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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."
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.
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.
Table-ized A.I.
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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I vote for beaming William Shatner into space now. Why wait for ashes?
Wouldn't he only be rolling in his grave if you try to observe him?
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
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.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Hah. I read that as "No red-shifted crewman were harmed" and thought "Well, they would be moving pretty fast..."
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.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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...
That wouldn't do you much good if you were 89 miles away from where your penis went.
It sure would freak her the hell out though.
You can't take the sky from me.
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.