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Instant Quantum Communication Is Near
fljmayer writes "In this experiment, researchers in Australia and Japan were able to transfer quantum information from one place to another without having to physically move it. It was destroyed in one place and instantly resurrected in another, 'alive' again and unchanged. This is a major advance, as previous teleportation experiments were either very slow or caused some information to be lost."
Sorry I'm posting from a quantum computer... And also not posting....
Neither Australia nor Japan is close to me, so unfortunately Instant Quantum Communication Is Not Near.
Better known as 318230.
Yes. Yes, of course there is. Unfortunately, there is no law of physics limiting the scope of journalistic hyperbole.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Not really.
Your post shows you have read neither the summary or the article.
And your cat is dead.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
No. This has been possible to do for millennia. We've finally got around to actually attempting it.
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Basically, the rate of correlation when measuring entangled things is a function of the orientations of the detectors. The only way to explain that is: 1> Assume that the universe is deterministic, so the entire future state of the system is known at the time of the event that creates the entanglement; 2> Assume that a change made to one member of an entangled pair have an instant effect across any distance on the other member of that pair.
Since entanglement and randomness are inextricably linked here, there's no way to use the effect to either foresee the future or communicate faster than light (and by extension, change the past). So you're right that there's no practical application for it.
It just raises some extremely thought-provoking questions about the nature of our reality.
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Physicists will say, how could the other electron possibly know this, instantly
Why would they assume that the electrons are separated? Because we perceive them that way?
Isn't it easier to assume that they're not separate entities and that we just don't know how the universe is put together than to assume that we understand the universe and there's a 'magical' force communicating across infinite distance?
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OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This article is awful. Terribly written, incoherent and obviously inaccurate.
This sounds like an extension of previous quantum state "teleportation" via entanglement. These are interesting phenomena, but cannot be used to transmit information faster than the speed of light.
It's not really quite clear what the breakthrough is here. But I'm fairly certain it doesn't involve a group velocity (i.e. information transmission) greater than c.
This is the kind of comment that gets you slapped with a trout.
It's not really quite clear what the breakthrough is here. But I'm fairly certain it doesn't involve a group velocity (i.e. information transmission) greater than c.
You're right, it isn't. This article makes me sick. If people take shit like this seriously they can't be blamed for not being able to differentiate real science from quantum woo.
It's better to just ignore than try to correct it.
Teleportation is a real phenomenon, albeit a bit old. This is not their breakthrough. The breakthrough is doing it with a cat state (the name is a reference to Schrödinger's cat; this kind of state was inspired in it). These states are usually very fragile, and strongly entangled, hence the interest.
Also other breakthrough is doing it with the measurement of the number of photons and position. This is a promising technique, that I am personally working with at the moment to test Bell inequalities, because of its high resistance to noise. But I don't think it is very exciting to the general public...
entropy happens
Isn't it easier to assume that they're not separate entities and that we just don't know how the universe is put together [...]
Sure, you can do that. But if you stop there, you'll know nothing; so we have to go on and keep trying to understand.
[...] than to assume that we understand the universe and there's a 'magical' force communicating across infinite distance?
The thing is, that's not what physicists are saying -- that's just a bastardized explanation used when you can't make someone take a few classes that require quite a bit of math to understand[1]. In fact, most physicists, if pressed, will admit no one knows what is really going on. For example, there's a famous quote by Richard Feynman: "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics".
What physicists do know is a theory that allows us to very successfully predict the outcome of many experiments and understand many phenomena better than any classical (completely understood) theory; and certainly better than if we just give up and assume that "we just don't know how the universe is put together", as you suggest. The amazing thing is that this theory can explain every phenomena we have ever seen (except gravity) and predict the outcome of any experiment we can perform.
The problem is, this theory (quantum mechanics) just doesn't make clear what's really going on. There are many tentative interpretations that are consistent with the theory and the experimental results, each of them having at least one very strange feature (instant collapse of the wavefunction -- which I guess would be the "magical force" you mentioned --, or parallel universes, etc.) that fails to convince most people, including physicists.
Most (all?) physicists working with quantum physics know this very well. But since "what's really going on" is not very important to do research, they don't think about it that much. What they really want is to predict more stuff and come up with new ways to use the strange behavior we see for our advantage.
[1] By the way: there's an excellent very basic course on YouTube about quantum entanglement: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A27CEA1B8B27EB67. It only requires high-school algebra (including complex numbers, I don't know it everyone takes that in high school), and patience to follow it through. I guarantee you that you'll end up having a good idea of how this quantum stuff works (at a very basic level) without any mention of magical forces communicating across infinite distances.