Oops!
Posted on 06/20/2002 11:48:24 AM PDT by maquiladora
C A N B E R R A, June 17 — In a world breakthrough out of the realms of Star Trek, scientists in Australia have successfully teleported a laser beam of light from one spot to another in a split second but warn: don't sell the car yet.
A team of physicists at the Australian National University (ANU) announced today they had successfully disembodied a laser beam in one location and rebuilt it in a different spot about one meter away in the blink of an eye.
Project leader Dr Ping Koy Lam said there was a close resemblance between what his team had achieved and the movement of people in the science fiction series Star Trek, but reality was still light years off beaming human beings between locations.
"In theory there is nothing stopping us from doing it, but the complexity of the problem is so huge that no one is thinking seriously about it at the moment," Lam told a news conference.
However, Lam said science was not too far from being able to teleport solid matter from one location to another.
"My prediction is ... it will probably be done by someone in the next three to five years, that is the teleportation of a single atom," said Lam, who has worked on teleporting since 1997.
But he said humans posed a near-impossible task as we are made up of zillions of atoms — quantified by a one with 27 zeroes — so forget Star Trek where the starship Enterprise crew step into a transporter, vaporize, then re-assemble elsewhere.
However, the breakthrough opens up enormous possibilities for future super-fast and super-secure communications systems, such as quantum computers, over the next decade.
Physicists believe quantum computers could outperform classical computers with enormous memory and the ability to solve problems millions of times faster.
Teleportation became one of the hottest topics among physicists in quantum mechanics in the past decade, after the IBM lab in the United States provided theoretical underpinning for the work in 1993. Since then about 40 laboratories globally have been experimenting in this area.
Although teams in California and Denmark were the first to do preliminary work on teleportation, the ANU team of scientists from Australia, Germany, France, China and New Zealand was the first to achieve a successful trial with 100 percent reliability.
The idea is if quantum particles like electrons, ions, and atoms have the same properties, they are essentially the same.
So if the properties of quantum particles making up an object are reproduced in another particle group, there would be a precise duplication of the object, so only information about the particles' properties need be transmitted, not the particles.
The inability to pass the information reliably has been a major stumbling block in past "entanglement" experiments.
ANU team member Warwick Bowen said they first successfully teleported a laser beam on May 23 to their great surprise, and repeated the success time after time in following weeks using their small-car-sized transporter, ironing out certain glitches.
"Even in Star Trek they realize there are problems with teleportation," Bowen told the news conference.
"It is such a complicated experiment that nobody knows whether their particular set-up is going to work until you do it ...and it turns out our system is very good."
Oops!
Excuse my low tech thinking but wouldn't a laser beam naturally travel one meter quicker than a blink of an eye? This seems like a step backwards.
so basically, if you get transported, you will be the same person but be as smart as a tack?
"Help me!"
It is not clear to me exactly what was measured on the second beam and how transmitting that information would be any different than transmitting similiar information (related via entaglement) gathered from the first beam.
Are they saying that they measured one characteristic, eg speed (velocity?), on the first beam and the other characteristic, eg. position, on the second other? Granted, they were probably measuring some other quantum characteristics like spin, angular momentum, or whatever.
I would love to see a more detailed explaination of the process.
Or explosives ;)
Reminds me of what I heard in physics classes years ago, that our human bodies are more like fountains of water in a particular arrangement than of a solid object (the actual water molecules keep changing while the overall shape is constant). That our body at any particular moment is not made up of the same matter as when we were younger, just that the particular atoms/cells at any time carry properties duplicating atoms/cells that used to be there.
All yah gotta do is transmit the information and clone the body.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.