Physicists Discover How To Teleport Energy

MikeChino writes "A physicist at Tohoku University in Japan has figured out how to teleport energy from one point in the universe to another. The technique is based upon prior research that shows it's possible to teleport information from one location to another, and involves making a measurement on each [of] an entangled pair of particles. The measurement on the first particle injects quantum energy into the system, and then by carefully choosing the measurement to do so on the second particle, it is possible to extract the original energy. Heady stuff, but essentially it means that you can inject energy at one point in the universe and extract it from somewhere else without changing the energy of the system as a whole."

Comments

Consistent Histories?

[slifox]

How would an experiment like this be interpreted using the consistent histories theory?

For a classic entanglement "teleportation" scenario where a measurement on one particle could cause information to be "teleported" to the state of the other particle, I think the consistent histories interpretation of quantum mechanics says that the second particle was always in the same state until it was measured, and that no information was exchanged.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consistent_histories

On another note, is there a way to test if this is correct?
Are there direct practical applications for this, if it is correct?

Re:Consistent Histories?

[PIBM]

Just wait until there is ..

no more powerline!

That would clean up a lot of space :)

Re:Consistent Histories?

[fusiongyro]

I am not the guy to answer this, but I'm going to take a stab at it.

The article says that the prior research worked by transmitting the information separately, at the speed of light. So the idea here is apparently that the energy itself can be transmitted instantly, but you can't actually transmit information this way. Just energy.

Still, that rocks pretty hard.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[tyrione]

Just wait until there is ..

no more powerline!

That would clean up a lot of space :)

Bury the power lines. Problem solved.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[CorporateSuit]

Exactly. In a few decades, instead of a power cable leading to your house, you could fit your house with a 30-ton, $7,000,000 quantum disentangler! I imagine it could also be used in place of a battery on your ipad! Never worry about low battery ever again!

Re:Consistent Histories?

[IICV]

I am not the guy to answer this, but I'm going to take a stab at it.

You've just described Slashdot in a nutshell.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[nine-times]

I don't understand what the hell is going on, but it seems to me that if you can send energy someplace faster than the speed of light, that could be used to transmit "information".

Assuming the energy increase is detectable and measurable, I could pre-arrange a system where a particular increase in energy constituted a discrete signal. All you need to do is to be able to detect the difference between "increase in energy" and "no increase in energy", and you basically have a bit. Find a way to have a lot of bits, and suddenly you can have conventional data transmission.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[BiggerIsBetter]

The article says that the prior research worked by transmitting the information separately, at the speed of light. So the idea here is apparently that the energy itself can be transmitted instantly, but you can't actually transmit information this way. Just energy.

I'm having trouble with the difference (energy level + time factor = digital information) and that's without getting into the idea that matter basically = energy + information, but I guess that it's the measurement that differentiates them. However, unless I'm horribly mistaken, and I probably am, you could have two sync'd clocks and make repeated measurements of the energy being teleported, and use that for instant information transfer.

There, I fixed those pesky space travel comms and control delays for you.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[geekoid]

Yes, it also looks like the amount of energy doesn't have to be the exact same.
So if different amounts of energy could be sent then they can be, interpreted as "ones" and "zeros"

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ladies and gentlemen, I hereby present you with the first ever time travelling message! Posted in 1993, it appeared on slashdot just now.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[WinterSolstice]

You think replacement batteries and chargers are expensive *now*

Re:Consistent Histories?

[mugurel]

you can't actually transmit information this way. Just energy.

You've just described Slashdot in a nutshell.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Normal Dan]

A lot of this has to do with what we call cause and effect and other terminology being used. Reading one side of the quantum pair 'causes' the other side to be of a certain outcome. It doesn't really mean anything spooky or mystical or faster than light is 'really' happening (for some values of reality).

Here's a different way to think about what's going on. Suppose you have some device that fires bowling balls in opposing directions, you're just not sure what direction they will go. So, on one side, you have something large that will be hit by the bowling ball... when this is hit you now know where the other ball will be, so now you know exactly where to set up an apparatus to catch the other bowling ball and convert its energy into something usable.

Remember, this is just an analogy to help you think of it in a different way. There's a lot more to what's going on than this.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[DeadDecoy]

But if you transmit energy this way, doesn't that imply that you have sent information? i.e. energy is being sent or received which might be encoded as a bit.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Grishnakh]

You can't do that for megavolt-level power lines. It's fine for residential areas though.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[paxcoder]

Had you explained why, you'd have a +1 moderation right now.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[MJMullinII]

The article says that the prior research worked by transmitting the information separately, at the speed of light. So the idea here is apparently that the energy itself can be transmitted instantly, but you can't actually transmit information this way. Just energy.

I'm having trouble with the difference (energy level + time factor = digital information) and that's without getting into the idea that matter basically = energy + information, but I guess that it's the measurement that differentiates them. However, unless I'm horribly mistaken, and I probably am, you could have two sync'd clocks and make repeated measurements of the energy being teleported, and use that for instant information transfer.

There, I fixed those pesky space travel comms and control delays for you.

That's almost infinitely valuable in itself. Imagine being able to instantaneously keep contact with spacecraft, regardless of how far they travel from earth. They're have been theoretical designs for over thirty years for Nuclear Powered unmanned missions to Alpha Centauri, Bearnard's Star (unsure about spelling there), and others. The main drag on spending the enormous amounts of money on such missions is that while everyone pretty much understands it will take a long time getting their (I seem to remember the project going to Bearnard's Star taking something like 40 or so years), but that the information gained from traveling to such places would take an equal time getting back.

I mean, we've done long-term space missions, even if "long-term" wasn't the original intention (I'm speaking of the Voyager Probes, etc.) So that's not completely foreign too us, but no one is going to put the effort into doing real science that far out without the instant gratification of collecting data all along the way.

Lets (for the moment) leave out the Star Trek, "transporting humans and people all around the galaxy", etc. I can see plenty of real world applications for this type of technology right now.

Imagine developing "androids" that, while human in appearance and capability, weren't artificially controlled...

By the way, I have NOT seen Avatar (and have no real interest in doing so) so if my following scenario is in any way close to what they were doing in that movie -- I'm basing this on the trailers I've scene -- please no smartass comments to that point, thank you

but were instead "inhabited" by real humans in shifts (normal, 8 hour work shifts, etc.) Imagine building spacecraft that were capable of traveling much faster than humans themselves were capable of surviving (in craft that while economical, weren't specifically built to be "human-rated") and that could be sent on long term missions through deep-space. RIGHT NOW we can build spacecraft that could leave our solar system and arrive at distant stars in our lifetime, the problem is that there is no way to keep people alive on those spacecraft (at least not in any way that doesn't lead to them being drooling idiots by the time they arrive -- no offense intended to any drooling idiots reading :)).

If you can maintain instantaneous communication with the craft regardless of how faraway it travels, you could keep a crew of "people-droids" permanently manned with people in simulators right here on Earth. As long as the ships power-supply holds out (something easily done with current technology), the droids can be continuously used to represent people doing science on the ship (not to mention repairing the ship when need-be, etc.) Basically I'm talking about being able to begin exploring the galaxy without needing fictional artificial intelligence or superhuman survival skills (which, considering how far away we still are from the world of Aurthur C. Clarke's "2001" & "2010", imagine how much farther we are from computers that have human-levels of adaptation and human-levels of endurance -- which make

Re:Consistent Histories?

[FrangoAssado]

So the idea here is apparently that the energy itself can be transmitted instantly, but you can't actually transmit information this way. Just energy.

No, energy can't be transmitted instantly. From the abstract:

Protocols of quantum energy teleportation (QET) (...) enable the transportation of energy from a subsystem of a many-body quantum system to a distant subsystem by local operations and classical communication through ground-state entanglement. We prove two energy-entanglement inequalities for a minimal QET model. [my emphasis]

So, you apparently still need the classical channel in order to know what measurement to perform in the receiving end, just like in good old quantum teleportation.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[mysidia]

Because you can't control the timing or amount of energy transferred precisely, or where exactly it gets transferred to?

Re:Consistent Histories?

[daeley]

Ladies and gentlemen, I hereby present you with the first ever time travelling message! Posted in 1993, it appeared on slashdot just now.

You must be old here.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Pharmboy]

Wouldn't it make it possible to send the craft without humans, because it can be controlled "in real time" here from earth, and perhaps by the time it gets there, we might be able to transport the humans to the ship? All we needed was a destination that we know we could safely send them. That and the technology to do such a thing.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[net28573]

This is possible but a less complicated method (assuming that the interval between each burst of energy is small) would be using a system like morse code or using the same protocol that fiberoptic cable receivers use to read light as data. Either that or create a new data transfer protocol entirely. I sincerely hope that its the latter because id appreciate something better than usb 2.0 (other than 3.0)

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Brian Gordon]

Actually, "spooky" isn't a bad way to to put it. Entanglement is spooky action over distance. Calling it nothing spooky/mystical is a stretch, and calling it not FTL is just wrong.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[shutdown -p now]

.You've just described Slashdot in a nutshell.

No, he described Wikipedia.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[HeronBlademaster]

So if I have the sending station at point A, and the receiving station at point B, and I want to transmit power, all I need to do is send point A's measurement to the people at point B so they know how to measure it to get the power out at their end. Is that right?

My question would be, is the energy required to do this more than what you'd lose just sending the power over the same distance using more traditional methods (e.g. power lines)? I'm assuming measuring, capturing, and converting the energy into some usable form at point B is a process which itself requires some energy...

Could this be used to transfer useful amounts of energy, to e.g. power a television's remote control without ever needing batteries?

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Brian Gordon]

Sorry to burst your bubble but you can't transmit information faster than light.

Period.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[jbuck]

As a matter o' fact, I can't right now think of ANY transmission of information that doesn't involve a transmission of energy. however small it might be.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[shutdown -p now]

I don't understand what the hell is going on, but it seems to me that if you can send energy someplace faster than the speed of light, that could be used to transmit "information".

In this case, you have to "measure" the particle in a particular way to retrieve the energy, and that way depends on what happened to the particle on the other side while the energy is being "pumped in" (so you cannot know in advance). So there needs to be an existing information channel to transmit the information on exact way of measurement that needs to be performed, which obeys the usual rules.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Anonymous Coward]

really he's describing humanity, we just didn't realize it until recently when the internet gave us empirical proof.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[johncadengo]

Can the energy being transmitted be manipulated in any way? For example, can we choose to send a lot of energy, or a little energy? If that's the case, couldn't we use different amounts of energy to represent different information? How is it that energy can be transmitted instantly, but information cannot?

Re:Consistent Histories?

[InfiniteLoopCounter]

So the idea here is apparently that the energy itself can be transmitted instantly, but you can't actually transmit information this way. Just energy.

No, energy can't be transmitted instantly... you apparently still need the classical channel in order to know what measurement to perform in the receiving end, just like in good old quantum teleportation.

Yes. However, that is for one measurement. To really know what speed you are limited to before you can get surplus energy out on one end (eaten on the other of course), you also need to know how many possibilities there are for measurement, and how much energy you would lose in measuring the "wrong" variable.

For instance, you could set up, say 100 such entanglements in parallel and then measure at random whether some spin is up or down at some time of some particle or whatever would be necessary at random. Chances maybe good that you get the extra energy out on, say 2 of these 10 measurements and end up coming out on top. If this were possible, you might be able to beat the classical channel speed limit all together (albeit with somewhat diminished output) over large distances.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[jnnnnn]

That sounds right to me.

The interpretation I like is that the superposition of states simply gets larger and encompasses the person doing the measuring. The person themselves is then in a superposition, each part believing a certain measurement was recorded.

This is just an interpretation (the "many worlds" theory) -- I don't think it can be tested any more than the fact "God"(s) exists can.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[radtea]

So the idea here is apparently that the energy itself can be transmitted instantly, but you can't actually transmit information this way. Just energy.

I'm pretty much pushing a rock up hill here, but some people enjoy pointless struggle.

