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Quantum Dots Might Be Key For Teleportation
prostoalex writes "Researchers from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have created a model teleportation system using quantum dots. PhysOrg reports that 'tiny clusters of atoms known as quantum dots may be excellent media for quantum teleportation, a physics phenomenon in which information — in the form of a quantum state, a very specific mathematical signature of an atom — can be transmitted almost instantaneously to a distant location without having to physically travel through space.'"
BullSHIT!
Cool, but all this quantum shit makes no sense to me.
Quantum computing... quantum encryption... quantum dots...
I've really tried to labor through the explainations but I guess I'm just not close enough to quantum physics and college math. I'm otherwise generally pretty good at understanding these technical explainations, but quantum just sounds like another buzz word, and one that goes over my head.
Please tell me I'm wrong. Tell me Quantum isn't another cyber, blog, or pod! I really want to be wrong because the implications of these advances sound pretty cool.
Measured in nuclear reactors, I mean.
"Teleporting one quantum dot will take 5 nuclear reactors", and such.
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Drat. iPhone is obsolete and it doesn't even go on sale until Friday. This whole quantum dot thing will make 3G networks obsolete before AT&T even gets it rolled out here in the U.S. I want my "iPhone Quantum". : )
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Biggest Hurdle so far is figuring out how to stop the quantum pac-man who keeps eating them.
Quantum entanglement is a great way to get information from one location to another at faster than the speed of light but offers no way to transmit matter. Theoretically the precesses here allow for technology like the ansible from Card's Ender's Game series but won't be transmitting ensign Ricky to his death from aboard the starship enterprise. Now, if we were all information-based entities teleporting about using quantum entanglement would be highly feasible.
I was under the impression that quantum entanglement could not transmit information. If these researchers have actually managed superluminal commmunication, then... wow.
"Almost instantaneously" seems to be another way of saying "not instantaneously", which we could have guessed anyway. So why not say how fast it actually is?
Ok, I want to hear from a single guy in this forum/site, who can take this "teleportation might use quantum dots" information and make some use of it.
And I don't mean Star Trek or cell phone jokes. I don't mean jokes at all (which I suspect will constitute 99% of the posts over here).
This article in fact doesn't have anything to do with the audience here, except that it's about (drum rolls) magical teleportation. Which won't happen probably in the next 50-60 years, yet we get teleportation articles over here every few days as if on schedule.
There are so many things happening right now we COULD make use of to further our knowledge, which we possibly comprehend:
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The article is pretty light on information, but hte discussion has a pretty thorough description of why this can't (AFAIK) be used to send information, including a link to the wikipedia topic. Maybe they have a way round that, but you can't tell from the article.
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This reminds me of a question I never found the answer to: if you teleported yourself, would you die and a clone be made?
From the sounds of TFA, the new "you" would not actually be you at all, just a copy. It sounds like your conscious mind would be obliterated and a new one created, although the new one might not be aware of it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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I wonder how long until I am getting a bill from a 'Quantum Dot Provider' that pipes these things in over a special line in my house to fill my computer, which keeps emtpying out because of decoherence... "Honey, do you have that spare packet of Quantum Dots for the computer? I think I put mine through the wash..."
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
While the article may not be information rich, the interest of this is rather significant. Communication between two points simultaniously no matter how far apart they be, would greatly increase information reliability of probes we send into space, as well as in the far far future allow us to have probes send us information from the edges of Black Hole event horizons. It is nice to see forward thinkers, but I wish they would have provided us with slightly more information.
But how much will transportation affect the economy? So many jobs hinge on transporting people and goods. As well as those that service the cars, trucks, trains and planes. That many people out of work would definitely have a major impact.
Let us take 9 "quantum pairs" (honestly, I don't know the exact terminology of them). You have 9 of them on Earth (A) and 9 of them elsewhere (B). They are ordered from 0 to 8. Assuming that you can determine when the quantum waveform collapses into spin up or spin down, you start the communication when A0 is caused to collapse. Instantly B0 becomes up or down. That's the start of the communication. If after 1 ms, B1 is found to have collapsed into an up or down, that counts as a 0. If after 2ms, B1 is found to have collapsed into a up or down, that counts as a 1. You would be able to generate a byte of data this way.
So start-2-1-2-1-1-1-2-1, would be 10100010.
