Posted on 06/16/2004 1:54:18 PM PDT by vannrox
TED: 2:55 pm EDT June 16, 2004
UPDATED: 3:03 pm EDT June 16, 2004
In a step toward making ultra-powerful computers, scientists have transferred physical characteristics between atoms by using a phenomenon so bizarre that even Albert Einstein called it spooky.
Such "quantum teleportation" of characteristics had been demonstrated before between beams of light.
The work with atoms is "a landmark advance," H.J. Kimble of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., and S.J. van Enk of Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., declare in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
Two teams of scientists report similar results in that issue. One group was led by David J. Wineland of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., and the other by Rainer Blatt of the University of Innsbruck in Austria.
Teleportation between atoms could someday lie at the heart of powerful quantum computers, which are probably at least a decade away from development, Wineland said. Although his work moved information about atomic characteristics only a tiny fraction of an inch, that's in the ballpark for what would be needed inside a computer, he said.
His work involved transmitting characteristics between pairs of beryllium atoms, while the Austrian work used pairs of calcium atoms. Each atom's "quantum state," a complex combination of traits, was transmitted to its counterpart.
Key to the process was a phenomenon called entanglement, which Einstein derided as "spooky action at a distance" before experiments showed it was real.
Basically, researchers can use lab techniques to create a weird relationship between pairs of tiny particles. After that, the fate of one particle instantly affects the other; if one particle is made to take on a certain set of properties, the other immediately takes on identical or opposite properties, no matter how far away it is and without any apparent physical connection to the first particle.
I'm not sure about causality, but it would seem to have ramifications for simultaneity, which since Einstein has been thought to be meaningful only within a particular frame of reference. Referring to simultaneous events across interstellar distances is supposed to be meaningless.
I don't understand the details, but that's what the theory is supposed to imply. Not sure where quantum entanglement fits in.
It doesn't, at least not in the sense that most people think of it.
Assuming a 150 lb person, you would yield ~1636.36 megatons. You'd get a pretty big hole and maybe clean off a couple of hundred miles in radius, but the rest of the earth would be just fine...
Of course, if ask me, just .36 MT would be too much if were anywhere, but say, Fallujah or something.
Of course, lab techniques and weird relationships, why didn't I think of that!
Sounds very scientific.
I thought Willy Wonka invented this already.
WONKAVISION
But the folks that would gravitate toward a thread like this would have gotten the references.
When Lex Luthor aimed a Duplicator Ray at Superman, without his knowledge, the result was Bizarro. An imperfect double of Superman with Super powers, but opposite from the Man of Steel. For instance, Green Kryptonite will kill Superman and not harm Bizarro. But Blue Kryptonite will. Superman's Fortress is in the Artic, Bizarro's is on a square planet in the Desert.
Firesign Theater
Are you sure you don't mean Teleportation passes through new ground?
so John Kerry is going to pull an algore and claim he invented this thing....before he didn't invent it.
Two words. Penthouse Holodeck.
I thought they'd said that Heisenburg made accurate data transmission via entanglement impossible. Has something changed in the theory?
Thats what I get for responding to another thread first....oh well. You snooze, you lose.
It's been awhile, i used to know most of them by heart.
yeah Jason Alexander would be great.
Forever is a long, long time. Who knows what the next breakthrough might be?
Flying cars OTOH...
This is something I've been interested in for a number of years. The "Entanglement" is somewhat explained in the partial post below. I copied from "American Physics news, still dont know how to post links properly, but copy and paste should work.
http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/1997/split/pnu350-1.htm
Story #1), December 10, 1997 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein
QUANTUM TELEPORTATION has been experimentally demonstrated by physicists at the University of Innsbruck (Anton Zeilinger, 011-43-676-305-8608, anton.zeilinger@ uibk.ac.at; Dik Bouwmeester, Dik.Bouwmeester@uibk.ac.at). First proposed in 1993 by Charles Bennett of IBM (914-945-3118) and his colleagues, quantum teleportation allows physicists to take a photon (or any other quantum-scale particle, such as an atom), and transfer its properties (such as its polarization) to another photon--even if the two photons are on opposite sides of the galaxy. Note that this scheme transports the particle's properties to the remote location and not the particle itself.
And as with Star Trek's Captain Kirk, whose body is destroyed at the teleporter and reconstructed at his destination, the state of the original photon must be destroyed to create an exact reconstruction at the other end. In the Innsbruck experiment, the researchers create a pair of photons A and B that are quantum mechanically "entangled": the polarization of each photon is in a fuzzy, undetermined state, yet the two photons have a precisely defined interrelationship. If one photon is later measured to have, say, a horizontal polarization, then the other photon must "collapse" into the complementary state of vertical polarization. In the experiment, one of the entangled photons A arrives at an optical device at the exact time as a "message" photon M whose polarization state is to be teleported. These two photons enter a device where they become indistinguishable, thus effacing our knowledge of M's polarization (the equivalent of destroying Kirk).What the researchers have verified is that by ensuring that M's polarization is complementary to A's, then B's polarization would now have to assume the same value as M's. In other words, although M and B have never been in contact, B has been imprinted with M's polarization value, across the whole galaxy, instantaneously. This does not mean that faster-than-light information transfer has occurred. The people at the sending station must still convey the fact that teleportation had been successful by making a phone call or using some other light-speed or sub-light-speed means of communication. While physicists don't foresee the possibility of teleporting large-scale objects like humans, this scheme will have uses in quantum computing and cryptography. (D. Bouwmeester et al., Nature, 11 Dec 1997; see also image at Physics News Graphics)
i still miss those guys... they have a website too with some new stuff on it.
Don't go out in that cellophane.
One would think so. That's the way it has been going in science, something new is observed and next thing you know there are papers and conferences and a new symbol appears in the equations. Quantum entanglement is sure interesting, but it is hard to work with and there aren't a lot of observations yet. It may turn out to be very valuable and make all kinds of sci-fi things possible.
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