Nothing is transmitted instantaneously. Not mass, not energy, not information. Nor, contrary to the article's false claims, has anyone ever teleported an electron, photon or atom, although people who don't understand quantum mechanics and physicists who would rather mislead the public to get positive mention in the press than do actual science will claim otherwise.

The only thing that gets "teleported" is the quantum state of an atom, electron or atom. As anyone who knows anything about quantum mechanics knows, the ontology of quantum states is a slippery beast, so talking about "teleporting" one as if it was ontologically identical to a brick or Captain Kirk is pretty questionable right off.

Teleporting a quantum state is completely different from teleporting a particle: if you could teleport a particle then the particle quantum numbers at the transmitter and receiver would change. In the case of quantum "teleportation" they do not. And the information is carried via entanglement using a perfectly ordinary beam of particles: if you were to stick your hand into the space through which information is being "teleported" the perfectly ordinary classical carrier particles would burn a hole through it.

In the case at hand, what is being discussed appears to be a fairly tame equivalent of quantum tunnelling, in which a spatially extended object like a string is excited into a higher energy state by an interaction at one end. There may be a small but finite chance that you can then de-excite the string from the other end pretty much instantaneously, because the excited state is a state of the whole spatially extended string, although the question of the speed at which that can occur is much debated.

Arguments over the "velocity" of the wavefunction under the barrier in quantum tunnelling have been going on since the early 1930's--there's a nice paper in Phys Rev from 1932 or thereabouts in which the authors did a pre-electronic-computer numerical solution to Schrodinger's equation to study the issue.

So to my mind, this is pretty ordinary, although a nice way of studying a much-debated and well-known curiosity of the quantum world, that has been marketed in a misleading and dishonest way to an ignorant press by the scientists in question, or which has been picked up the the ignorant press and distorted beyond all recognition despite the scientist's attempts at an honest and clear presentation.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[DigiShaman]

I think it has to do with maintaining the insulation of underground high volt lines. A single hairline crack could cause an arc-to-ground scenario.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Linuxmonger]

If the energy can be controlled, then there is information in it, seems to contradict the article I didn't read.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[clem]

Would have been more deliciously ironic if the message had been "First Post!"

Re:Consistent Histories?

[jovetoo]

No. It has to do with the impedance of the cables. Since there is a lot of empty space around the powerlines in the air, there is very little loss from the electromagnetic field that is generated around the conductors by the power flowing through it. If you bury the cables, there is a lot more electrically conductive material near the power lines creating more loss of power. In effect, the power cables would lose a lot of power heating the ground around it. At least, if I remember my classes correctly.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Nazlfrag]

If you could make it a binary choice, couldn't you just guess and still get 50% of the power transmitted?

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Tekfactory]

Electric Car? No charging stations.

If they can make it small enough, no more Cell Phone/Laptop batteries.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Thinboy00]

My question would be, is the energy required to do this more than what you'd lose just sending the power over the same distance using more traditional methods (e.g. power lines)?

Depending on the distance it may require vastly less infrastructure. (e.g. if in ~10n years we send a probe to $planet_or_moon and want to keep it powered without having to rely on dust storms to clean off its solar panels).

Re:Consistent Histories?

[eonlabs]

Unless you're able to transfer more energy in this fashion than it takes to measure the system, I neither see a useful purpose to this information, nor any uniquely distinguishing characteristic that would make your comment on consistent histories invalid. If the universe is actually allowing for the transmission of energy through an entanglement, I expect this will get rather entertaining.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Thinboy00]

So "teleport" is misleading since you cannot transmit power any faster than information, and that has to travel at the speed of light at most (as far as we know (this week anyway) anyway).

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Fallingcow]

Slashdot (sometimes abbreviated as /.) is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as, "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and evaluated current affairs news stories about a variety of science and technology related topics. Each story on the site has an Internet forum-style comments section attached. Slashdot was founded in 1997 as a blog, Chips & Dips, by Hope College computer science student Rob Malda, also known as "Commander Taco". The name "Slashdot" is described by Malda as "a sort of obnoxious parody of a URL", chosen to confuse those who tried to pronounce the URL of the site ("h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slashdot-dot-org").

Summaries of stories and links to news articles are submitted by Slashdot's own readers, and each story becomes the topic of a threaded discussion among the site's users. Discussion is moderated by a user-based moderation system in which randomly selected moderators assign points of either -1 or +1 to each comment, based on whether the comment is perceived as either normal, offtopic, insightful, redundant, interesting, or troll (among others). The site's comment and moderation system is administered by its own content management system, Slash, which is available under the GNU General Public License.

Slashdot's traffic is estimated at approximately 5.5 million users per month, and the site has won over twenty awards, including People's Voice Awards in 2000 for Best Community Site and Best News Site. Occasionally, a story will link to a server causing a large surge of traffic, which can overwhelm some smaller or independent sites. This phenomenon is known as the "Slashdot effect".

Wikipedia's just described Slashdot in a nutshell.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Artifakt]

I think there will be demand for as many as six of them, worldwide.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to burst your bubble but you can't transmit information faster than light.

Period.

Unless the theory of relativity turns out to be incomplete as a model of the universe. But that's almost certainly impossible as all our previous theories have proved to be perfect in every respect and this one is sure to too.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[JDeane]

Probably this.

http://tdworld.com/projects_in_progress/business_in_tech/superconducting_cable/

Re:Consistent Histories?

[eggled]

Almost -- has to do with safely dissipating the electric field. In buried transmission cables, losses are minimal (they are coaxial, so there's very little radiation of any kind), but they use an engineered layer of semiconductor between the conductor & the neutral sheath to create an E-field gradient. On a very high voltage line (say, 169kV & higher) this semicon becomes impractically thick (not to mention extremely susceptible to failure). When you can achieve the same thing with 20 ft of air, which is almost free (you have to buy land), and maintenance costs drop significantly (for not having to dig), it just makes sense to do overhead lines.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[PaladinAlpha]

Oooh, good one...

Re:Consistent Histories?

[chhamilton]

I've been curious regarding this... assuming we could pluck them out in the same order from each 'vat', is there any way to generate two giant vats of stored entangled photons? One stays on the earth, the other travels with the ship. Photons are measured according to some kind of predetermined low-bandwidth schedule, which allows sending of little messages. These little messages could then trigger large high-bandwidth messages. The photons have thus been entangled as long as the ship has been traveling, but the message is still 'instantaneous' as far as the earth and the ship are concerned. Is bending the rules of faster-than-light information travel like this possible?

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Failed Physicist]

Sorry to burst your bubble but you can't transmit information faster than light.

Period*.

*: As long as current observations that the universe is causal are not falsified.

Fixed that for you.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a book for people with your attitude.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible

Re:Consistent Histories?

[poopdeville]

I don't understand what the hell is going on, but it seems to me that if you can send energy someplace faster than the speed of light, that could be used to transmit "information".

You're right. Energy and information are the same thing, looked at from different perspectives.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Hurricane78]

Yet another one, who forgets, that when your “just” prepare a certain amount of particles (by measurement) upfront, you still get “instantaneous” communication/transmission while using them up.

Imagine a rover on mars, with pre-entangled and pre-measured partices onboard.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[lgw]

Keep pushing - that was very clearly stated.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[clambake]

In this case, you have to "measure" the particle in a particular way to retrieve the energy, and that way depends on what happened to the particle on the other side while the energy is being "pumped in" (so you cannot know in advance).

So you take a trillions and trillions and trillions of particles, and start measuring them randomly at once... Eventually you get lucky, and one of them gives you a return on energy. Poof, instant information transfer, but without having the data that you "needed" to do it. No waiting in line!

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Hurricane78]

No. Wikipedia would be “Admin: I have the power, I define reality!”

Re:Consistent Histories?

[tibman]

But that would be a teleport.. two devices right.. one transmits info to the other describing how to receive the energy.. the 2nd unit receives energy transmitted from the 1st unit. It doesn't have to be FTL to teleport.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[shutdown -p now]

They didn't claim FTL transmission anywhere. It's still "teleport" in a sense that you don't have any wires, beams etc over which to transmit energy. The information channel still has to exist, but the requirements to it are much lighter.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[shutdown -p now]

No. Wikipedia would be “Admin: I have the power, I define reality!”

That is Conservapedia.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[MaskedSlacker]

Consistent histories is wrong. See also the Bell Inequality.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[SpelledBackwards]

You'd better have a good way of proving it, because my working hypothesis is that the server was just very slow.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[allisterabbey]

Sounds like a future cornerstone of green energy practices. Wind and solar farms could be placed anywhere (the middle of the Pacific, for example) and the energy they produce could be teleported wherever it was needed – and with 100% efficiency! Sounds like science fiction, and it probably is, but this would truly revolutionize human civilization as we know it. http://ezinearticles.com/?Super-White-Teeth-Review&id=3100384

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Fnord666]

And the amateur radio people will still complain about interference.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you could send any message that was on the schedule. If you wanted to improvise, you'd have to contact the other ship and tell them what pairs you were going to measure next, in what order. Having decided what the message is you need to transmit "instantaneously" and communicated what that message is going to be to the other ship, you can now do the tricky part of sending it via quantum entanglement.
  Or you could just skip the quantum entanglement, and replace it with reading tea-leaves or some other mumbo-jumbo that can't transmit any information. Seeing as how you're just pretending to "send" messages instantaneously anyway. :)

  It's frustrating, pop-sci articles *always* get this quantum entanglement thing wrong. Too many of those crazy Deepak Chopra books, perhaps. (I love how he wrote "Timeless Mind, Ageless Body" on how to stop aging by... wishful thinking,* apparently, and yet on all his later books he keeps looking older... and older... and older.. You'd think people would catch on.)

  * Excuse me, that's QUANTUM PHYSICS-informed wishful thinking!

Re:Consistent Histories?

[MJMullinII]

Sorry to burst your bubble but you can't transmit information faster than light.

Period.

But you assume the speed of light is constant throughout the multiverse. Using an unorthodox example (rather than what some have replied, which is basically "it's magic!"), what if these particular particle are connected through more than our universe.

Meaning what if they share existence in another (for lack of a better word) dimension. Basically in another dimension, the laws of physics could be anything and everything. Einstein could still be correct, in that the speed of light is not only a constant in our universe, but in all universes.

However, in another Universe the speed of light, while constant, might be completely different from the speed of light in our universe.

I guess I'm saying that the speed of light may be almost pointless as a speed limit if the speed of light differs between the different layers multiverse.

I'm sorry, I've tried to stay out of Rod Serling territory...

Basically, they could be communicating with each other through a different dimension, completely within the laws of physics (meaning merely at the speed of light), but at speeds which would be considered many times the speed of light in our dimension.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[skeffstone]

No the article still states that the receiver needs to know the "correct measurement" to be made, which means that Bob needs information from Alice on which measurement to make and that information has no choice but speed-of-light exchange. I just wonder if not the energy of the information exchange exceeds the energy exchange of the entangled pair, even theoretically.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[geirnord]

I think the price will lower than 640k...

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Skal Tura]

You are thinking way too small scale.

Doing that for a friggin' TV remote won't be anyway cost-effective. The gear required for this is going to be expensive.

More like think about power satellites in the orbit ... Yes, huge solar panel satellites sending electricity back down to earth ....

Re:Consistent Histories?

[HeronBlademaster]

You're right. However, I picked tv remote because of its low power usage. Can this method be used to transfer enough power to use a remote control, regardless of cost? If not, then obviously, powering a satellite won't work either.

That was my question :)

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Lorens]

Ladies and gentlemen, I hereby present you with the first ever time travelling message! Posted in 1993, it appeared on slashdot just now.

You must be old here.

Yes, Anonymous Coward is one of our oldest and most prolific contributors.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[korpique]

> I'm pretty much pushing a rock up hill here, but some people enjoy pointless struggle.

I love pointless struggle! I could read it for hours.

Funny part is, all this fuzz about FTL goes on and on because people don't understand what time and distance are. Explain that, and the babbling stops.