The point is that it doesn't matter whatever B0 to B8 end up as. Just when they end up as an up or a down.
Are you going to be able to determine whether the waveform has collapsed without collapsing it yourself.
Of course, I didn't sleep last night. My guess is that if you are in a position to determine whether or not the waveform has collapsed, you will collapse it yourself. Maybe there's an indirect method.
As far as matter transportation, I wouldn't rule it out as impossible. I certainly wouldn't say it's inevitable. When quantum communication is studied in greater depth, some inconsistencies may be uncovered which could lead to a "greater truth".
IANAP(hysicist), but it is my lamens understanding that the No Communication Theorem is such that the act of observation lies in direct contradiction with the potential for communication.
If you have a set of atoms on earth, and an equivalent set of atoms on say Mars (light minutes away), synced with teleportation - any message sent from earth would be received on Mars faster than the speed of light, but when observed the message would inherently be garbled to the point where it could not be understood due to the fact that the observation of said atoms would disturb their state.
Somebody please correct me if I have misinterpreted.
This is certainly a great feat - displaying the capabilities of teleportation, but it is not the only mountain to climb. I do not read that they have resolved the issue of observational mish-mashing, but one could deduct that they did at least to a degree in order to prove that the teleportation happened - although they probably used a known quantum teleportation scheme which would involve additionally a classical information transportation method and thus limiting teleportation communication by the limits of that already existing information transportation methodology. (still pretty neat, but not necessarily groundbreaking as experimentation on this level has been happening since roughly 1998)
It's not that difficult to come up with a potential list of ways to resolve this problem, finding a solution that actually is provable certainly would be difficult. If in fact they have surmised a way to communicate via teleportation rather than just prove that teleportation is possible an entire world of possibilities just opened up that will take us centuries to truly realize.
Assuming that you can determine when the quantum waveform collapses
This is the faulty assumption.
Think of of entanglement this way. You have two roulette wheels and they are "entangled". What this means to the roulette wheels is that they are spinning and the marbles are bouncing along inside them synchronously(I know they'd be at right angles but being the same value works well for the visualization). So you split them up and one roulette wheel is in another galaxy and the other is here. Both are spinning and the marbles are still bouncing around in sync. If you stop one, the other keeps going. If you stop them at the same time the marbles will have the same value. But the problem is the one you assume away. You cannot tell that the other roulette wheel has stopped.
In QE, if you attempt to observe the entanglement, you make it collapse. You can't tell what the state of the particle is without destroying the entanglement.
IINAQP and I could be wrong. But this is my understanding and my cousin who is a Physicist tells me I have an accurate, if rudimentary, understanding of this particular phenomenon.
I wish you were right.
Quantum teleportation is nothing more than the equivalent of the MOV instruction on a quantum computer, with the oddity that this instruction actually does *move* the data, rather than copying it. As you can imagine, this is one of those basic instructions that you have to be able to implement properly in order to be able to have a quantum computer, which is why people are trying to get it right.
The reason it's called "teleportation" is just to emphasize that the data was once in one place and now is in another, in contrast to classical data which you can copy and so have in two places at once.
As for why you have to teleport the data, the answer is (very, very roughly) that if you were to copy the data then you would be overwriting a register somewhere, which destroys the data at that register; this is not allowed since you cannot destroy information in quantum mechanics. Put another way, you should always be able to construct any arbitrary past state of the universe given the present state; if you were allowed to overwrite a register with a new value, then you would lose the ability to figure out what value it had in the past, ergo copying is not allowed. (The more precise statement of this fact is the so-called "No-cloning Theorem".)
Snarkiness is inversely proportional to wisdom because it emphasizes feeling right rather than being right.
At least not until we figure out how to use quantum DASHES along with the quantum dots.
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I'm not sure this really even counts as news, what they are saying is that if they record the exact state of each atom in an object, they could reconstruct it on the other side using that data to put each atom back in the proper spot as last time. Sort of like IKEA products, here's the parts, here's some pictures showing you which 'state' each piece of wood is supposed to be in to connect to each other - do it yourself.
So how fast can it travel? As fast as you can transmit the states of each atom in the object. How much power will it consume? As much as it costs you to transmit that much data through that form of data transfer (fiberoptic, copper, morse code, tribal drum - pick your poison). Honestly, I dont think power is much a concern at all, its not that expensive to point a laser at mars and bust out some morse code style file transfer. It requires some stuff on the opposite end though, like the precise chemical composition of what you are wanting to transfer. If you wanted to transport a person to Mars though, just for the sake of example - you could send a corpse to mars, and then somehow sort out all the atoms into piles in the corpse, and then reassemble a living person from earth on the other end using the corpse atoms.
