Breakthrough Brings Star Trek Transporter Closer 503
japerr writes to mention The Independant is reporting that a new breakthrough may bring scientists one step closer to a Star Trek style transporter. " A team of physicists has teleported data over a distance of 89 miles from the Canary Island of La Palma to the neighbouring island of Tenerife, which is 10 times further than the previous attempt at teleportation through free space. The scientists did it by exploiting the "spooky" and virtually unfathomable field of quantum entanglement - when the state of matter rather than matter itself is sent from one place to another. Tiny packets or particles of light, photons, were used to teleport information between telescopes on the two islands. The photons did it by quantum entanglement and scientists hope it will form the basis of a way of sending encrypted data."
Teleport? (Score:5, Insightful)
Accurate headline? (Score:5, Insightful)
Call me dumb... (Score:5, Insightful)
We can already transport data through space without using quantum entanglement at all -- it's called radio.
IndependEnt! (Score:2, Insightful)
Ugh... it's "The Independent". Now we can't even copy the names of publications correctly without misspelling them, even when there is a giant logo with the correct spelling right in front of us and numerous other text versions on the page? It's called highlight/ctrl-c, people!
The whole ent/ant thing is there/their/they're for this decade, and obviously a pet peeve of mine. Get it through your heads; there's no such thing as an "independant". An independent is not something you wear around your neck.
Anyway, to get back on-topic, is it just me or the idea of teleporting "data" 89 miles not very impressive? I realize it's probably poor wording, but I'm sure once I click the "submit" button here, this data's going to be instantly "teleported" all over the world!
Re:Call me dumb... (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems like every couple weeks, someone else writes an article or reads on article on this sort of teleportation and posts it all over the Internet. "Omigawd, we are SOOOO close to having Star Trek transporters!!!"
And then everyone has to explain, "No, we really aren't." This really doesn't bring us any closer to being able to break material objects down to nothing (effectively) and simultaneously rebuild them perfectly at a far-away location.
Could we all just stop this now? This article doesn't have any significant depth or any clear/new information. Quantum entanglement has been know for a while, but (and I am not a physicist, but AFAIK) there's never been any way to use it to transmit data in a way that breaks the speed of light. That would be a discovery, but it still wouldn't be moving actual matter across distances. It wouldn't be deconstructing atoms, molecules, or whole organisms on one side and rebuilding them on the other. So please, no more stores about how "Star Trek transporters are just around the corner!"
Re:Call me dumb... (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks, but no thanks.
Proof:
Scan yourself down to the most fundamental level (regardless of what that is), and build an exact duplicate without destroying the original. Press the start button on the duplicate, assuming instantaneous duplication and starting. Since the original's consciousness has maintained continuity in the original, even if the duplicate is an exact copy of the original's state, it cannot be continuous with the original's state because the duplicate exists at a different location and time. (I considered using "space-time locus", but it's difficult enough talking about this without resort to high-falutin' words :)
Therefore, the "you" that existed prior to duplication is the "you" of the original, and not the "you" of the duplicate. "You" suddenly don't perceive two different realities, one from the POV of the original, and one from the POV of the duplicate.
The conclusion is that if someone destroyes the original, "you" die. Really die. The duplicate may have all your memories and skills, and will think it is the original, but it is not.
Really, the only way teleportation (or brain-to-computer transference) could work is if each individual part (for some definition of "part") were duplicated, placed in sync with the original, and then the original part destroyed. Since consciousness consists of the whole and not the parts (assuming we're not going to invoke the supernatural), the consciousness remains continuous with only one instantiation at any one time.
I've given this some thought, since I hope to download in 2045 :)
--Rob
Re:Bad Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Its all in the time travel... (Score:4, Insightful)
Secondly, as others have posted, it ain't gonna happen. Teleporting matter by breaking it down and reconstructing it on the other end ain't going to happen. There are so many holes in that approach that its not funny.
I read a couple of interesting magazine articles on teleportation, and the key to teleportation is really time travel. Teleportation would be sending someone on a time-ride, bending the space-time continuum, have them "arrive" at the exact physical destination but still in the same temporal location in which they left. That is the key. However, the big problem with this approach is that the matter being transported will still age the amount of time is took the "time ride" to occur. Still, any teleportation is a feat the will probably never be accomplished.
But let me go on record as saying that rather than for science to focus focusing on teleportation or time travel seems moronic. How about we just focus on building some kind of high-speed passenger transport mechanism that travels at supersonic speeds (something like Mach 3 or Mach 4)?
Personally, I'd be just fine if I could go from Los Angeles to New York in one hour. And that seems like a much more achievable goal.
Re:spooky? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not really encryption either -- it's just a way of transmitting some information, and knowing whether anybody else has intercepted the transmission. The relationship to encryption is that it allows you to transmit a key and know that it wasn't intercepted during transmission. Obviously, you only use the key if it wasn't intercepted. If memory serves, it's not immune to a MITM attack though. This is why the free-air transmission means something -- it's much easier to put your agent in the middle of an optical fiber.
In the absence of public-key cryptography, this would be a big deal, as key distribution has historically been a big problem in encryption. In the presence of public key cryptography, however, the practical significance is likely to be fairly limited. In theory, if the problems associated with PK algorithms turned out to be easier than expected, this could become a big thing again -- but I see little sign of major breakthroughs in factoring, finding logarithms in a finite field, etc. Some pretty serious mathematicians have pretty solid arguments that elliptical curve encryption is probably not even amenable to the types of algorithms used for factoring and finite field algorithms (the sieve-style algorithms only work if you can prove "smoothness" and nobody's done so for elliptical curves -- and there are some fairly solid-looking arguments that they're not smooth).
title is total crap (Score:2, Insightful)
they didn't teleport anything.
they used a giant remote control.
Re:Call me dumb... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One step closer to an ansible, maybe. (Score:4, Insightful)
The above post deserves to be moderated as +1 humor, since it is the first to bring up the idea of the quantum entanglement communications device accidentally talking to another universe.
The above post is absolutely not flamebait.
hanzie.
Re:Call me dumb... (Score:2, Insightful)
Do it while you're asleep. You go to sleep in a (wheeled) hospital bed in a room. Two of you wake up in two identical beds in another room. How can you tell which one's which?