Takers?
 

Re:Consistent Histories?

[CB-in-Tokyo]

What if you had a non compressible pole that was light years long. You push the pole at one end and it moves at the other. That is information passing at speeds faster than light..

Re:Consistent Histories?

[maxwell demon]

However, this was discussing an effect predicted with our existing theories. And within the theories used to predict the effect, FTL information transfer is not possible. Period.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[cybernanga]

Genuinely asking here, not trying to troll.

Let's say for example, you could build a very stiff, rigid bar that was 1.5 lightyears long, and mounted it between two fixed points. Now if you push one end of the bar, the other end of the bar will physically move at the same time.

Obviously this is impractical, but let's say for a moment that it was possible. Wouldn't this be a method to transmit information faster than light?

Re:Consistent Histories?

[maxwell demon]

On another note, is there a way to test if this is correct?

That one is easy: Yes, there is. Just perform the experiment they described.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[maxwell demon]

After the measurement (the "instant energy transfer"), the average energy at the receiving site will still be the same. So until you receive the information from the measurement, you don't know whether your local energy was increased (-> extract it) or decreased (-> don't try to extract it; you'll lose).

Re:Consistent Histories?

[wisebabo]

I know you're just kidding (and a lot of people appreciate your sense of humor with a +5 Funny) but really if you could quantum teleport energy it could have some really unbelievable applications.

Imagine a space probe drilling through the ice on Europa, even if the efficiency of teleporting energy was a tiny fraction of a percent, not having to transport a (nuclear) generator several billion miles *might* make it worth it.

If the efficiency was respectable, then it *might* make interstellar travel practical. A photon drive uses a lot of energy but no fuel. Put a satellite in orbit near the sun and teleport the energy to a spacecraft with a photon drive and you've got infinite acceleration.

Of course there are a lot of other factors that would have to be true before this would work out. Hence the *might*. Still, just dreaming.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Kagura]

A nutshell is the outer shell of a nut. Most nutshells are inedible and are removed before eating the nut meat inside. The expression "in a nutshell" (of a story, proof, etc.) means "in essence", metaphorically alluding to the fact that the essence of the nut, i.e., its edible part, is contained inside its shell.

You've just described in a nutshell on Slashdot.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[kamochan]

Imagine the sending and receiving end having a database of matrices describing all the various known combinations that can be transmitted, and a light-speed channel of delivering a key identifying the matrix in question...

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Devout_IPUite]

Until someone hits the line going into your house while they're digging, exploding your speakers and dishwasher. New problem made! :(

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Mindcontrolled]

The other end would not move at the same time. The force you enact on the first end has to "get" to the second end. This happens by molecular interactions in the material of the bar, which are (mostly) electromagnetic in nature. So, the force travels with the speed of light. By moving the first end, you basically create a compression wave that travels with roughly c through the bar. The second end moves 1.5 years later. Of course, the bar breaks first anyway...

Re:Consistent Histories?

[McGiraf]

err, no.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[McGiraf]

"Are the Wikipedia articles on this topic reliable?"

is the water in $FAR_AWAY_COUNTRY dry?

Re:Consistent Histories?

[cybernanga]

Thank you for the explanation.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Courageous]

By the way, I have NOT seen Avatar (and have no real interest in doing so) so if my following scenario is in any way close to what they were doing in that movie -- I'm basing this on the trailers I've scene -- please no smartass comments to that point, thank you

Dude. This site is "news for nerds," and you just got de-qual'ed.

Mod -Infinity, Not a Nerd, Banned from Slashdot

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Courageous]

This is going to be quite hard for you to accept: your claim is overly strong.

Science hasn't discovered what you claim ("that you can't transmit information faster than light"). Rather, doing so is inconsistent with current theory, and every bit of empirical observation we have to date. These positions are very different. One position is close-minded. The other is not.

C//

Re:Consistent Histories?

[benjamindees]

Measurement requires energy. You will not beat the odds and get a magical return from randomness.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Brian Gordon]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity

Re:Consistent Histories?

[rockytopchip]

Actually, it's a dielectric insulating material such as teflon, not a semiconductor. I've got a three phase 500 kV TVA overhead power transmission line that goes across my property, I would be very happy indeed if they could come up with a way to safely bury that thing. It's ugly, it restricts what I can do with my property, it makes hissing and buzzing noises, and it will charge up nearby materials that can zap you.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[guygo]

Coming Soon from O'Reilly publishing "/. in a Nutshell"

Re:Consistent Histories?

[gardyloo]

It is NOT happening FTL; the "instantaneous" features of evanescent waves are well known, and have been since George Green described them in the 1820's and 1830's. Neither information nor energy is getting anywhere faster than c.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Alef]

When you can achieve the same thing with 20 ft of air, which is almost free (you have to buy land), and maintenance costs drop significantly (for not having to dig), it just makes sense to do overhead lines.

The cost of repairing a power line drops, yes. However, because overhead line are much more susceptible to taking damage from bad weather and storms, the total maintenance cost isn't necessarily lower. Especially if you have to pay compensation to customers for extended power failures.

Where I live, power lines have been replaced by buried cables during recent years, to a degree where almost the entire power grid is now below ground, because they are more reliable and less expensive in the long run.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[fwr]

if you were to stick your hand into the space through which information is being "teleported" the perfectly ordinary classical carrier particles would burn a hole through it.

I'm going to have a bit of fun with this by taking what you wrote literally.

So basically, if we were to do a lot of these information transfers we would create something like a beam. Mount it on a sword and you have a vibro-sword. Or a "quantum scalpel!"

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Grishnakh]

Wikipedia claims only one operational circuit worldwide with voltage levels above 500kV

Huh? Most long-distance transmission lines are 765kV in the USA, and up to 2MV in other places like Russia.

I imagine the reasons you cited are the main ones why they're not buried. Ground movement would be a big problem for a transmission line that runs hundreds of miles; at some point, it's surely going to cross a fault line. Plus it's really expensive to bury a line for that distance, compared to just sticking up some giant towers.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[eggled]

The teflon covers the semiconductor - idea is that if the metal has an irregular surface (which it does), the semicon presents a regular surface to the conductor and insulator so there are no E-field 'hotspots' that can break down insulators very quickly.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[BitZtream]

So I can transmit energy or I can not transmit energy.

By turning the energy off and on, I could create a ... lets call it a Bit Stream ... which could be used to build larger blocks of data, lets call them bytes ... which could represent letters and other data ...

Seems to me that if you're transmitting energy and you can control the energy you can transmit information.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[jonaskoelker]

I have the power, I distort reality!

And that would be Steve Jobs :P

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Agripa]

The whole house becomes the receiver - you move into the garage!

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Hurricane78]

Nope. That’s Wikipedia too.
I myself already had many cases, in which I added information, plus references, and it was deleted because the old bull / top dog of that article did not like it. “Facts? Who cares about them, right?”
While blatant lies stay, strong like a nuclear bunker wall.

Every article that can not be changed without one admin looking over it, already has a control Nazi sitting there, deciding what fits his reality and what not.

That’s why Wikipedia is already dead to me. It’s closer to the Nazi regime than to free speech.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[CB-in-Tokyo]

Why not? The motion at the the far end occurs exactly at the same time as the motion at the near end. Combined with a key determining how far it moves have different meanings and you have meaningful information being transferred.

Care to elaborate?

Re:Consistent Histories?

[McGiraf]

err, no :P

It was explained in another post.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[bill_mcgonigle]

In this case, you have to "measure" the particle in a particular way to retrieve the energy, and that way depends on what happened to the particle on the other side while the energy is being "pumped in" (so you cannot know in advance).

This is the part of this that always confuses me - do you happen to know why regular (clock-based) particle manipulations on the 'sending' side wouldn't work? Perturbations of the pattern of measurements could be used for signaling (he says naively).

Re:Consistent Histories?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Meaning what if they share existence in another (for lack of a better word) dimension.

I don't even think we have proof that entangled particles are not really the same particle if looked at with the proper dimensionality. I'm reminded of the people in Flatland looking at the weird series of circles that appear and disappear.

Some might even conjecture that entangled particles are proof of a more correct topology that we're missing. There are at least some models that show our 4D existence as a projection from a different, base topology.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Daetrin]

Okay, i've read the article, and your explanation makes sense, but there's still something i'm missing.

If you can control the information when you pump the energy in, can't you tell the other people the information, and then stop transmitting the energy in order to send messages?

And if they can't control the information when they pump the energy in, couldn't they figure out statistically how often each set of information would be the answer? Then you could do the exact same thing, but with a lot more loss of energy.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[MJMullinII]

Meaning what if they share existence in another (for lack of a better word) dimension.

I don't even think we have proof that entangled particles are not really the same particle if looked at with the proper dimensionality. I'm reminded of the people in Flatland looking at the weird series of circles that appear and disappear.

Some might even conjecture that entangled particles are proof of a more correct topology that we're missing. There are at least some models that show our 4D existence as a projection from a different, base topology.

While it would certainly be nice to know how something works before we use it (;)), it really isn't even necessary to know exactly why the particles behave as they do, so long as it can be demonstrated to be a dependable, predictable occurrence.

You show me something that can be confined to only two specific states of being (one or off, clockwise or counterclockwise, etc.) and I can build you a binary based communication system, regardless of whether I actually know how your part works :).

Re:Consistent Histories?

[ShakaUVM]

>>In the case at hand, what is being discussed appears to be a fairly tame equivalent of quantum tunnelling, in which a spatially extended object like a string is excited into a higher energy state by an interaction at one end.

Except a string can't pass through a brick. But an electron can teleport through a "solid" barrier over very short distances. Its wavefunction can overlap a thin solid barrier, and when collapse occurs, it can appear on the other side of the barrier. This is why transistors work.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[ShakaUVM]

>>Sorry to burst your bubble but you can't transmit information faster than light.

But light can move faster than C. Light can also move backwards in time. You can also violate conservation of energy temporarily as long as you pay it back later. All of these effects only occur at quantum scales. If there was a way of getting them to happen at larger scales, perhaps by paying extra energy, then all sorts of interesting things would be possible without violating the laws of physics.

In particular, being able to send information via photons traveling at warp speed would have tremendous applicability, even here on earth. The time delay of light going around the world adds unavoidable lag to any worldwide FPS games.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[lennier]

As long as current observations that the universe is causal are not falsified.

Indeed. And if one looks at ESP research, such as precognitive dreams, remote viewing, autoganzfeld, or delayed-choice Zener cards, it appears that the universe is NOT causal in the ordinary sense of 'an effect always occurs before its cause'. Psi correlation seems to blithely ignore light cones and causality; remote viewers or card guessers can 'see' a future event with probability greater than chance just as easily as they can 'see' a past or present event.

Course you then have to figure out how to extract the signal from the noise since psi is a very noisy channel... but still. Unless one simply ignores 100+ years of psi research (and sadly many post-WW2 physicists do because they've just not been taught about this), there's some weird stuff going on in the foundations of physics which ought to inform our theories.

Does information in precognition 'travel' from the future to the past, or are two events merely correlated? Which way is the arrow of time flowing here? Is there in fact an arrow of time at all? Is the past (or part of it) caused by the future in the same way that the future is caused by the past? If so, are some events 'more causal' than others? Does time flow sideways, or is everything just 'fated to be'?

Boundary Institute have some interesting maths about this kind of correlation with their 'link physics' : http://boundary.org/bi/index.html

Re:Consistent Histories?

[lennier]

Er, I meant of course 'an effect occurs AFTER its cause'. Or I will have being meaning to have already meant that.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[lennier]

Time is what you measure with a watch, and distance what you measure with a ruler?

Re:Consistent Histories?

[weiserfireman]

Even better, the possibility exists now, because of this experiment, that the nuclear power plant to power your space ship, could remain on Earth, and we use this Quantum Energy transmission technology to transmit the power to the spaceship. Want to do some heave acceleration or deceleration, bring another power plant on line. Fusion power become feasible halfway through the mission? No problem, build the new plant, put it on line, and retire the nuclear plant.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Tubal-Cain]

Power = 1
No power = 0

What's so hard about that?