This is still quantum copying though, not quantum teleportation the way I see it. You arent causing the atoms to teleport, you are just saying you can rebuild large atomic structures (macro-nanotechnology? lol) if you are given a blueprint of how they existed in the first place.
I have also wondered whether detecting the timing of waveform collapse provides a loophole to the "No FTL communication" rule. Since quantum calculation relies on having an un-collapsed waveform, Bob could attempt a calculation, and if it fails then he knows that Alice alreadly collapsed his waveform. Ta-Daa! FTL communication. Interestingly, google gives zero hits for "detect waveform collapse", "detect quantum waveform collapse", "detect whether waveform collapsed" and a few other variants.
actually, teleportation is already possible.
can't find the link now, but some scientists made it possible, it was basically a method in wich a laser copied the original molecule and rebuilt it at the other end.
it was basically a copy that destroyed the original, and it was actually really slow (they calculated that it would have taken 13 years to teleport the equivalent of matter for a boy...)
reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation makes it clear that this isnt "teleportaion" as you would think about it. you can't use it for transportation or anything.
the way it basically works is that say 2 people have an entangled pair of qubits. then person A who wants to send some quantum state to person B measures his qubit which then collapses into some random state. person A, now knows the state of person B's qubit because they are entangled and sends some information to person B (classically, by, say, telephone or whatever) that tells person B what operation to perform on his qubit to turn it into the state that he wanted to send.
so the best this can be used for, as far as i can see, is transmitting a huge amount of information but only having to send very small amount through 'classical' channels.
Wouldn't that be useful for unlimited internet connection? like, EVERYWHERE and unlimited bandwidth?
Throw more dots, more dots, more dots ... Ok, stop dots.
Isn't that the "ice cream of the future" you see advertised all over the place? Just asking.
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It does not matter how fast the information is sent from the source to the destination (well, within reason, one could take the bus...). Quantum entaglement as a mechanism is pretty silly when standard electrons or photons in a transmission system such as a terabit tcp/ip network on copper or fiber or quality wireless, would do just fine. The fact is that extremely detailed data on the original configuration of the subject is required, regardless of the transmission mechanism.
The challenge is in determining the exact state, position and velocity (Damn Heisenberg...) of every particle that makes up a human being, in a minuscule time frame. I have long been proposing ultra high resolution spectroscopic magnetic resonance imaging (UHRS-MRI) for this, computer processor power is almost up to the task of doing it in the time frame required. Receiving equipment would be of a similar design but in an ultra precise cyclotron configuration (in fact the same equipment is required, it would be a transceiver with two modes) to assemble raw materials into the form specified by the received data. The challenge there is to get it to work at atmospheric pressure as reconstructing the subject in a vacuum is not desirable (unless microsecond time frames of reconstruction and repressurisiation could be managed).
Then the question is what to do with the original once the teleported copy is constructed? Big ethical questions are involved, this amounts to mechanical (not biological) cloning. Do we vaporise the original? Leave it intact? Tough question.
So long as the imaging system is capable of capturing the state of every subatomic particle of the subject then it will be reproduced intact, right down to the very thought process occurring at the time of teleportation / duplication.
Unfortunately I think Heisenberg has defined the limitations of physics that may make this impossible, the mechanism of information transfer is irrelevant, the challenge is in coming up with an imaging system that can surpass the uncertainty principle or at least get the error to within acceptable tolerances, which just might be possible.
Initial trials could be best achieved on a subject such as a house fly (;)), as the smaller the transceiver, the larger the magnetic field gradients (and thus resolution and scan rate) are possible. Research the technologies of MRI and Cyclotron Mass Spectrometry and you will see where I am going with this. Given enough money and time I believe I could do it.
Though MRI is limited to suitable nuclei, so more than one imaging modality would be required to scan the original, in order to copy the state of every particle including electrons, and non resonant nuclei, but I believe that UHRS-MRI would best form the skeleton of the data. Preferably the imaging modalities used would be non destructive (resulting in mechanical cloning as described above) however with sufficient confidence in reconstruction, destructive methods could be used, avoiding the ethical pitfalls of duplication.
