and will think it is the original, but it is not.

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.

I've given this some thought, since I hope to download in 2045 :)

--Rob

IANAP....

[retro128]

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?

Re:IANAP....

[lilomar]

No. At least, not according to this article in the last issue of Darkermatter.

So could these entangled particles be used for superluminal communications? To achieve this we would need to create two or more identical (or cloned) particles and then separate them physically from each other. Then if we were to act on one of the particles, an observer of the second should be able to detect an effect. Then introducing a code (such as Morse Code) would mean we should be able to communicate at greater than the speed of light.

Such a thing is unfortunately impossible. In 1982 physicists Bill Wootters, Wojciech H. Zurek and Dennis Dieks introduced the No Cloning Theorem. This theorem states that it is impossible to create an identical copy of an arbitrary unknown quantum state. As cloning is a requirement of using these entangled particles for superluminal communication, we have to rule this method out.

Re:IANAP....

[khayman80]

I am a physicist, and I don't understand the connection between the no-cloning theorem and using entanglement for FTL communication.

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.

Re:IANAP....

[khayman80]

Unfortunately, it's not easy to demonstrate that FTL communication implies backwards-in-time communication without using spacetime diagrams. I've done a little googling, and the best website I could find on this subject is here.

The gist of the argument is that special relativity divides the universe into three regions of spacetime: the timelike future (which is the set of all points where you COULD be in the future if you could travel at any speed up to and including the speed of light), the timelike past (which is where all events that could POSSIBLY have an affect on you at the present reside) and "elsewhere", which is comprised of all other events. An example of an "elsewhere" event is the state of the Mars rovers RIGHT NOW. I can't possibly know that at the moment because there's about a 30 minute light travel time delay. It's important to realize that FTL communication connects you to an event in "elsewhere" in a causal manner.

If you draw a spacetime diagram for two people, one of whom is moving very fast (at a conventional sublight speed) relative to the other, you'll find that the "elsewhere" of one observer intersects the past of the other. So using FTL communication and sublight engines to send a message to the past would work like this:

1. Bob gets in his fancy spaceship and travels directly away from earth at 90% the speed of light. He travels for 1 year (the time and speed aren't really important, they just allow the message to be sent farther into the past).

2. Alice, on earth, sends Bob an instantaneous message using her FTL communication device. It travels to Bob along what Alice considers to be her "line of simultaneous events" - the line in her spacetime diagram that goes through her present position and on through "elsewhere", to define the "present". It's not necessary for Alice's communication to be instantaneous, but it makes the argument (a little) clearer and doesn't really matter because going 1.0000001x the speed of light is just as impossible as going infinitely fast (as an instantaneous communication device would have to do).

3. Bob receives the message at the exact instant (in Alice's timeframe) as when she sent it. He then sends the message back to Alice using the same FTL device. The difference is that Bob is travelling at 90% of the speed of light, so his "line of simultaneous events" is completely different- it actually intersects Alice's "timelike past".

All of this makes a lot more sense once you get the hang of drawing spacetime diagrams, but it confused me for many years. You might want to google for tutorials on spacetime diagrams or "pole and barn" paradoxes to see some examples of spacetime diagrams...

Re:When the day come...

[LWATCDR]

I bet he would really hate that since he is still alive.

Re:Matter? Yeah, right.

[ObjetDart]

Have these guys who wrote the summary heard of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? It was in all the papers.

Sure they have. That's why all the Star Trek transporters employ "Heisenberg compensators". Duh.

Re:The "Independant"?

[spun]

They tried to teleport the name of the source directly into the summary and it got scrambled. Cut them some slack, it's a new technology.

Re:When the day come...

[AttillaTheNun]

I vote for beaming William Shatner into space now. Why wait for ashes?

Re:spooky?

[brunascle]

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"

One step closer to an ansible, maybe.

[tukkayoot]

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.

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 ... 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.

Re:One step closer to an ansible, maybe.

[hal2814]

Seems like ansibles would be a bad idea. Sure you could have faster than light communications but at the expense of the Buggers hearing every word of it.

Re:One step closer to an ansible, maybe.

[UbuntuDupe]

My reaction was, it doesn't matter if you're limited to the speed of light, or if it can provide additional encryption. It still has the benefit that you can send data without using the (limited) electromagnetic spectrum, or laying down lines, both of which are expensive markets to enter.

Re:One step closer to an ansible, maybe.

[SEAL]

It still has the benefit that you can send data without using the (limited) electromagnetic spectrum, or laying down lines, both of which are expensive markets to enter. ... because hiring a team of quantum physicists, securing patents, and avoiding becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the NSA is so much cheaper?