Re:Consistent Histories?

[Skal Tura]

i was thinking of transferring electricity from a satellite to earth ;)

Re:Consistent Histories?

[fusiongyro]

Thanks for the clarification. This stuff is so abstract, it seems like whenever someone tries to make it meaningful to the lay person they wind up utterly destroying the truth of what's going on.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[HTH NE1]

I think there will be demand for as many as six of them, worldwide.

Well, yeah. That gives an octahedral distribution network that can span the globe.

You can use it to teleport power from orbiting solar panels rather than deal with the hazards of high-powered microwave transmission to wildlife and aircraft.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[downix]

it would be funnier if his user ID was fewer numbers.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[hawkfish]

Or, maybe the "signal" is just the fact that the future may be constrained without being completely deterministic.

Re:Consistent Histories?

[cavemanf16]

I love this! The "science is god" crowd always loves to cry foul when anyone claims that there are fundamental absolutes about morality, existence, and rationality because, well, obviously we don't know everything. But when science fiction *possibilities* (not probabilities, but possibilities - and in this case, rather far-fetched ones) are taken to task, they want to cry foul again. So which is it, atheists/evolutionists/agnostics? Do we have ANY reasonable, rational basis to believe that information CAN be transmitted faster than light? (Cluetrain: The answer is NO!) Do we have any reasonable, rational basis to disprove God's existence either? (Cluetrain: no, you don't... perhaps you can't prove His existence, but you also can't disprove His existence, either, on purely material grounds.) BTW, The General Theory of Relativity *refined* Newton's theories; it didn't blow it away and make it null and void.

Communications perk?

[DJRumpy]

How long before something like this makes it's way into communications? Granted it's no 'beam me up Scotty', but it's getting pretty damn close, at least from an energy perspective. Is this instantaneous across a distance?

Re:Communications perk?

[txoof]

All we need now are some Heisenberg Compensators and we're half way to a teleporter.

Re:Communications perk?

[DJRumpy]

I've re-read this 3 times, and I'm still not sure. It seems the information can be passed instantaneously across a distance, but some other piece of this requires plain old speed of light. Is there an engineer in the house?

"The technique relies on the strange quantum phenomenon called entanglement, in which two particles share the same existence. This deep connection means that a measurement on one particle immediately influences the other, even though they are light-years apart. Bennett and company worked out how to exploit this to send information. (The influence between the particles may be immediate, but the process does not violate relativity because some informatiom has to be sent classically at the speed of light.) They called the technique teleportation. "

Re:Communications perk?

[dissy]

It seems the information can be passed instantaneously across a distance, but some other piece of this requires plain old speed of light. Is there an engineer in the house?

It seems what they are saying is not that the information can be teleported faster than light (even though in limited prearranged cases it can), but instead that the 'information' can be ignored as such, but its useful energy can be raised by lowering the useful energy at the other teleporter site by the same amount.

Think of each end of the teleporter as each end of a power extension cord.

I for one am OK with the fact, after plugging one end into the wall, that I have to and carry the other end at speeds much slower than that of light, to the device across the room I need power for :)

Assuming it actually works at all, it would still be useful.

Re:Communications perk?

[MillionthMonkey]

I'll believe it when they transport a red shirt into oblivion.

Re:Communications perk?

[geekoid]

I suspect that if you can transport mass and energy, you could manipulate the energy so your momentum is correct for where you are arriving at. In fact, if you did it right, you could create an energy generators.

Re:Communications perk?

[v1]

well if E still equals MC^2, if you can teleport energy, then you can teleport mass. And that causes all sorts of problems with issues such as angular momentum and conservation of energy, so I remain skeptical.

Generally speaking, the 'to every action there is an equal but opposite reaction" means that if you teleport something, something else of an opposite nature also was teleported the other way. So either they're wrong, or they've overlooked something important.

Re:Communications perk?

[Grishnakh]

I'm an engineer, and I can't help you too much. What you're looking for is a scientist, more specifically a physicist.

We engineers don't usually get too involved in stuff like this until there's practical applications for the scientific findings, and real pieces of equipment being designed to exploit them. When someone's figured out how to make teleportation machines or FTL communicators with this data, then you can call an engineer to tell you how it works.

Re:Communications perk?

[spire3661]

Its ironic that we use the term Heisenberg to denote uncertainty, considering how very right he was.

Re:Communications perk?

[earls]

The speed of light "hinders" you in two ways.

1. You need a "receiver" to teleport to. You have to get the receiver in place by classical means.

2. To stimulate the channel, you have to hit it with a laser beam which still has to travel through classical space between the beam emitter and the teleportation transmitter.

There will always be a non-zero "delay" in the creation-transmission-absorption of information between two points separated by the smallest value. Hence, no violation nor causality paradox. The process is just extremely efficient.

Re:Communications perk?

[Lally Singh]

It'd be nice to reduce the ping times between tokyo & dc.

Wow.

[tool462]

Best. Physics quote. Ever.

"He gives the example of a string of entangled ions oscillating back and forth in an electric field trap, a bit like Newton's balls."

Re:Wow.

[Some.Net(Guy)]

you beat me by 2 seconds.

Re:Wow.

[frosty_tsm]

Best. Physics quote. Ever.

"He gives the example of a string of entangled ions oscillating back and forth in an electric field trap, a bit like Newton's balls."

Which we know from his laws, will continue to swing until they encounter another object or friction.

Re:Wow.

[geekoid]

And at which point he will stiffen. Which brings us to the less known Newton's law:

"The angle of the dangle is proportional to the heat of the meat." - Newton

Re:Wow.

[socsoc]

The difference between 03:27PM and 03:25PM is 2 minutes, not seconds.

Re:Wow.

[neiras]

And at which point he will stiffen. Which brings us to the less known Newton's law:

"The angle of the dangle is proportional to the heat of the meat." - Newton

I'm pretty sure this law has applications in the field of quantum teledildonics.

Now to find a sucker^H^H^H^H^H^Hdonor^H^H^H^H^Hhorny single with a webcam to fund a 15-minute study of the implications.

Re:Wow.

[maxwell demon]

Historical correction: Newton lived and died a virgin. He was starring at apples not melons.

He was starring? In which movies?

BTW, living as a virgin is no contradiction to occasional stiffening. Being a virgin just means that the stiff thing never has entered a hole.
I doubt that we have a historical record about whether Newton ever experienced a stiffening ...

Re:Wow.

[frosty_tsm]

Historical correction: Newton lived and died a virgin. He was starring at apples not melons.

He was starring? In which movies?

BTW, living as a virgin is no contradiction to occasional stiffening. Being a virgin just means that the stiff thing never has entered a hole. I doubt that we have a historical record about whether Newton ever experienced a stiffening ...

Honestly, I doubt that any historical record would be complete enough to be able to label someone a virgin.

Wow....

[Cheerio Boy]

If you can inject enough energy into the process this could in theory be the replacement for batteries. This is provided you could make a giant transmitter that sends to the receiving devices. (Or possibly battery replacement modules?)

This is provided the technology isn't only "ten years away" or so. ;-)

Re:Wow....

[dissy]

If you can inject enough energy into the process this could in theory be the replacement for batteries. This is provided you could make a giant transmitter that sends to the receiving devices. (Or possibly battery replacement modules?)

To teleport energy between two points in space, I would imagine a little bit of hardware would be needed to accomplish this.
Instead of just 'device a' and 'device b' as our two devices that teleport energy, lets call them 'battery' device'\ which comes in a tiny pellet sized unit, that comes with adapters of the sizes of our current batteries, and the other one called the 'power brick with no wire' device that plugs in the wall.

It's a start!

Re:Wow....

[jfengel]

> This is provided the technology isn't only "ten years away" or so. ;-)

This is the kind of technology they call "40 years away". As in "Yeah, I suppose, maybe, but I'm not even sure it's theoretically possible."

(As opposed to "10 years", meaning "It's theoretically possible, but I have no idea how.")

Re:Wow....

[nodd]

Even if you could inject enough energy, you would need one transmitter for every battery in the world, since one particle can be only entangled to a single other particle.

Re:Wow....

[Geminii]

New studies show that an estimate of 'ten years away' could be made as early as next year!

Life Imitates Video Games

[TyIzaeL]

If I recall, in Mass Effect 2 they used entangled particles for instantaneous long-distance transmission across the galaxy!

Re:Life Imitates Video Games

[ArundelCastle]

If you recall? It came out last week. My copy arrived today.
Too bad the post office couldn't entangle it into my mailbox sooner.

Re:Life Imitates Video Games

[neokushan]

Yes, according to the lore they use entangled particles as a form of long range communication. EDI (Tricia Heifer of BSG fame) goes into some detail about how it works, which isn't that different from how the article here describes it.

Bioware deserve points for doing that kind of research into the game.

Re:Life Imitates Video Games

[geekoid]

Except it can't and that's not this. Other then that, you are spot on...this.

Re:Life Imitates Video Games

[Grishnakh]

EDI (Tricia Heifer of BSG fame) goes into some detail about how it works,

You may not like her like most other BSG fans, but that's no reason to call her a cow.

Re:Life Imitates Video Games

[neokushan]

I always get her name wrong, my bad entirely.

Should be Tricia Helfer.

Re:Life Imitates Video Games

[Tmack]

Yes, according to the lore they use entangled particles as a form of long range communication. EDI (Tricia Heifer of BSG fame) goes into some detail about how it works, which isn't that different from how the article here describes it.

Bioware deserve points for doing that kind of research into the game.

Its actually been around in Sci-Fi for quite some time. See Ansible, Orson Scott Card used it as the basis for Ender's Game and that whole series of books (though it got a bit extreme after the first one).

tm

Re:Life Imitates Video Games

[Grishnakh]

Actually, that was supposed to be funny... it's a pretty obvious and understandable misspelling, but quite funny.

Re:Life Imitates Video Games

[Carra]

I first met it in Cards books but the term was first used by the other great Sci-Fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin.

Re:Life Imitates Video Games

[neokushan]

Oh right, in that case feel free to mod me +1 whoosh!

Re:Life Imitates Video Games

[geekprime]

done,

Oh crap.

Re:Life Imitates Video Games

[ShakaUVM]

>>If I recall, in Mass Effect 2 they used entangled particles for instantaneous long-distance transmission across the galaxy!

Yeah, one of the things I love about the Mass Effect series is that they actually have a consistent physics that would actually work if their core premise (Element Zero / Eezo) actually existed. Essentially, if you run an electric current through the Eezo, it reduces the mass of objects in the area based on the electric current, and the mass. When you reduce mass to zero, then you get to move at light speed for free. If you reduce it below zero, the theory goes, you get FTL speed.

Positioning?

[Mikkeles]

Exactly how do I get the 'second' particle to where I want the information to be retrieved?

Re:Positioning?

[MJMullinII]

Exactly how do I get the 'second' particle to where I want the information to be retrieved?

I'm guessing that's the rub. You'd most probably need to get said second particle to wherever you were wanting to transmit too the old fashion way (meaning anything you can manage below the speed of light), so it's not as cool as "Warp Drive", though assuming you are able to constantly communicate with the ship (were assuming space for the purposes of my example), you at least could be kept abreast of the trip the entire way to said destination.

That's kinds how it works today when laying fiber optic cable. While you have to physically drag the cable to wherever your wanting a hookup, the cable is active the entire time of the trip. The ship or transport can talk back to home-base while laying the cable (and in fact, they do keep in constant contact so as to know immediately is the cable gets severed in some way -- you know, before they get a few hundred miles away from the break ;) )

Re:Positioning?

[youn]

positioning you ask? welll it depends... I'd first start with position to turn on the particle, get it in excited state... then move towards €missionary then work my way from here :)

I thought quantum entanglement didn't transport

[NotSoHeavyD3]

Information. Well I mean besides the states of the 2 entangled particles. (You look at one, it's state is set and therefore the entangled particle gets it state set.)