I'm pretty sure I have thought this through more than the average scientist.
I for one welcome our teleporting Quantum Dots Overlords!
SeqBox
two thick and wet dots were enough for a man to teleport around (her) juicy universe... now u talking more than 2? plz tell me it's not going to be odd numbers too. yuck! wait...
They made a model teleportation system. Why do models get special treatment? I can undestand their being able to deduct makeup as a business expense, but why do they get a teleportation system first?
...teleportation will bring privacy concerns...
One of these days maybe I will learn to quit having a beverage available while reading /.
:-)
This is another of those times...cleaning up spewed coffee (black-no sugar) IS a little better than the beer in the keyboard and all over the monitor!
But at least I'm still chuckling as I cleanup!
Thanks for a good laugh to start the day with.
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Parent is redundant, the moderator probably just didn't get it. It's funny for the obscure Space Balls reference (except that correct the quote is actually "Why didn't [anyone] tell me my ass was so big!?".)
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Strange google advertising on the site: http://img338.imageshack.us/img338/5095/quantumdot slk3.jpg
You are making a great "step" to hide a flaw in your reasonement. The difference is that the body is not destroyed and rebuilt each instant. It only very small parts which die off and are replaced. But not identically else you would neither grow, nor would you forget, nor would your body differentiate during foetus growth. I repeat the MAIN mass of the body and brain is NOT replaced at each and very instant even if it is over time. This enorm step you take is assuming a Destruction of the whole body, then at a LATER time reconstruction would be identical to the small replacement which occurs constantly in the body. But it is not. It is NOT a philosophical question. At the moemtn you destroy the body for the teleportation, the life is OVER for this individual. Maybe an identical 1:1 individual is reconstructed with the same memory but it was not the original one. The perception for this individual would be final : death. Pretending otherwise introduce another entity which is the soul (or whetever you want to call the entity holding all info of the individual while his brain and body are non existent and destroyed), the only way to maintain that the individual survive the destruction to be reconstructed. But up to now there is no scientific proof of soul existing, and many evidence that the brain alone and its structure is responsible for our "self". Destroye the brain and everything is gone, even if you make a second one identical in any point. And if you really want to bring soul in the debate, then please feel free to bring evidence. But be warry that extraordinary claim, require extraordinary evidence.
even worst, if you can measure all atom, position, and quantum state and somehow reconstruct an individual at another place, then there is no obstacle to make multiple copy. If this is the case, then no one can pretend the original did not die and both copy are not the original.
Bottom line: if ever teleportation come to be in reality and is not science fiction, the only way to put me in a teleporter would be to shoot me dead and send my meat to the other side.
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So if communication via entangled quarks is impossible (ref: the forum comments in TFA), and seems to be impossible because passing information instantaneously (i.e., faster than the speed of light) is thwarted by the quantum states being "a jump ahead" of free will and conscious action, adjusting themselves to compensate for the actions of supposed free will -- does this mean that free will is an illusion?
That we are steered by the manipulations of quantum states, and have no real say in what we do?
Do we live in a Clockwork Reality, something akin to Stephen Wolfram's automaton theories of reality, where a set of rules generate the next state of Reality from the current state?
Easy suicide!
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Atoms are matter. Quantum entanglement does NOT transfer information across the universe. In reality there simply is no such thing as distance on the quantum level, therefore there is no such thing as space on the quantum level, therefore something can be in multiple places at a time on the quantum level. If atoms can be entangled and be in multiple places at a time, and matter is made up of atoms, then anything made up of atoms can be in multiple places at a time.
It's a scale and energy issue, not an issue with the physics itself. It's proven already that it can be done, as they've done experiments already that have proved that a material object can be in multiple places at once.
Teleportation is the wrong word, quantum non locality is the right word.If this can be scaled up, it will likely change physics as we know it because it breaks all the laws of physics, unless we view the laws of physivs from a completely different philosophical angle. Thus we have quantum philosophy.
So while information can be in multiple places at a time, in theory so can anything, including matter, we just don't have the equipment to entangle huge amounts of atoms.
In all likelyhood, the universe is non-local anywhere, which simply means everything comes from the same singularity on the quantum level and space, seperateness, and distance are all illusions of our mind. In reality everythings connected to a web or matrix, everything you do influences everything else because you are a part of the universe and thus a part of everything else.
