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.
This experiment ought to show up in a journal, Physics Today, for example. OTOH, several major advances in science have been reported from Australia. Bell Labs' Schoen, too, for that matter.
However, I do believe that one day it will be done. Imagine the custom recliner you could order for Super Bowl CDXVI. It would have a transporter built into the seat, so you'd never have to get up to go to the bathroom, no matter how much beer you drank. Sort of a "transportapotty"!
You think we oughta send someone to check on Cobby and Scuttlebutt. They shudda been back with those cases of beer days ago. Any way we can teleport them?
Yeah, ya gots to love it when someone tries to measure time in light years.
Wouldn't be so bad if Goliath had not tossed Tiny on top of me.
This is almost as bad as having the eight hammocks for crew members to sleep in one room - can't even tell which one is The Snorer, the sounds reverberating around the walls at warp speed.
Thank heaven for ear plugs...
I wouldn't bet on that. Every Australian I've known in the US that sees a Fosters ad on TV starts laughing; they say Fosters has about as much cachet in Oz as Schlitz or Pabst Blue Ribbon does here.
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