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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.'"
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.
"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?
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)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
First of all, I don't want a matter transporter. People are going to insist on using it for an alternate form of transportation. That might seem a fantastic idea, but just wait until some underpaid asshole with a hangover uses the wrong coordinates and doesn't beam you into your office cubicle, but sticks you halfway into a concrete wall in the lobby of your office building.
Now, as for actual matter transportation -- and particularly people -- I've always wondered exactly how that would work. I am not one of those morons who believes that we have a soul or some particular part of our body or supposed spirit that makes us who we are. So - does that mean that simply taking my precise atomic makeup at point A and re-assimiliating it with different atoms over at point B will result in a real, actual me? Or would it be me without whatever makes me myself? I mean, soul and spirit bullshit aside, how could every neuron firing in my brain and every receptor and every blood vessel and capilary and memory stored away in my brain ever be re-produced somewhere else? Surely with so many trillions or quadrillions of atoms that make me up, there will always be some loss. So when you transport me from home to the office, I am a lossy me.
And then, of course, the more you transport, the more you become like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. Or, if you like another analogy, you go from being Alec Baldwin to Stephen Baldwin to Daniel Baldwin to a pool of primordial goo.
I've also always wondered what would keep someone from just creating many copies of themselves. A transporter would never truly transport you. It would simply map your makeup here and assemble the same thing somewhere else. But that isn't to say that you'd have to destroy the version at point A from which the map came.
So at best, we might some day have matter duplicators. There is no way we would ever have matter *transporters*. If you are going to assemble an orange a mile away, why bother with the energy to destroy a perfectly good orange here, that the duplicate came from? And when it comes to people... can you possibly imagine the indescribable agony you would experience every time you went through the process? They'd confirm that your duplicate was assembled and functional at your destination... and then destroy you at your point of origin. You would somehow be taken apart at the atomic level. Perhaps reduced to a very fine recycleable dust. It wouldn't be harmless and fun like in Star Trek. It would probably be like having a trillion surgical scalpels cutting into you while every inch of your body inside and out felt like it was burning and being shredded and ripped apart.
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".
I'm not so sure the teleportation theorem does say that. If it's possible to transfer quantum states without measurement, and all you need for teleportation is to transfer these states, then you don't need to make measurements (which is what the teleportation theorem describes). Quantum physics doesn't rule out teleporters. In fact, the cloning theorem suggests that if you do teleport a person, then they are teleported and not destroyed after duplication. That is, if you only transfer their state and don't make measurements in the process of teleportation.
Who ordered that?
I don't know that the Offtopic mod was all that fair on this post. Sure, it lacked a little detail, but what's with this "almost instantaneously" bullshit that keeps coming up every time we talk about teleportation?
Maybe it's plausible in a Star Trek universe, but in our universe, we appear to be constrained by the speed of light, even for transmitting information through entanglement. Sure, one might argue that speed of light is instantaneous, but we all know that this kind of language gets a bunch of readers' hopes up every time.
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?
"...but what's with this "almost instantaneously" bullshit that keeps coming up every time we talk about teleportation?"
I think the confusion perhaps relates to the difference between quantum tunneling (where "almost instantaneous" shows up) and any attempt to use quantum tunneling for the purposes of information transfer.
"The Berkeley group:
An experiment of theirs, where a single photon tunnelled through a barrier and its tunneling speed (not a signal speed!) was 1.7 times light speed, is described in
* Steinberg, A.M., Kwiat, P.G. & R.Y. Chiao 1993: "Measurement of the Single-Photon Tunneling Time" in Physical Review Letter 71, S. 708--711 "