The reason quantum entanglement works is because when things are small enough we can SEE everything is non local. This is also an issue of perception, and there are philosophical issues involving the role of the observer as well.
You are right in saying nothing can be moved through space time faster than light.
However, because space time does not actually exist, and because on the quantum level everything is one thing, there is no such thing as distance when things are small enough, and therefore everything is everywhere all at once, all at the time, with no seperate, no distance, and so concepts like measuring and calculating the time etc etc are all worthless.
Electrons move faster than matter because electrons aren't matter, they are actually particles which are also waves. In one form, it's everywhere all the time, in another form, it's in one place as a particle, and the fact that we observe it changes it because our brains and our observation itself depends on electrons and atoms.
So basically, on the quantum level everything is one thing, and on the larger sizes, everything is seperate. The seperate is the illusion that creates distance, but distance does not actually exist quantumly, and once we start encoding information into the quantum, distance will begin to cease to exist for us.
Think of the potential of an internet where all questions are answers as soon as you think of them. Information at the speed of thought. Everything on demand. That's what we are talking about here.
I tend to think that when something is too good to be true, it probably is. Quantum entanglement is most probably a result of an error in the physics model and likely doesn't exist in reality.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Teleportation is only limited by your imagination...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
"Are you only you because of that matter that makes you up?"
Is a sound only that sound because of the matter that makes it up?
Here's the referenced article, outside the PhysOrg tarpit. Abstract only without a paid subscription.
And it only transports matter!?
The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something; for the box might even be empty.
Quantum dots teleport you!
Oh wait, that's exactly the point.
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Don't bother beaming me up Scotty, there actually IS intelligent life out there!
As a part of the project in my junior year, I feel extremely elated to see it on the frontpage of slashdot.
We have 2 cases: a) the universe is deterministic, b) the universe is not deterministic (this one is favored by quantum mechanics).
In case a), the decisions you make are already predetermined by the paths of particles. No free will there, and an entity which knows the exact initial state of the universe can predict its outcome.
In case b), the world is truly random, it can not be predicted. Therefore, any decision you make, is the outcome of random processes. No free will there, as well: the universe drives your decision making process, albeit in a random way.
"Randon information" is not information. Randomness is better thought of as "anti-information". Information is present only as a deviation from perfect randomness.
No we aren't talking about information traveling faster than the speed of light. We don't exist in that way.
The physics term is "on-shell" (and i's antonym is "off-shell"). The idea is that quantum mechanically, there can be a lot more going on than in classical systems. A common example of this is vibration modes of a photon. Classically, they can only vibrate transverse to the direction of propagation (as I understand it, this can be thought of as due to the photon travelling at the speed of light). However, in QM systems, one finds that between classical observations of the system, one has to consider virtual photons that can vibrate in the two other possible modes (longitude and compression IIRC). Since we observe things classically, we don't see off-shell dynamics like virtual photons.
Figuring out how to get space-time coordinates from more basic principles is one of the great unsolved problems in modern physics. There has to be some structure present even on these scales that extends to the concepts like distance, time, and velocity that we are familiar with.
They get to use the teleportation system first, cause they wear the sexy outfits the Captain likes!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I would call my new world, the DOT MATRIX!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Believe it or not, the answer is in this movie:The Prestige (2006)
http://imdb.com/title/tt0482571/plotsummary
The movie ends up revolving around a trick is called "the moving man" where the magician disappears and reappears 100ft away in an instant. The trick uses a device created by Tesla. If I say more, I'll spoil the movie for you.
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I think the really exciting part about all this teleportation speculation is that as Human Beings move ever closer to creating a matter teleportation device, we become closer to discovering the answers to questions such as "What makes me me?" and "Do I have a soul?".
These are questions that philosophers have been asking for thousands of years, and yet empirical science has failed to come up with any satisfactory answers. Will we ever make a functional teleporter? Who knows, and who cares? I'm sure that we'll learn a lot about ourselves and the universe we live in trying.
p.s. Apparently KFC's got Soul.
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I was under the impression that that the universal "now" is an obsolete concept.
Someone finally managed to post an article about quantum entanglement information transfer without cramming crap about matter transporters into it. They should get a reward. Of course that didn't keep people from making it their point of discussion. But then this is Slashdot, not PhysOrg.
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connect the fatom dots !!!