Re:One step closer to an ansible, maybe.

[iluvcapra]

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 own many of the technical manuals, and they go to pains to handwave over this part of it, making a big deal about "Heisenberg compensators" and working through how these machines capture the data (basically every quantum number in the system, in real time, digitally). All of the gear you mention usually has something called a "phase transition coil" that does the complicated job of making the matter non-corporeal. One can assume the mass is turned into energy, the books won't dissuade you from this, but mass into energy isn't a phase transition, and the amount of energy you'd get from the average human mass would destroy the Enterprise several times over.

The likely explanation a writer, cornered, would give you is that these devices handle matter that is in an as-yet-undiscovered, highly exotic, highly energetic, wavelike, and protean phase of matter, that might as well be energy from our modern-day perspective. In the canon, an object being transported is never referred to as energy, but as "phased matter," which would seem to support this.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going off to sleep with my highly exotic, highly energetic, and as-yet-undiscovered girlfriend.

Re:One step closer to an ansible, maybe.

[moderatorrater]

The ansible communicated by means of two entangled particles. That is impossible by everything that we currently know.

The type of system they're talking about is where you use entangling to imprint the differences between two particles on a third one. They're fundamentally different and resemble neither the ansible nor star trek transporters.

Re:One step closer to an ansible, maybe.

[brunascle]

by utilizing the properties of quantum entanglement, it may be possible to achieve faster-than-light communication

no, it isnt. this has nothing to do with the speed of light. you cant use quantum entaglement to send data faster than light. no one is trying to.

if you're trying to send data, you'll still need to send photons (or other particles) from one location to another. when you're talking about quantum entanglement and sending data across distances, what you're doing is taking two photons in the same location and tieing them together, then sending one of the particles across a distance. when it gets there, it's still tied together (unless something screwed it up on the way), but if you try to manipulate your photon then it unties from the other, so you cant use it to send info faster than light.

Re:One step closer to an ansible, maybe.

[brunascle]

this is god speaking. stop looking for superluminal travel. it doesnt exist.

Re:One step closer to an ansible, maybe.

[ConceptJunkie]

The good news is that you can send unbreakably encrypted messages over long distances instantaneously. The downside is that the people who receive your messages are complaining about President Kucinich's proposed tax legislation and how expensive produce is since California fell into the sea, and all the foreign aid we've given to Mexico because of it, and whether Quebec's Senator is eligible to be the U.S. President because when he was born, it _was_ a foreign country, and they have no idea what the hell your warning about terrorist activity at Kennedy airport is all about.

Re:One step closer to an ansible, maybe.

[bh_doc]

Wrong. Completely and utterly wrong. You can't send information faster than the speed of light.

Quantum teleportation doesn't work like that. Here's basically how it works: Two quantum particles are entangled. Then they are separated from each other, one goes to point A the other to B. If you do a measurement on A and COMMUNICATE THE RESULT OF THAT MEASUREMENT to where B is. The other guy can do a special measurement on B based on what A's result was. Then the state of A becomes what the state of B was originally. The particles have not moved (the measurements have changed their states, though), but A's state has been "teleported" to B. It's all to do with the fact that the two particles were entangled in the first place.

But the very important point is that you *still have communicate the result of the first measurement*, which means you're limited to the speed of light.

There is still application for encryption since just knowing what the result of the measurement was is not enough without having the actual entangled particle B.

BUT THERE IS NO APPLICATION TO STAR TREK-LIKE TELEPORTATION OR FASTER THAN LIGHT-SPEED COMMUNICATION. And frankly I'm getting tired of seeing the same wrong information getting played in the media like this. And slashdot even, come on guys, you should know better by now. I'm new here, aren't I?

Yes, IAAQP.

Re:One step closer to an ansible, maybe.

[Hanzie]

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.

'tis uncertain...

[Namlak]

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.

Re:spooky?

[numbski]

How are they NOT related?

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. :D

Wow I'm sick. :P

Re:IndependEnt!

[dreamchaser]

You mean -1 Indepedantic, don't you?

Its all in the time travel...

[javabandit]

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.

Stephen Hawking says...

[purpleraison]

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..

Re:Dear Slashdot

[AMSRay]

That wouldn't do you much good if you were 89 miles away from where your penis went.

Re:Give me data, not matter

[ErikZ]

Instantaneous spam. All over the universe.

Re:Dear Slashdot

[stonedcat]

It sure would freak her the hell out though.

Nah, he's dead Jim!

[freaker_TuC]

mod up. by the way, is the cat dead or alive? He's dead Jim, but not as we know it!