Quantum Teleportation and Computation

[TopQuark]

All very nice, but it doesn't seem to have many practical implications during most of our lifetimes. We all may be very pleasantly surprised.

Just look at the micro-computing in the last twenty years. IBM, the experts in the field, was yawning at that invention for about five years --- it looked like a toy to them. They allowed, finally, one small group to look into it, and only in the area of hardware. When looking at the external sources for software, there were essentially two choices --- DRI and Microsoft. When IBM approached Bill Gates, he told them Microsoft was not intereseted and suggested IB contact DRI (it is unpopular to bring up this fact, for it violates the cult of the visionary). Well, DRI was the big guy on the block, they were bigger than Microsoft and busy with marketing their existing operating system, CP/M. They declined IBM's offer.

Only after the second contact, IBM and Microsoft shook hands on the devlopement of DOS. Even after that, for years, IBM failed to understand the role of the micro-computer and notoriously underfunded the project. For his part, it was Bill Gates who said in 1984, "I cannot envision why would anybody need more than 64KB of memory. And indeed, a mainframe handling transactions of a large insurance company had 4MB of memory, which cost millions. In contrast, I am typing this into a computer under my desk that has 640MB of memory.

What's the point of all this? That the adoption of new technologies, once the initial scientific breakthrough is there, tends to occur very fast. Not only we, the general public underestimate the speed in this area, but even the experts --- the IBMs, the Microsofts of this world --- sometimes fail to comprehend it also.

Who knows, in 10-15 years we might be exchanging notes via a QC network and saying, "Remember when..."

[lafroste]

Your post does not address the basic premise of my question. That being: How do you use a physical system to manipulate a quantity that is not subject to physical law? My further point was that the basic misunderstanding we are dancing with here is the basic thing that must be resolved one way or another for your future to be realized.

[elephantlips]

The Matrix!

[Attillathehon]

I have no idea what you're talking about. I just looked in to see if there was a quicker way to get to work.

[Paradox]

Well, Time is not the fourth dimension, it is just a dimension, if you want it to be. Think of "the" fourth dimension as merely an extension into another "space", perpendicular to our own. Much as a two dimensional being who lives in a 2 dimensional space (sheet of paper) cannot detect the third dimension (our own), we cannot detect a fourth. (FlatLand.. great little story).

[AUgrad]

That the adoption of new technologies, once the initial scientific breakthrough is there, tends to occur very fast. Not only we, the general public underestimate the speed in this area, but even the experts --- the IBMs, the Microsofts of this world --- sometimes fail to comprehend it also.

In other words, we have great engineering capacity.

[Zon]

To be technical/NOT....that is truly sci-fi mind-blowing....

Funny thing is, and I don't even know if it's funny or not, it just is, but I don't like sci-fi. I do agree that it is rather mind blowing. No cobwebs in here -- been blown away on a daily basis. I like to try to keep it fresh.

[lafroste]

Physicist Lawrence M. Kraus discusses the physical (im)possibility of teleportation in the national bestseller "The Physics of Star Trek". Begin with the question of how much information is encoded in the human body. The answer works out to roughly 10^28 kilobytes. To build a transporter that could beam this much 'data', let alone a living person, "would require us to heat up the matter to a temperature a million times the temperature at the center of the Sun, expend more energy in a single machine than all of humanity presently uses, build telescopes larger than the size of the Earth, improve present computers by a factor of 1000 billion billion, and avoid the laws of quantum mechanics. In short, forget it.

I agree that this concept of teleportation is implausible. However, I do believe that another, far and away simpler, approach is out there on the horizon. It is fantasy to say that a complex object can be reduced to information (digitized) then re-assembled at another point using the saved information. However, I do have shades of an inkling of another mechanism could be employed that really moves the entire object en mass in an apparently discontinuous fashion.

I admit that this stuff just fascinates me.

[Father Wu]

Yes. Thanks. I wrote it in middleschool.

[TopQuark]

In my mind it comes down to the basic question of "if something is mathematically possible, is it necessarily possible?" I have been wrestling with that one for awhile, but my sense of it is that the answer is "no". Good support for your argument is provided by geometry. One can imagine all sorts of curvature in space-time, bur nature has chosen only one (Minkowski) geometry.

My strongest argument to date for my position has a ready example in the potential energy function, E=mgh, for gravitational fields. I have concluded that potential energy is nonsense, Whence such a strong conclusion?

much as Newton's laws are merely approximations and do not really describe reality. I beg to disagree: Newton's laws describe reality well, but not perfectly well. And the inaccuracy happens to be greater at greater speeds.

[Paradox]

However, I do have shades of an inkling of another mechanism could be employed that really moves the entire object en mass in an apparently discontinuous fashion.

C'mon Scotty, fess up!

[Father Wu]

One thing that most people don't get is that this backs up Einstien's Theory of Relativity. Even with QT, we're still not able to break past the speed of light, because after the scanning process the information still has to be sent at light speed or slower

[dubyagee]

Funny thing is, and I don't even know if it's funny or not, it just is, but I don't like sci-fi.

Neither do I. But when it changes from fiction to fact, it becomes very interesting. Even if one can only grasp a small part of it.

[Zon]

Good analogy. It paints a picture of a technology horizon that we can't see over, but can eventually reach

To be honest, I was happy just have it flow out of my mind and onto the computer screen as well as it did. I love it when the user interface works as I intend it to.

[Father Wu]

Just messing around. My son wrote it . I just pulled it off of the computer.

[Brett66]

Star Trek went about it the wrong way . Instead of disassembling and reassembling an object they could have just made an artificial wormhole and walked through it. Of course creating an artificial wormhole is a considerable technical achievment, but not as hard as the destruction/reconstruction method.

[Father Wu]

That's where quantum computers come in.

[hopespringseternal]

"The Physics of Star Trek".

That phrase always makes me laugh. "Star Trek" (and most science fiction) is written in a world of non-physics. Science fiction is largely the genre of the omnipotent plot device. OPDs do away with the normal constraints of space, time, and causality. There is no cost, no trade-off.

[TopQuark]

there is no such thing as "action at a distance". This was the focus of extended philosophical and scientific debate in the second half of the XIX century(Mach and Sommerfeld were central figures, if I remember correctly). There was a notion of ether introduced --- a medium for the alleged transport of action (force) at a distance.

It has been concluded then and believed since that, as you pointed out, there is no such thing indeed: all interactions of a particle happen at the point where that particle is located. Thus, two electrons repel each other not "at a distance," but by means of an electomagnetic field: each electron creates a field which influences the other at the point where that other is located.

Quantum mechanics does not actually add anything to that picture.

[gjenkins]

"The more interesting question is "what is the fifth dimension?"


That is a good question.