[fish hawk]

Jim Beam me up. I mean, Jim, beam me up.

[ILS21R]

It’s Wonkavision.

[Nachum]

The Fly?

[jwalsh07]

"An invisible umbilical cord emerges connecting these two electrons. And you can separate them by as much as a galaxy if you want. Then, if you vibrate one of them, somehow on the other end of the galaxy the other electron knows that its partner is being jiggled."

This has been tested?

[Deagle]

Wait a minute! Does that mean that the speed of light is not a constant? What other of our current theories will be trashed? Actually, probably most since so many are based upon theories and many can’t be proved...

[Candor7]

[RandallFlagg]

and some even think entanglement may explain things like telepathy.

Well, you start messing around with things using the word, "Entanglement," in 'em...

Next thing you know, the Combine show up.


Then, ya gotta call this guy:

[Psycho_Bunny]

"and some even think entanglement may explain things like telepathy"

Really? There might be a explanation for the everyday, common occurrence of telepathy?

My taxes helped write this nonsense?

[ScottinVA]

Great! Teleport 0bama to Kenya and repeat every time he shows back up here in the USA.

[Paratesties]

Can they teleport the commie bastage in the White House to Pluto?

[TigersEye]

The problem with such an act, Kaku says, is that "you have to be destroyed in order to have your body teleported to the other side of the room. So if you've been destroyed and teleported, then who is that person there? They have the same memory, the same jokes, the same everything, except the original was destroyed in the process of being teleported."

That is not as big of a problem as he makes it sound. Consider that every seven years every cell in our body has been replaced. Every moment things are changing in every cell in our bodies so we really aren't the same being we were ten minutes ago.

The question he's really getting at is "will the consciousness, ie mind, exist in the living being that is "transported" via quantum entanglement?"

He's wrong about it not being like the Star Trek teleporter too. It did disassemble the transported object and reassemble it. Not the same thing as this quantum entanglement idea but a teleported person was essentially destroyed in the process.

[GOPJ]

So they don’t actually teleport - they ‘create’ at the end of the vibrations’ cord?

[Mike Darancette]

"Quantum entanglement" may sound like an awful sci-fi romance flick, but it's actually a phenomenon that physicists say may someday lead to the ability to teleport an object all the way across the galaxy instantly.

Wouldn't that be time travel?

[Captain Beyond]

String Theory Physics ping

[Bratch]

[E8crossE8]

In the referenced article, the authorship of which was attributed to unnamed "NPR staff," there appears the following passage:

"...and some even think entanglement may explain things like telepathy."

A couple of posters have noticed this passage, and used it as the basis for a condemnation of the professional scientists working in this area, going so far as to imply that those scientists are "idiots."

I want to point out that this absurd passage in the article doesn't actually quote any trained, professional physicist who actually earns a living by working in the field of Quantum Information Science (nor does it quote any professional scientist of any kind for this passage). In fact, this passage doesn't quote anyone at all. There is probably a very good reason for that: I suspect that "NPR staff" made it up (because they believe it), and that "NPR staff" did not hear any working physicist utter this inane, meaningless comment. I have never in my entire career heard a single one of my fellow physicists ever make such a statement about "telepathy," whatever telepathy is, assuming it is even a real phenomenon, which I doubt. The topic of the article, quantum teleportation, is an actual physical phenomenon that has been independently reproduced in a number of physics laboratories around the world over the last few years, and has nothing whatsoever to do with so-called "psychic phenomena." This work is real physics, and has nothing whatsoever to do with "telepathy," for which there is currently no scientific evidence available.

(Incidentally, although this phenomenon, to which we have given the name "quantum teleportation," has indeed been demonstrated in a few laboratories (beginning with demonstrations at the University of Innsbruck and at Caltech in the late 1990s), one shouldn't fall into the trap of associating this with what appears on Star Trek. The experimental demonstrations that have been performed (for which, by the way, there is a mathematically rigorous, theoretical basis) have involved "teleporting" small numbers of elementary particles under carefully controlled conditions. We are a very long way away from doing anything remotely like what appears on Star Trek.)