Posted on 06/27/2002 9:50:33 AM PDT by Korth
A team of physicists in Australia have successfully teleported a laser beam of light from one spot to another in a split second, it emerged today.
The physicists, from the Australian National University, said they had managed to disembody a laser beam in one location and rebuild it in a different spot about one metre 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 the reality of beaming human beings between locations was still light years off.
"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," Dr Lam told a news conference.
However, he 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," he said. Dr Lam, who has worked on teleporting since 1997, said humans posed a "near-impossible" task because we are made up of a huge number of atoms.
The ANU breakthrough now opens up enormous possibilities for future 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 infinitely faster.
Teleportation became one of the hottest topics among physicists in quantum mechanics in 1993, after the US IBM lab provided theoretical underpinning for the work. 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, made up of scientists from Australia, Germany, France, China and New Zealand, was the first to achieve a successful trial with 100% reliability.
ANU team member Warwick Bowen said they first successfully teleported a laser beam in May and repeated the success several times in the ensuing weeks.
We currently drop tanks from airplanes.
This is just like everything else. a big nothing.
Hardly worthy of notice, for now. But in time, if this is real it's got huge implications.
Fred again complains about SpamSpamSpamSpam and MORE Spam.
He also wants Cobby to devise a harness with rigid pole affixed to hold an umbrella over his head while he is on his water skis.
Razorback-bert resists the idea of getting rid of using some of the Spam in his fruitcakes.
End of Daily Report
It would still have the potential to give new meaning to "Blitzkrieg"
I think we should research and lead here for sure..
Yep. I stopped reading at this line :
but the reality of beaming human beings between locations was still light years off.
Good news for the scientifically clueless!
What is curious to me is the quantum computer reference. I may be mistaken, but I recall that quantum computers deal with using the mechanics of the atom and it's orbiting particles to emulate transistors, which would produce a much faster and smaller processor than anything we could produce with silicon. What the hell has that to do with teleportation? They are seperate areas of Quantum theory. Is this Guardian paper that was qouted one of the massively biased papers that honestreporting.com criticizes so much?
From an Australian paper.
Mostly because he's interested in finding a way out of the slammer.
It's so uncontaminated by actual physics that I can't meaningfully comment on it.
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