Re:I thought quantum entanglement didn't transport

[PotatoFiend]

Correct. David Deutsch proved that "spooky action at a distance" is information being transferred via classical channels after all. The same principle should apply to energy transfer.

Practical application?

[geekprime]

So we can put the solar panels in a "close" solar orbit (or even earth orbit) and entangle/detangle the power into our grid?

Will it FINALLY be power to cheap to meter?

Headline

[oldhack]

Man, I love the headline, whatever the details. Even better, the scientist(s) is Japanese!

Re:Headline

[geekoid]

Which means the technology will be used to give people faster access to tentacle porn.

Just a theoretical preprint, premature to plug it

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking as a Physicist, it seems the title should be " A physicist has posted a preprint in which he claims that "energy can be teleported"
(as opposed to beiing transmitted)." and someone has praised it in a blog post.

The astract says
"Protocols of quantum energy teleportation (QET), while retaining causality and local energy conservation, enable the transportation of energy from a subsystem of a many-body quantum system to a distant subsystem by local operations and classical communication through ground-state entanglement. We prove two energy-entanglement inequalities for a minimal QET model. These relations help us to gain a profound understanding of entanglement itself as a physical resource by relating entanglement to energy as an evident physical resource. "

note "classical communication" (i.e. a telephone call from one place to another) to tell the recipient what to do to extract the energy is needed.

Note that an arxiv post is an assertion by an author, prior to any refereeing. The are only minimal "fences" at arxiv.org to keep out the "Einstein was wrong, I am right" nuts.

Space based sular arrays to ground transfer

[ZP-Blight]

This tech, if ever made viable on a larger scale would be the perfect way to transfer solar energy to the ground, much more efficient than the currently proposed lasers.

Re:Space based sular arrays to ground transfer

[Grishnakh]

I thought the current proposal was to use microwaves.

Re:Space based sular arrays to ground transfer

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I checked (walked outside after dawn), solar energy transmitted itself to the ground just fine without our help.

Hmm

[dissy]

Wait a sec...

Isn't how things started in The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect got started off?

*fear*

Re:Hmm

[Velocir]

Fear? Why? You don't want to play games for the rest of your life?

Re:Hmm

[kvezach]

If everything is easy, what is worthwhile?

Re:Hmm

[Velocir]

The games weren't easy... From what I remember most of them involved torturous pseudodeath if you lost...

Re:Hmm

[kvezach]

The games weren't, but altering reality was. Everything is equally real... or equally fake.

Saudi Naughty

[Tablizer]

Does this mean we can finally get away from funding M.E. terrorists and get our energy directly from planet Zoofnin?
   

Re:Saudi Naughty

[roc97007]

Yes. Of course, we'll then have to contend with the Zoofnin terrorists.

Re:Saudi Naughty

[kehren77]

Or directly from Zoofnin's sun. More energy there than on their planet.

Actually this does beg the question of how long until we have a working ZPM.

Re:Saudi Naughty

[Tablizer]

Don't worry, James Cameron will warn us first.

Re:Saudi Naughty

[roc97007]

...in a way that's bright and colorful but long and boring.

video game imitates book

[city]

If I recall, in Hyperion, they used entangled particles for instantaneous long-distance transmission across the galaxy!

who's next?

Re:video game imitates book

[grayshirtninja]

Rocannon's World did it before Hyperion.

Re:video game imitates book

[biryokumaru]

If I recall, in Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon, they used entangled particles for instantaneous long-distance transmission across the galaxy!

Re:video game imitates book

[Artifakt]

Le Guin for the Win!

Re:Bingbing, holography!

[BiggerIsBetter]

If the two entangled particles only appear in our holographic 3D space to be diverging, while on the actual 2D horizon they are still coherent, any form of 'spooky action at a distance' makes perfect sense. If you inject energy into one of the particles, it makes sense that this should be transferable to the other.

That's cool if the holographic universe theory works, but my gut says it's the other way around, and that it's coherent in a 4D or higher space while only appearing separate in our 3D space.

Big deal..

[mozumder]

I can teleport energy through a "power cable".

Re:Interesting possibilities

[androst]

don't worry. I'm working on a device that would extract natural gas from your anus which in theory wouldn't harm parallel universes (or the peaceful creatures they harbor).

In all honesty...

[Facegarden]

All I can sat is: Jesus, what the fuck? This is insane. This can't possibly be even close to as real as I think it is. Does this mean that we could actually have space-based solar cells that are just *magically* linked to the ground?
This is blowing my fucking mind.
-Taylor

Re:In all honesty...

[spire3661]

Not trying to be down on you, but the word 'magically' is out of place in a discussion about the fundamentals of the cosmos. The reality of the universe is FAR more interesting then any 'magic'

Re:In all honesty...

[John Hasler]

> Does this mean that we could actually have space-based solar cells that are
> just *magically* linked to the ground?

No. It is an interesting result but it has no implications for practical energy transport at all. The word "teleportation" is used in its rather esoteric quantum-mechanical meaning which is quite different than the "commonplace" meaning of the word.

Re:In all honesty...

[Facegarden]

> Does this mean that we could actually have space-based solar cells that are
> just *magically* linked to the ground?

No. It is an interesting result but it has no implications for practical energy transport at all. The word "teleportation" is used in its rather esoteric quantum-mechanical meaning which is quite different than the "commonplace" meaning of the word.

Yeah... that's what i figured. I just needed someone to explain that to me before my head exploded. I really wish people wouldn't write sensation articles. Oh well.
-Taylor

Re:In all honesty...

[Artifakt]

You realize, you've just been chewed out for not distinguishing what a distinguished scientist (Arthur C Clarke) said can't be distinguished.

We've been over this

[Arancaytar]

It's Not That Kind Of Teleportation

And the first comment on TFA is, of course, someone saying how this can be used for FTL communication.

Easy enough

[Snaller]

I've been doing that for years. I shove a pizza in my mouth and it teleports to my ass!

travel to the stars just got easier

[chezifresh]

if this really works and can be very precise then you can teleport energy to a moving spacecraft making serious space travel a reality. no longer would you need to carry ANY fuel.

Powerlines?

[denzacar]

Energy teleportation could mean no more need for any kind of fuel.
Heck... even if the send/receive station is to huge to be portable it would still eliminate any other form of powerplant.

Just chuck some solar sails on huge platforms up into space and point them towards the sun.
For the extra credit, get them there by pumping energy collected on Earth into their receiving station and use ion engines to set them up at the most desired position.
Then, do what they do on Star Trek all the time - reverse the polarity.
Pump the energy they collect back to Earth using the very same station that got them there.

Re:Powerlines?

[Brian Gordon]

How would you get a supply of entangled particles up to orbital satellites?

Re:Powerlines?

[Anonymous Coward]

fedex

Re:Powerlines?

[AshtangiMan]

Get with the times man. It's all email now.

Re:Powerlines?

[denzacar]

From TFA:

The technique relies on the strange quantum phenomenon called entanglement, in which two particles share the same existence. This deep connection means that a measurement on one particle immediately influences the other, even though they are light-years apart.
.
.
Since quantum particles are indistinguishable but for the information they carry, there is no need to transmit them themselves. A much simpler idea is to send the information they contain instead and ensure that there is a ready supply of particles at the other end to take on their identity.

Re:Powerlines?

[maxwell demon]

This "instant influence" is dependent on your preferred interpretation. Indeed, there's simply no way you could detect whether a measurement has occurred on the sender side (that's called no-signalling and is one of the important no-go theorems in quantum mechanics). Only after you get the message about the measurement result at the sender's side, you know what to do to get your teleported state.

this is not physics, its biology

[circletimessquare]

its called peristalsis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peristalsis

aka, every time you swallow, you make a future fart

so what is this? interstellar peristalsis? gives new meaning to the term "worm hole"

Good news.

[Tibia1]

Although I've already read about this concept, I'm glad to see that there is progress being made. It's been said that we can make the most efficient computer in the universe by utilizing every process inside a black hole, and it's been theorized that we can send in quantum entangled atoms, and leave the other half out of the black hole to keep the result of the computation available. This means we can utilize the power a black hole can deliver without having to enter it at all. The atoms will keep the same spin as their entangled partners and therefore we can computations and energy back out.

Re:Interesting possibilities

[MJMullinII]

yup, but think bigger .. seems like it's only a step away from extracting energy directly from our sun, destroying random parallel universes in the process

Screw em'...what they ever do for us anyway!

Not faster than light, but still teleportation

[Pfhorrest]

People both here and on the linked blog article seem to be thinking that this "teleportation" talk is all about sending things from one place to another faster than light. That's not the big deal; it's already well-established that that cannot be done, at least not via quantum entanglement.

The breakthrough the article is talking about is moving energy from one place to another "instantly" by means of performing the right pair of measurements on both end; but the communication between ends about what measurements to make still happens at light speed or less.

For example, say I have a bunch of particles here on Earth and my colleagues on Mars have another bunch of particles entangled with mine. Mars is at the moment ten light-minutes away from each. On my end, I perform a measurement on (i.e. I interact with) my particles in a way which raises their energy from X joules to Y joules; I then send a radio transmission (with said transmission using less than Y-X joules) to my colleagues on Mars giving them instructions for what measurements to make on their end, i.e. I transmit information, in normal ways, at the speed of light or less.

Ten minutes later, my colleagues on Mars get my message, perform the measurement, and BAM, the energy of their particles jumps up to Y joules. The most efficient classical alternative for transmitting that (Y-X) joules of energy would be to beam a signal of said energy between the two points, but that requires a clear line of sight between them, or some set of relays capable of carrying that signal, each of which adds inefficiency to the transmission. An even less efficient, even more classical method would be to take whatever the energy is stored in here on Earth and physically move it to its destination, which is both much slower and much less energy-efficient.

With this method, my colleagues could be buried deep underground in a sealed lab with no way of getting anything in or out except for a limited range of radio signals carried by equipment incapable of carrying high-power signals... and still I can "beam" them arbitrary amounts of energy straight into their lab just beaming energy into some particles in my lab and then telling them over the radio what to do in their lab to receive it.

Re:Not faster than light, but still teleportation

[MMC Monster]

And what if nobody receives the call? Does the energy "disappear"? What if two people get the message? First one to reproduce the directions gets the energy? Who determines which is first? What if they are (as close as possible) simultaneous?

Re:Not faster than light, but still teleportation

[shoor]

If nobody received the call, the energy wouldn't disappear, but it might eventually get dissipated by some means. Two people might get the message, but only one would have the proper set of entangled particles. What I'm wondering though, is if the center of mass/energy would change. In a classical closed system, the center of mass is going to stay the same for the system as a whole because of conservation of momentum. If the universe as a whole is a closed system, could one teleport energy (or mass) and change the center of mass of the whole system? I realize there is already quantum fluctuation of energy so maybe that also could ultimately, in a random way, change the center of mass.

Re:Not faster than light, but still teleportation

[DigiShaman]

Not sure if it would work, but here's my thought. Feel free to shoot holes in it and explain why it would not work (or might work). I'll be intrigued either way...

Say I have two devices a few meters apart. Each devices transmits/receives measurements along with capturing energy in a usable form (electricity). I now turn them on and both are now transferring power. Now add into the mix that I modulate the electricity in such a way as to be encoded/decoded as a form of binary communication. Further more, real-time measurements can be transmitted/received along the binary data stream.

I now take one of the devices (still powered on and in "sync") and deliver it to my colleagues on Mars. Now we have instant FTL communication AND deliverable power to boot.

I can see a problem however. If one of the devices fails for even a moment, both devices would have to be brought back physically together to re-establish a paired connection. Could this work?

Re:Not faster than light, but still teleportation

[Tekfactory]

Hmmm,

Seems like you would want a surge protector (firewall) that would cutout and NOT measure the power difference if the measurement data they sent said someone sent you too much power and measuring it would fry the system.

