Now listen here sonny...
...on this planet we obey the laws of physics!
A research group at Delft University of Technology has set the lesser-brained among the world's science writers in an absolute tizz by demonstrating what it describes as reliable quantum teleportation. Of course, mention quantum phenomena like entanglement (and therefore teleportation) and the only angle anyone can think of is …
We sure do and that would be the laws of physics as we know them today, tomorrow is a different story, I doubt very much Einstein is wrong, but that does not mean he had all the facts.
"A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Max Planck
Normally I'd just agree and move on, but I see a real opportunity here ...
If they would enclose the electrons in "... a rich, sweet pastry made of layers of filo pastry filled with chopped nuts and sweetened and held together with syrup or honey.", it would not feed the hungry but would be a quantum leap forward in snacks.
More details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baklava
Entanglement is tantamount to slavery, it should be abolished before the practice becomes accepted dogma.
What kind of facilities for the active electron have been provided for in these so call 'diamond' class prisons? Is there even enough room to spin more than an angstrom? Who is in charge of seeing that these prisoners of state are given their universal rights?
Is this teleportation per se ?
Being of the Star Trek generation, teleportation - to me - has always suggested 'disassembling' matter in one place and, after transporing it to another location by e.g. an energy beam, 'reassembling' it in it's proper form. This suggests some sort of 'freedom' in the location where the reassembling takes place, even if this requires two 'assembly-disassembly' units. One of the main problems doing this was postulated by a certain Mr. Heisenberg.
What this guys are doing may be teleportation in the literal sense, but it does have a drawback. Since the system relies on entangled pairs, you would first have to 'construct' an entangled pair, and then transport one to whatever location you wish to transport stuff to, whereupon you could proceed to 'teleport' to that location, and none other. Teleporting somewhere else would require you to either transport one 'unit' to a new location or construct another 'pair'. Since only the two entangled bits (I use the term loosely) can communicate with each other communication is very secure, however not very flexible.
I could see an application in instantaneous secure communications, but I don't think beaming an underwear change to the lads on moonbase Alpha is on the cards just yet.
Short answer - NO. It's just an entangled electron as you have said. Even if they do get to a stage where they can entangle matter (not just photons) and move one 'copy' to another place how the hell do you encode the entangled stuff at point A with the matter (an apple say) that you want to move to point B? Even if it worked then the entangled matter at point B would be an apple and so just a one way shot, really useful.
Even with entangled photons one of the pair has to be sent down a fibre optic cable so it's not teleportation either.
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quote: "I would assume this is the first step towards real teleportation. Teleportation of data happens almost instantaneously through measuring entangled particles."
It might help to think of it not as teleportation of data, but as "action at a distance"; as you measure (and thus set) the spin of one electron, the other immediately takes on the complementary spin. Nothing has teleported, all that happens is the probability function of the electron spin breaks down into a single value determined by the value measured at the other entagled electron.
These guys have apparently managed to get a qubit that has a deterministic, rather than random, sequence of values, and if that is actually the case then we could theoretically get "subspace" communications of a sort going between these discrete entangled qubits. It is not going to enable matter teleportation though, no matter how much I'd like that to be the case. :(
I would assume this is the first step towards real teleportation. Teleportation of data happens almost instantaneously through measuring entangled particles.
Totally wrong. First you "teleport" (the correct way is "move") quantum state which you don't know what it is. Nothing happens "instantaneously" (because in what frame?) And if you "measure" it, you do not even to get out if bed, you already lost.
The closest thing to "real teleportation" is putting the thing on a truck and driving it there. Ain't no way around that.
as you measure (and thus set) the spin of one electron, the other immediately takes on the complementary spin
In the same way as finding out that you have the queen of spades in your hand causes your opponent to have the queen of hearts?
No information was transmitted in the teleportation experiment. If it were, it would violate the space-time continuum and our universe would collapse into a deterministic quantum soup, or so.
You don't have to worry about competition to your Star Trek teleporter because the fastest quantum information transmission occurs with the speed of light and you therefore might just hurl the physical object with /almost/ c instead.
Interesting, how the scientific articles never claim information teleportation, but the press releases always throw it in for some good PR. Science versus media.
Quantum Computing researchers are the new Silicon Snake Oil salesmen.
Apply the weirdness of Quantum Mechanics with some suitable hand-waving in the expectation that some large company will come and deposit large sums of dosh in the hope of patenting a system that guarantees No More Secrets ®.
Oh, secure encryption may be part of why large sums of dosh are tossed towards it. Unlike the Higgs, this stuff may well have practical applications.
The real clincher is, however, that there's obviously something about the Universe we live in we still don't understand yet, and quantum entaglement is one of the ways to probe physically into parts of our reality we otherwise cannot touch.
It's one of the "Hey, that's odd..." things in real hardcore science, and that alone is worth tossing some $ into.
The big farce of 'quantum teleportation' is the system is closed; even if you're taken in by the 'quantum' explanation, the only information that's transferred is an unknown, until you measure it at one end, then the other. In other words, you can't input information at one end and have it emerge at the other. Teleporting unknown information has yet to find a practical use, other than generating misleading press scientific releases over and over and over again. But 'scientists find more reliable method for doing the same old sh*t you read about last month' doesn't make the press.
The non-quantum explanation of entanglement is exceptionally mundane. You tip one shoe out of a box into a black bag, but don't look which one, then send the box to Australia. Now you look at yours at the same time as your antipodean friend opens the box, and you miraculously and instantaneously find that he's got the left shoe and you've got the right one. Big whoop. Make a press release that you can teleport the handedness of shoes; the press will then report you can teleport whole shoes.
Your "shoe" example is a hidden variable theory. Unfortunately it's been proven that no local hidden variable theory can reproduce all the observed features of quantum mechanics. To make hidden variable theories work you need to accept either FTL communication between the particles or communication which travels back in time along the past light cone of the particle.
No, but it can reproduce all the ones this article is banging on about.
And until someone can either (a) find a use for the 'hidden variable' example or (b) find a way to influence the 'unknown' part of the quantum entanglement example, then there's no practical difference between the two.
quote: "No, but it can reproduce all the ones this article is banging on about."
I had a quick browse of the Arxiv paper, and they claim that the qubit state for their setup is deterministic. As in you aren't dealing with complementary random values of shoe, but complementary deterministic ones instead.
Then I saw loads of difficult looking maths and got scared off ^^;
"To make hidden variable theories work you need to accept either FTL communication between the particles or communication which travels back in time...".
Surely that's what you need to accept the notion of 'quantum teleportation'? To make that 'hidden variable' example work, all you need to accept is that shoes come in pairs!
I have no wish to die and then have a facsimile reassembled from transmitted data.
Assuming that
A) It's possible to "scan" someone entirely
B) Possible to store/transmit that amount of data
C) Possible to turn the Energy / Data back into original constituents.
This concept of "transportation" is nothing to do with Star Trek's concept, which may be inherently impossible. Which may have been "invented" due to lack of budget for Shuttle, or lazy scriptwriting. Just because something seems cool on TV doesn't mean it's ever possible. I'd sooner believe a "Star ship" is possible.
It's not clear how you actually use entanglement / Quantum Transportation to do any useful information transmission, in the "Ansible" sense.