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.
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.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but Heisenburg simply states that you can't know both the location and the velocity of a given subatomic particle at the same time--the more accurately you pin down one, the "fuzzier" the other gets. We can still accurately detect spin just fine, so how would this affect ansible communication?
I've also never been clear on how FTL communication wrecks havok with causality. After all, if you're observing a planet ten light years away and communicate with it instantaniously, it's not like your communiques arrive there ten years ago. It's the light waves from the planet that are ten years out of date, not the planet itself. Such communication might reveal that one or the other planet is aging more quickly due to relativistic effects, but what's the problem there?
Beam me up ping
Yes...
and on pbs last year,
I saw a scientific program where a signal was accelorated from one state of existence to another, and actually arrived there microseconds before it was actually sent...
they used gravity or a super collidor to accelorate the data to a speed in excess of light.
I saw it on TWICE. It was hard to understand, as quantum theory escapes my ability to logically accept. Matter existing at a sub atomic level in more than two places at once.
technically speaking they say anything is possible in the (scary) world of quantum physics... which is where we ar headed... string theory seems to be confirmed by these little experiments.
the recording they tranferred WAS distorted, but was a musical passage recognizable in comparison to the original.. sort of like Bell's voice to his dog... on the first record.
No, they have to use the smallest particles possible... Republican testicles.
Don't crush that dwarf, hand ME the pliers.
I always thought that Inexplicable Communion Theory was actually explicable after all -- that the entangled particles are joined in some higher dimension -- no matter how far apart they appear in three dimensions they are adjacent (or occupy the same space) in a higher dimension. Thus limitations of the speed of light pertaining to information transmission are not violated in the higher dimension. I'll go back to the terror thread now, where I am more qualified.
Now that's weird...and kinda creepy.
This is way cool.
As to the other, we would not have a business interest in simple communication across the galaxy at this time, but in getting ourselves back and forth. That is the goal. Make it happen.
I don't know enough about the current state of the research and the physics underlying it to comment intelligently on those questions (causality & the uncertainty principle) as they're relevant here. But they are very good questions!
the omni present characteristics implicated by aspects of quantum and string theory.... sound familiar to God's description of his state of existence. Perhaps the matieral world has its reality, based on the immaterial, omnipresent realm of quantum... and perhaps that is where the human soul enters the material human reality, from an ominipresent God, who is its source.
God may not only be less than a breath away, he may be permeating us at every level on a quantum level... and we, him. making a lot of sense, of a lot of religious hobblety gob...
God may be transcendent or "above" us, but not in the physical sense, in the quantum sense. Perhaps all the energy and existence of good and evil flow from a yin and yang balance, that is of God's nature, on a quantum level... and perhaps when we pass, we don't go to heaven... it may be a place, on a quantum level that exists right here, right now, where we live and breathe... we just cannot see it until we are "liberated" from the rather "heavy" atomic material reality, in which we are accustomed to swimming.
Wouldn't surprise me, if all that Jesus spoke of, was NOT of this world... but permeating it at every level, while being unseen.
interesting.
The thing is, and apparently most people do not see this, there is only one atomic particle and we are seeing it over and over. They are all images connected because they are all the same one. There is something else going on that makes it look like a zillion instances of the particle in the universe. Don't imagine that there is an original particle somewhere that we can't see, because we actually see that particle all the time from different aspects.
Okay, just manipulate and measure the velocity then. It seems simple enough, in theory if not necessarily in practice.
As to the other, we would not have a business interest in simple communication across the galaxy at this time, but in getting ourselves back and forth. That is the goal. Make it happen.
I'd love to, to be honest, but I don't see it happening in my lifetime. Developing ansible communication, on the other hand and as has already been pointed out, has any number of applications beyond communicating with one's interstellar starships and colonies: The ultimate in uninterceptible communications, real-time control of our interplanetary missions, etc.
I'm just still unclear on why FTL communications would cause such paradoxes that they must be impossible, as some here claim.
I can't help with that since I don't see a problem either.
Reminds me of a very similar dilemma in the sci-fi short story "Think Like a Dinosaur." Basically teleportation involved completely copying someone at Point A and reassembling them at Point B. Then Point A person was killed in order to "maintain balance."
Hah! Planets are not in deserts. Deserts are on planets. Guess those comic strip guys don't think of everything.
From everything I've read it would require computing power that may very well be out of reach forever.
Using present day computing power it would take a hundred years to crack the most secure encryption available -- using quantum-computer processing it would take a few seconds. We'll have that in a decade or two at the most... Imagine the computing power achieved in say fifty or one hundred years.
Off topic, but have you checked out the Starship Design Project? They've got some interesting ideas on how to go about building a sublight interstellar ship.
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