I remember reading something about the first transatlantic cable being fried by someone on one end sending too much power.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable

Re:Not faster than light, but still teleportation

[sarkeizen]

I doubt it's actually saying what you claim... But it's interesting that you recognize that you still need a classical channel to do this transfer but don't seem to realize that the classical channel, by your assumptions requires line-of-sight anyway. So it's at least unclear that the transmission is either more efficient in either time or power transmitted.

Re:Not faster than light, but still teleportation

[Hurricane78]

You left out the detail, that one could still “pre-measure”/prepare a certain amount of entangled particles (with light-speed communication), and then later slowly use them up for “instantaneous“ communication.

Re:Not faster than light, but still teleportation

[Bryan Ischo]

Well I think the entire thing is bullshit but ... if you buy what this guy is saying then you could theoretically transfer huge amounts of energy with no losses except those experienced by the very small radio signal that encodes the information necessary to make the measurements. Assuming that you don't require "as much" radio signal as you do "transmitted energy", then this is a much more efficient way to transmit energy than if the entire process was done just by radio signals (or other non-spooky means).

Re:Not faster than light, but still teleportation

[Pfhorrest]

I am not a physicist so this is just my educated-layperson's take on it, but I believe what happens is the energy-states of both entangles particles "sync" at the moment of the (second) measurement. So we've got our two entangles particles; I put mine into a higher-energy state, consuming energy from some source on my end and storing it in the particle. Then when my colleagues perform the directed measurement on their end, they measure their particle in a high-energy state, tapping the energy from the particle in the process (as is always the case with quantum measurements), or in other words, collapsing it back into a low-energy state, with the energy going into the system of their measuring apparatus, and then perhaps on to elsewhere. At that moment, as they make their measurement, our two particles exactly mirror each other, so my particle ALSO collapses back into a low-energy state. (And also, if I'm not mistaken, breaking the entanglement; so, this can only be done once per entangled pair).

So I take energy from something in my lab and put it into a particle, then later (if my colleagues do as instructed) my particle just collapses into a lower-energy state without giving me any of that energy back, the energy apparently just disappearing. Meanwhile on the other end, my colleagues follow some instructions from me and suddenly find their particle exhibiting energy it got apparently from nowhere. The net effect, between the two ends of the entanglement, is that I pump energy into a particle on my end and it comes out of a particle on their end without ever traversing the distance in between (although some other energy, carrying the signal encoding my instructions, had to traverse that distance, but it could be much less energy than is transferred through the entanglement).

Re:Not faster than light, but still teleportation

[BiggerIsBetter]

For example, say I have a bunch of particles here on Earth and my colleagues on Mars have another bunch of particles entangled with mine. Mars is at the moment ten light-minutes away from each. On my end, I perform a measurement on (i.e. I interact with) my particles in a way which raises their energy from X joules to Y joules; I then send a radio transmission (with said transmission using less than Y-X joules) to my colleagues on Mars giving them instructions for what measurements to make on their end, i.e. I transmit information, in normal ways, at the speed of light or less.

Please excuse my stupidity, but why can you not agree in advance (eg, before lift-off of the Mars mission) which techniques/measurements to use for this, and negate the need for light-speed communication at all?

Re:Not faster than light, but still teleportation

[Pfhorrest]

The main hole in that idea is that, unless I am mistaken, the entanglement is broken at the time of the second measurement. So the entangled particles don't act like a wormhole that you can just pump energy (and information) through; it's a one-time thing, that allows you to send an arbitrary-sized chunk of information and energy from one place to another instantly by sending a fixed-size chunk of information and energy normally.

Re:Not faster than light, but still teleportation

[benjamindees]

and still I can "beam" them arbitrary amounts of energy

Not arbitrary amounts. Not more than the amount of entangled particles they have already been provided with. If you read the actual paper, which is entitled "Energy-Entanglement Relation for Quantum Energy Teleportation", it is clear that the amount of energy which can be "transmitted" is limited by the consumption of entanglement.

Re:Not faster than light, but still teleportation

[kvezach]

Please excuse my stupidity, but why can you not agree in advance (eg, before lift-off of the Mars mission) which techniques/measurements to use for this, and negate the need for light-speed communication at all?

Because adding energy to the particles alters their state randomly. You have to send the outcome of that random transformation to the other end before he can do anything. Consider it like a cryptosystem: upon adding energy, it's "encrypted" with a random key, and the key is given to you. The other end has one shot at putting in the right "key" (and the costs are so that he doesn't gain anything if he just guesses). You have to use ordinary, slower than light communications to get the right key over to whoever is at the other end.

Entanglement-based communications work the same way: after "decryption", the system scrambles itself, and there's no way to measure without decrypting (no-cloning theorem). Therefore, you have to send the "key" to the other end, classically or the message is lost.

Re:Not faster than light, but still teleportation

[Pfhorrest]

Perhaps "arbitrary" was the wrong choice of words... I meant only to say that the amount of energy that can be sent is not limited the the amount of energy sent via the transmission, i.e. you can send X-to-Y joules of energy using a less-than-X joules signal, even if Y is some finite amount.

Teleporting hydrogen bombs

[cvtan]

If people figure out how to teleport troops or nuclear weapons into my basement it will be VERY BAD! There have been a few sci-fi stories examining the impact of teleportation which I can't seem to remember. Perhaps some literate slashdot members will enlighten us? I would discuss this in greater detail, but there is a Homeland Security truck in front of my house and there is someone at the door...

Bowling balls?

[CFD339]

Please, someone come up with an automotive explanation, Quick!

Re:Bowling balls?

[Inda]

You have two cars, one towing the other. When the accelerator in the front car is depressed, the speedometer on the second car says 20mph.

Re:Bowling balls?

[benjamindees]

Is one of them a Prius?

Re:Bowling balls?

[CFD339]

Fantastic! You actually did create a car metaphore, and one that actually seems to make sense.

Bravo!

Stability of pairs and efficiency of transfer?

[hadesan]

What can untangle the pairs? How stable is the entanglement?

Also, how much energy does it take to do the correct measurement to receive the transmitted energy?

Depending on how much energy can be transferred in this method, would it be possible to mass a large amount of entangled pairs and send them into the Sun (or a solar array in space) that could then transmit that energy back to the other pair located somewhere on Earth?

Limitless energy with no loss to transmission... Sweet deal...

BTW, which do you think will come first? The civilian or military use (if the military isn't already using it in some fashion...)

Re:Just a theoretical preprint, premature to plug

[Roxton]

note "classical communication" (i.e. a telephone call from one place to another) to tell the recipient what to do to extract the energy is needed.

Sounds like another one of Maxwell's Demons. "If something were smart enough to assess the properties of a local particle..."

Re:Just a theoretical preprint, premature to plug

[ignavus]

So you can instantly teleport energy to Alpha Centauri, but it would take over 4 years for your phone call to reach them, telling them about it?

And add another 8 years if they say "WHAT? Can't hear you."

Re:Just a theoretical preprint, premature to plug

[HeronBlademaster]

note "classical communication" (i.e. a telephone call from one place to another) to tell the recipient what to do to extract the energy is needed.

Yeah, but that doesn't make it useless. For example, imagine your television came with an entangled remote control, and it communciates the necessary information "classically" with one of any available low-power wireless transmission methods. The remote can then use whatever power it needs through its "entanglement battery". There you go, a remote control that never needs new batteries.

I'm just extrapolating, assuming that you actually can "teleport" useful amounts of energy wirelessly through this process, so I have no idea whether it would actually work, but the need to communicate information through classical channels does not mean the whole concept is worthless.

Instatanious Digital Communication

[arthurpaliden]

Using time sequencing you can now transfer binary data. Energy at this time code (i) no energy at this time code (0).

So you can now have real time control of distant space craft and rovers.

the real trick

[hyperion2010]

Its easy, all you need is to already know what information it is going to send!

Those of you who are married surely have large amounts of data on this FTL communication device!

Re:the real trick

[Tekfactory]

Is there any reason they can't send 110 volts at a speed equal to 60 Hertz, and my machine check for 110 volts every appropriate interval?

IANAP so I'm sure there is a perfectly good explanation. If someone can send in layperson speak it I'd appreciate it.

The Genesis Machine!

[TrebleJunkie]

James P. Hogan wrote a sci-fi novel about this back in the 70's, I think. The Genesis Machine. The technology was weaponized fairly quickly -- why use a warhead to deliver phenomenal amounts of energy when you can just deliver the energy?

zero point?

[davek]

Editors, I love ya, but if anyone on earth really did discover "how to teleport" anything, I'm pretty sure I'd be seeing it scroll by on the CNN news ticker right now. It wouldn't be the first time /. has scooped the media complex, but so far its been 2 hours since the story was posted, and I don't see any breaking news on Channel 6. Seriously, enough with the sensationalist headlines. Call me when you have my flying car or jet pack ready.

Fusion

[Titan1080]

If this becomes practical, will we not even need to create fusion? Can't we just teleport energy from the sun?

Re:Fusion

[ls -la]

Can't we just teleport energy from the sun?

Not unless the sun is sending us entangled particles and measuring them just the right way at just the right time.

Boon for hard science fiction writers!

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine for a moment, that you build a dyson sphere around a small ( lets say, asteroid sized event horizon) black hole, which has a single aperature through which you can feed it. Near this aperature, is an energy collection system (lets be imaginative here, afterall-- this is a thought experiment.) which extracts the obscene energy released by the matter flow as it gets constricted from gravitational influences of the black hole, and begins to emit high intensity X-rays, gamma rays, black body radiation, and the like.

Since the black hole is naturally deleterious to any habitable/habitated area, simply because of the chaos its gravity well would cause, you need a way to transmit this obscene amount of energy to the population center, which could be several tens, or even hundreds of light years away.

If you use this energy entanglement transfer mechanism, you can transfer this absurd amount of energy to the population center at the speed of light, with a very tiny fraction of the losses incured by trying to beam it there, and without any of the line-of-sight issues.

EG, a single power plant on the planet's surface would have access to the full power of the black hole power plant. Moreover, the energy produced by the black hole plant, and transported to the planet in this way, could maintain the entanglement states at both ends.

Such a solution would safely provide nearly unlimited power to said hypothetical civilization, and do so for billions of years. (assuming that the power plants are maintained.)

Forget ZPMs-- You could drive planet building machinery with this approach.

Cryptography

[Post-O-Matron]

I wonder why nobody mentioned this, but wouldn't "teleportation"-based communication be impossible to eavesdrop on?

If that's the case, it would have applications even across distances where classical communication is still "instantaneous".

Bad news for cryptographers though...

Quantum tunneling called...

[Paul Fernhout]

They want their energy back. :-)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation

Could all mass and energy in the universe have come from random fluctuations nearby a big black hole? I don't understand why the generation of pairs of particles does not produce no net effect on the black hole (so, no evaporation) if matter and antimatter pairs created by vacuum fluctuation quantum events have one or the other fall into the black hole at the same rate? If there was a preference for antimatter from the created pair to go into black holes, that might explain the existence of the material universe. :-) And all the anti-matter to balance the matter created from the vacuum is safely tucked away inside one or more big black holes. (A tiny asymmetry of anti-matter being having a teeny bit more gravity than the same amount of matter might explain that, or if some type of anti-particle attracted anti-particles more than particles, that might also explain that.)

Think Bigger

[jovetoo]

How about a few thousand solar satellites in orbit around the sun, transmitting energy directly to power stations on earth where the energy gets redistributed?

How about no more batteries?

Driving cars that get their energy straight from the sun?

Cellphones that do not just get their energy through an entangled pair, but also their 'net connection?

Or why not just dump one of those entangled particles into the sun? Or, if we're feeling particularly paranoid, into a neighboring star?

There's an important subtlety here

[Interoperable]

From the abstract of the article:

Protocols of quantum energy teleportation (QET), while retaining causality and local energy conservation, enable the transportation of energy from a subsystem of a many-body quantum system to a distant subsystem by local operations and classical communication through ground-state entanglement.

There's an important line in there: while retaining [...] local energy conservation. What lies at the heart of the proposal is that the measurement devices add or remove energy from the system that they are measuring. The energy is in no way removed from one location and given to another, spatially distant, location. What happens, is that a measurement device at one location gains energy from the quantum system and, based on the outcome of that measurement, the measurement device at the second location can be configured to lose energy into the quantum system at that location.

The thing to take away is that no energy is lost or gained at either location. Instead, the measurement devices at each location gain or lose energy to compensate changes in the energy of the system. This proposal is in no way a method to teleport energy in the intuitive sense; the total energy of the quantum system and measurement device at each end is conserved. The notion that measuring a system changes the energy of the state is very fundamental in quantum mechanics and is well understood. Honestly, there's nothing particularly new about it and the paper doesn't appear to be written to be submitted to a major journal.

This reinforces my opinion that people need to stop submitting papers they find on arXiv, especially single-author papers.

Re:There's an important subtlety here

[benjamindees]

So an entangled system is like two ice cube trays, one on top of another, in a freezer. When you take them out, there is exactly enough energy to freeze half of the total ice cubes. You separate them, and half of the ice cubes in each tray are randomly frozen while the other half are thawed. The corresponding ice cubes in the other tray are oppositely thawed and frozen. But you don't know which is which without measuring and disturbing the system.

You then take each ice cube tray to opposite ends of the universe. When you measure one of the trays to find which ice cubes are frozen, you are adding heat (energy) to that ice cube tray. By learning which ice cubes are frozen in this tray, this tells you which ice cubes are unfrozen in the other tray. You can then transmit this information to the person with the other ice cube tray, who can carefully extract energy from only the thawed ice cubes in the tray.

You add energy at one place and extract it from another, but in reality the energy was already there and all you have transmitted is the knowledge of exactly how to make use of it.

Re:There's an important subtlety here

[samurphy21]

I think I'm even MORE confused after reading what you wrote.

Re:There's an important subtlety here

[lgw]

That's a wonderful explanation. You have summoned Maxwell's Demon, and bound him for a time. Do be sure you can dismiss him.

Re:There's an important subtlety here

[kamochan]

Basically, this method cannot be used to transfer power, just power state changes. Which would be useful for instant communication, except that you have to communicate the change via traditional channels first for it to be observed in the spooky device - because the receiver needs to know what to measure in order to receive it.

Basically, useless.

Playing with fire...

[mcrbids]

With this method, my colleagues could be buried deep underground in a sealed lab with no way of getting anything in or out except for a limited range of radio signals carried by equipment incapable of carrying high-power signals... and still I can "beam" them arbitrary amounts of energy straight into their lab just beaming energy into some particles in my lab and then telling them over the radio what to do in their lab to receive it.

OK, so let's say that you send them (via radio, or penguin-post, a flung shoebox, whatever) a series of expected time sequences that you will be transmitting data, minutes, hours, days, or weeks in advance. And then, at the expected times, you either send X joules of information, or not, indicating a binary state. (or perhaps you send anywhere from 1-10 joules of energy, indicating 10 possible information states)

In a way, you aren't sending any information faster than the speed of light, because the real information is being sent via penguin-post. But you could still instantly notify the other side that Obama won his 2nd election without having to wait for classical physics transmits that data, correct?

Re:Playing with fire...

[Pfhorrest]

I believe so, yes. You could think of it something like data compression with built-in encryption. We establish a link (entangle our pairs of particles), then on my end I arrange my particles to encode a message, then I send you (at light speed or less) instructions telling you what to do to sync your particles with mine (sort of like giving you the encryption key and compression codec), and then BAM you see the message, which could be much larger than the "key" instructions I sent.

But I am not a physicist, so physicists feel free to correct me.

(Incidentally, I wonder if this is related to the phenomena that have been covered here on /. before of signals propagating "fast than light" through some media, because the medium at the front edge of the signal can tell somehow what the rest of the signal is going to be just from the leading edge; another case of sending a big chunk of information "faster than light" via sending a smaller chunk of information at light speed).

Still Requires Classical Communication

[sanman2]

You can't "transmit" the energy unless you also use classical transmission methods to send over the information on how to extract the energy at the other end. So you're left with the same issues there are for quantum communication - whatever you send "instantly" is no good until you can send a classical signal to extract some value out of it on the other side. Well, if you're still having to send things the old fashioned way anyhow, then what advantage are you even gaining from using the quantum method at all?

Re:Still Requires Classical Communication

[denzacar]

Can you power your car from the radio reception your car radio picks up?

Instead of "classical communication" say "classical communication at the speed of light" - it becomes much clearer where the advantage is.
Also, while you may have various levels of efficiency of communication, efficiency of the energy transfer is 100% - as there is no energy loss in transfer.
It is the ultimate superconductor.

Re:Still Requires Classical Communication

[HTH NE1]

Can you power your car from the radio reception your car radio picks up?

Yes.

Well, realistically, there probably isn't enough signal power to drive the whole car, but there's certainly enough to power a radio in the car. But I'd imagine that the FCC would step in if you tried to power an entire car that way. The power you extract from the signal degrades radio reception for others, reducing the usable range of the signal. And since the effect is directional, your device can be located.

teleportation

[Hellswaters]

How long until I can say "beam me up Scotty?"

Violation of conservation of energy...

[rmdyer]

So the idea here is apparently that the energy itself can be transmitted instantly, but you can't actually transmit information this way. Just energy

... which would immediately violate the principle of the conservation of energy.

The problem here is that energy == matter (via e=mc^2) and the system of matter/energy together in space-time yields information. Beckenstein shows that the total information in a volume of space is described by the area of the volume which encloses it. See "Bekenstein Bound" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound/
    So in order for this new theory to work, the energy that is instantly transfered to another point in space-time must not be useful until we know what we can do with it through the classical channel. Otherwise you violate the conservation of energy.

Consider for example a mass at height in a gravitational field. To hold the mass stationary at height without any means of support other than using some of the mass itself for the creation of thrust, you would neccessarily run out of mass eventually (time). But if this theory were true, you'd have a loophole where you could take the energy expended for thrust and send it instantaneously back to the point in space above the mass where it could thusly be re-utilized. You would then have your first anti-gravity machine, which can't exist. A mass at height can be used to create energy in free-fall, and which is only equal to the potential difference in height. See http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/HBASE/gpot.html

Btw, this is why theoretical wormholes can only exist along gravitationally equal field vectors. If a wormhole were to connect two different locations in space that don't exist with the same gravitational potential, you could generate an almost infinite amount of energy. Consider two ends of a wormhole, one end at 1000 meters height above the earth, the other at the ground. Throw a very large mass in at the ground hole. The mass then appears at 1000 meters, and starts falling. You could then make energy from it indefinitely. (What's that video game? Portal?) I would assume, in such a scenario, that the two ends of the wormhole would neccessarily begin to edge closer and closer to each other until they "evaporate" from existance altogether. This might be similar to black hole evaporation.

My question is, what actually is the total amount of energy required to actually hold any object at height, indefinitely, in a gravitational field?

Re:Violation of conservation of energy...

[Anonymous Coward]

question is, what actually is the total amount of energy required to actually hold any object at height, indefinitely, in a gravitational field?

Technically speaking, no energy at all. Work = Force x Distance (as according to Newton), and Work = Energy (Work-Energy Theorem), therefore, if it's not moving along the vector of the applied force, no work, and hence no energy, is done. Once the object is moved to a point above ground in a gravitational field (which would require energy), all that you do by holding it up is preventing its potential energy from becoming kinetic. This is precisely why magnets can exist - they can produce a force, but you cannot extract energy from a force without motion, therefore magnets don't require or dole out energy (perpetual motion buffs, look here). If you're looking for a way to measure the incremental energy that would be produced as the object were to fall through the pair of wormholes you mention, it's simply mass * gravity * height (in this case, distance between wormholes). The real trick would be extracting energy from that system.

Re:Violation of conservation of energy...

[lgw]

But the Bekenstein Bound is still mostly conjectural (reasoning from Hawkings similar bound on black hole entropy), while having huge implications if true - the sort of claim deserving great skepticism. It's very cool if true, though - revolutionary in fact.

this is why theoretical wormholes can only exist along gravitationally equal field vectors

I think that's oversimplifying to the point of being false. A wormhole would create gravitationally equal field vectors. Your "upper" and "lower" wormholes would have the same gavitational potential, and nothing would fall between them - you will have "created sideways". Wormholes would really mess up practical physics, because they would create non-metric space (violate the traingle equality) - I don't think we have the math to do more than shrug at all this.

My question is, what actually is the total amount of energy required to actually hold any object at height, indefinitely, in a gravitational field?

Zero of course. There's no work required unless the object is moving.

Re:Violation of conservation of energy...

[lgw]

"... violate the triangle inequality", of course.

Re:Violation of conservation of energy...

[ShakaUVM]

>>My question is, what actually is the total amount of energy required to actually hold any object at height, indefinitely, in a gravitational field?

None. My monitor sitting on my desk is doing quite well without me having to constantly expend energy to lift it. And there you were saying anti-gravity machines were impossible!

If we could develop some sort of gravitational lensing, it should be possible to float an object indefinitely. I think.

Re:Violation of conservation of energy...

[lennier]

If you're looking for a way to measure the incremental energy that would be produced as the object were to fall through the pair of wormholes you mention, it's simply mass * gravity * height (in this case, distance between wormholes). The real trick would be extracting energy from that system.

You mean it requires something more complicated than chucking a rock into the lower wormhole, watching while it pops out of the top wormhole and goes zzzzzzwwwwwHHOOOOOM!!! and then grabbing it?

Re:Violation of conservation of energy...

[lennier]

My question is, what actually is the total amount of energy required to actually hold any object at height, indefinitely, in a gravitational field?

Zero of course. There's no work required unless the object is moving.

Then why does it cost fuel for a helicopter to hover?

Re:Violation of conservation of energy...

[lennier]

>>My question is, what actually is the total amount of energy required to actually hold any object at height, indefinitely, in a gravitational field?

None. My monitor sitting on my desk is doing quite well without me having to constantly expend energy to lift it. And there you were saying anti-gravity machines were impossible!

If we could develop some sort of gravitational lensing, it should be possible to float an object indefinitely. I think.

Are you sure it's zero energy cost? What about compressive strain on the structure of the material?

Your desk is constantly experiencing an acceleration of 9.87 m/s/s toward the ground. Yet it's not moving. So all those clever little inter-molecular bonds holding its stuff together must be constantly generating an equal and opposite upward force to counteract the force of gravity, mustn't they? Action and reaction and all that. They must just whip it out of their invisible pockets.

Oh sure you could say 'gravity isn't a force, it's spacetime curvature' but in the Newtonian limit that's saying nothing; the maths is the same. And outside Einstein's abandoned UFT, nobody's claiming that electrostatic bonds between atoms are also spatial curvature.

Seems like quite a lot of force is occuring to me. Just because we don't see anything moving at our scale doesn't mean stuff isn't happening.

Re:Violation of conservation of energy...

[ShakaUVM]

This is what I said: "My monitor sitting on my desk is doing quite well without me having to constantly expend energy to lift it."

This is what you said: "Seems like quite a lot of force is occuring to me."

These are two different statements. There is force pushing down on my desk, and force (in an equal amount) pushing back up, but no energy is being expended. My desk is a fully functioning anti-gravity device that consumes no energy to hold my monitor in its current position in the gravity well.

Re:Violation of conservation of energy...

[lgw]

A helicopter's blades are moving. My table does no work to hold up my monitor. Work (energy "consumed") is force times distance (extending that to everyday objects is a bit of a Physics 101 simplification, but it's usually true.)

Exxon

[mbstone]

So Exxon will be able to suck the gas back out of my tank?

I can see it now

[kimvette]

I can see it now:

AT&T and Apple partner to offer the first remotely-charged cellphone. AT&T has exclusive rights on the self-charging iPhone 6G S SC until 2022. Mandatory selection of "UNLIMITED CHARGING" is required with the two-year contract at time of purchase.

Six months later:

AT&T has been sending cancellation notices to iPhone 6G S SC users who are heavy power users. Heavy gamers have been a drain on the charging network, so when a user reaches 200W the user will receive a courtesy call the first time, and the second time the user exceeds 200W the user's account will be shut off. Subscribers are outraged, since they expected "UNLIMITED CHARGING" means what it says.

AT&T did not respond to our request for comment.

To Infinity and Beyond

[AmigaMMC]

And now we only have to figure out how to transform matter into energy and vice-versa in a non-destructive way and we can start building Galaxy Class starships.

e=mc^2

[Anonymous Coward]

they may have transmitted it as energy, but matter is just energy in standing waves. so we just need a (very) fancy wave generator, insane processing power, an ultra fast scanner at the sending end, and of course a disintegration beam to vaporize you once your copy is made; then it's star trek here we come.

Re:e=mc^2

[Pfhorrest]

Actually, the biggest problem with a Star Trek transporter is that it's impossible, per the Uncertainty Principle, to "scan" all the information in a physical system and encode it in another. You'd have to (somehow, probably equally impossibly) entangle the original particles in your body with particles on the receiving end and then do the magic quantum measurement to sync you with those particles. The plus side is, you wouldn't need the vaporizer; you just would suddenly be on the other side, and the matter which had been your body would no longer be in the form of your body. That's why they call it quantum "teleportation" instead of quantum "replication" or some such; nothing is copied, the particle at the receiving end literally becomes the particle that was at the transmitting end, and the latter ceases to be what it was.

Speaking of Consistent Histories...

[snooo53]

I used to think the effects of quantum mechanics were strange but not truly spooky, until I learned about the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser where essentially the "spooky action" happens backwards in time(!)

Re:Speaking of Consistent Histories...

[maxwell demon]

The important part is this:
In the delayed choice quantum eraser discussed here, the pattern reappears even if the which-path information is erased shortly after, in time, the signal photons hit the primary detector. However, the interference pattern can only be seen retroactively once the idler photons have already been detected and the experimenter has obtained information about them, with the interference pattern being seen when the experimenter looks at particular subsets of signal photons that were matched with idlers that went to particular detectors.

The total pattern of signal photons at the primary detector never shows interference, [...]

You see, the past is not changed. What changes is that after we get the which-way information, we can identify subsets which show the interference patterns. There are no signals magically disappearing or moving after the fact. Basically the detectors D3 and D4 also convey information, just a different information than detectors 1 and 2: D3 and D4 reveal the information to which of the two overlayed interference patters the particular hit belongs. If the photon hits D1 or D2, that information is missing (just as the which-way information is missing if the photon hits D3 or D4). It still holds that you can only get one of the two types of information (complementarity), however saying that the past is modified is IMHO as reasonable as saying I'm modifying the past when I destroy an one-time pad previously used to encrypt a message, because as soon as I destroy it, the encrypted message disappears.

Re:Speaking of Consistent Histories...

[maxwell demon]

Damn, I should have previewed a bit more thoroughly. The second sentence is of course wrong; it's of course not the subsets identified by the which-way information, but the subsets identified by the other two detectors (the ones which do not give which-way information) which show interference patterns. I also exchanged the meaning of "D1/D2" with "D3/D4": In the setup described by Wikipedia, D3/D4 are the which-way detectors, while D1/D2 are the which-pattern detectors.

Re:Speaking of Consistent Histories...

[snooo53]

Ah, but the whole point of the experiment is that there is magic (or something pretty amazing) happening here due to the longer idler path length! Take this same setup but reflect the idler photons out to Mars and back before it hits the Glen Thompson prism. So the signal photons hit the D0 detector (and form the hidden subset pattern) minutes before the entangled partners still on their way back from Mars even "know" what type of detector they're going to encounter.

We can't choose what path the idler photons take, but it's pretty darn amazing that the signal photons "know" before the idlers even get there what they will encounter!

Re:Speaking of Consistent Histories...

[maxwell demon]

Do they really know it? Who tells you that the two overlapping interference patterns are not there even when we measure the which-way information, just we cannot detect it because we don't know which of the hits belong to which of the overlapping interference patterns? Remember that the total pattern doesn't change; the only thing which changes is whether we are able to form two subsets which each show an interference pattern.

Say the idler photons are detected by the "interference detectors", but we don't read out that information. Then we will not be able to see the interference pattern either. Or even: Say I read the idler data out, you don't. Then I'll see an interference pattern, while you won't. So does the interference pattern actually exist in that case?

Doesn't that, by Einstein's formula, also mean...

[Hurricane78]

...that one can teleport matter?
(Perhaps “serialized” into energy first, and put back together later.)

Now all we need is a way to remote-materialize things without first having to fly a machine all the millions of light years to that other planet. :/

Re:Just a theoretical preprint, premature to plug

[khallow]

Wait, it's posted in the arXiv *and* there's a blog post? Slashdot threshold exceeded.

Very close together...

[yoshi_mon]

I've seen a lot of posts with very good math talking about how it's not realistic to move data or energy across a field. But I'd submit that whenever these study's come up they always move said data or energy along something outside the inside part of the nuclear field that someone is dealing with.

Quantum "Teleportation" isn't teleportation at all

[DigitalEntropy]

There is nothing transmitted between "entangled" particles, nor are any relevant bits of information passed between them in any method that comes close to the definition of "teleportation", or even "transportation". The quantum mechanics behind "entagled" particles should be described like this:

1.) You have 2 Rubick's Cubes.
2.) You "entagle" them by making the faces of each Cube exactly identical to the other.
3.) You separate them physically into different geological locations.
4.) You "measure" Cube A by turning one of its sides.
5.) You call a handler at Cube B using a "common channel" (phone).
6.) Cube B is "measured" by having its identical face turned exactly replicating Step 4, per the instructions received by step 5.
7.) Repeat steps 4 through 6 until your heart is content.
8.) Bring the Cubes together, and marvel that their faces are still identical to each other.

I think the principle problem with "quantum teleportation" is that any measurement on one Cube which is not duplicated exactly on the other, breaks the entanglement of the particles. They are only "entangled" in the sense that their states have been synchronized. There may be avenues of recovering the synchronization using permutations of "measurements", but then I haven't read much about what occurs during an error or fault in measurement, so this is all just my best guess.

Why This Won't Work

[pipingguy]

It would be great to be able to beam your molecules across space and then reassemble them. The only problem is that you have to trust your co-worker to operate the transporter. These are the same people who won't add paper to the photocopier or make a new pot of coffee after taking the last drop. I don't think they'll be double-checking the transporter coordinates. They'll be accidentally beaming people into walls, pets, and furniture. People will spend all their time apologizing for having inanimate objects protruding from parts of their bodies.

http://monster-island.org/tinashumor/humor/treklife.html

Read david Bohm

[0xC2]

David Bohm's theory of the implicate order is (for me) the most satisfying explanation of the apparent absurdity in quantum entanglement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicate_and_explicate_order_according_to_David_Bohm#Quantum_entanglement

http://www.david-bohm.net/

http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/science/prat-boh.htm

Practical applications? m=E/c^2

[lpq]

If you can teleport E, then given m=E/c^2, then you can teleport 'M'. It's a slow build up from 1 bit of 'E', to many bits of E, but the referred to article also mentions the ability to transfer small bits of matter in the not too distant future being a possibility -- from there, it's only a matter of scale and time (perhaps money and energy) before such technology could feasibly transport humans. Theoretically, that is...

But today's theory and sci-fi could easily be tomorrow's science fact.

Oh R'ly?

[MindPrison]

Sorry to burst your bubble but you can't transmit information faster than light.

Period.

How do you know that?
We only know the laws of physics, well - as little as we DO know about it.
Maybe there's something faster than light - that we don't know yet?

Re:Oh R'ly?

[BiggerIsBetter]

Maybe there's something faster than light - that we don't know yet?

Is time faster than light? Probably, yes.

This question might make more sense in a 5D universe.

Nope, not a practical way to transfer energy

[AniVisual]

From what I gather from the summary, you have to first measure the first particle, then measure the second in a way determined from the first particle. That means that firstly, you have to expend energy to separate the entangled particles, and secondly, you have to expend energy to transfer the information of the first measurement to the second measurement. So in effect, you have to expend a net of more energy through conventional means, i.e. the receiver has to expend more energy than it gains through the energy teleportation. That makes this technology for whatever possible future energy-reciever applications you've got there null'd.

Re:Nope, not a practical way to transfer energy

[Fantastic Lad]

Nope, not a practical way to transfer energy

Well, okay, but let's keep this in perspective. This is an incredible discovery about the nature of the universe, not a mundane piece of junk being proposed for sale at the local Walmart. If somebody can't find an application or a way to extrapolate further insights from this, then they're not trying.

-FL

mod parent up

[chichilalescu]

This would be the best use for such a technology. Now we just have to wait to see if it gets done...
Having large solar panels on a space station transmitting energy to the ground would be very clean and somehow reasonable (everybody should realise that most of the energy emitted by the sun is wasted outside the orbital plane).

Re:Interesting possibilities

[maxwell demon]

Wrong. You'll have to "recharge" it with new entangled particles, because the entanglement gets destroyed by teleportation.

Re:Quantum "Teleportation" isn't teleportation at

[Fantastic Lad]

1.) You have 2 Rubick's Cubes.
2.) You "entagle" them by making the faces of each Cube exactly identical to the other.
3.) You separate them physically into different geological locations.
4.) You "measure" Cube A by turning one of its sides.
5.) You call a handler at Cube B using a "common channel" (phone).
6.) Cube B is "measured" by having its identical face turned exactly replicating Step 4, per the instructions received by step 5.
7.) Repeat steps 4 through 6 until your heart is content.
8.) Bring the Cubes together, and marvel that their faces are still identical to each other.

Except that isn't how it works.

Here's a neat page which goes to some lengths to explain why people are excited and mystified by this particular feature of reality.

It is a high school science level presentation, but frankly, that's my level and with something as peculiar as Quantum Entanglement, it helps to go through the steps as a refresher. If you want to skip ahead, then the goods can be found on this page.

-FL

this is a mathematical breakthrough right ?

[notrandom]

is it just me or proof by experiments is hard to come by these days ?

So ... in the gas station of the future

[Joce640k]

I just fill up my tank with entangled particles and the gas company will disentangle them as I drive along? That's neat!

Looks like we have FTL communication now

[Eristone]

If this really works, then we can actually do FTL communication - vary the energy levels you are sending through and...

How about momentum?

[free0]

other commenters have already speculated on powering a spacecraft by such
teleportation of energy... how about going one further, could this leveraged
towards transmitting momentum?

instead of merely transmitting energy for the ship's propulsion to use, take a
derivitive of this as the propulsion itself... imagine using the earth, sun, or any
other sufficiently large mass with a convenient energy resource as the reaction
mass for a ship to remotely push against.

however, if the entanglement is destroyed upon extraction of energy, then the
spacecraft could still be required to carry a large supply of entangled particles...
perhaps using photons would mitigate the impact this requirement, subject to other
tradeoffs?

Yes, its all still slower than light, and requires a classical communication channel,
however, the efficient propulsion potentially achieved would still be revolutionary.

If, however, its true that this effect doesn't even so much as transfer energy as
sensationalised, then of course nevermind. Though i would point out the energy
appears to be described as conserved for the whole system, as opposed to the
each of the 2 remote subsystems some commenters seem to have taken it to mean.
IANAP, though, and my interpretation could just be naive wishful thinking; anyone
who knows better is encouraged to poke the appropriate holes through this notion.

Body transfer?

[Psaakyrn]

If talking about state changes only, this seems like a potential candidate for a scientific variant of the D&D clone spell..

http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Clone

and yet...

[DarthVain]

still no giant robots. For shame Japan, for shame.

Tesla

[Aizenmyou]

Didn't Nicola Tesla do something similar?