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."
Bad Summary (Score:5, Funny)
Misleading summary. Minus 100 points.
Re:Bad Summary (Score:5, Funny)
He woke up the next day and told Geordi he didn't think he'd be able to go to the holodeck.
"Sorry, but I woke up feeling really encrypted"
- RG>
Re:Bad Summary (Score:5, Funny)
Explains why Data had the urge to write Perl
-1 Troll
Re:Bad Summary (Score:5, Funny)
Cpt.: What do you mean?
Data: All my video data has been modified... and there is a number burned in my mind... it's 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
Re:Bad Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bad Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bad Summary (Score:5, Funny)
One step closer to an ansible, maybe. (Score:5, Interesting)
What this would seem (at least on the surface) to bring us closer to is the ansible communications technology employed most famously in the Ender's Game series. That is, by utilizing the properties of quantum entanglement, it may be possible to achieve faster-than-light communication. This also has its problems though
Re:One step closer to an ansible, maybe. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:One step closer to an ansible, maybe. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:One step closer to an ansible, maybe. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:One step closer to an ansible, maybe. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:One step closer to an ansible, maybe. (Score:5, Informative)
Quantum teleportation doesn't work like that. Here's basically how it works: Two quantum particles are entangled. Then they are separated from each other, one goes to point A the other to B. If you do a measurement on A and COMMUNICATE THE RESULT OF THAT MEASUREMENT to where B is. The other guy can do a special measurement on B based on what A's result was. Then the state of A becomes what the state of B was originally. The particles have not moved (the measurements have changed their states, though), but A's state has been "teleported" to B. It's all to do with the fact that the two particles were entangled in the first place.
But the very important point is that you *still have communicate the result of the first measurement*, which means you're limited to the speed of light.
There is still application for encryption since just knowing what the result of the measurement was is not enough without having the actual entangled particle B.
BUT THERE IS NO APPLICATION TO STAR TREK-LIKE TELEPORTATION OR FASTER THAN LIGHT-SPEED COMMUNICATION. And frankly I'm getting tired of seeing the same wrong information getting played in the media like this. And slashdot even, come on guys, you should know better by now. I'm new here, aren't I?
Yes, IAAQP.
Re:One step closer to an ansible, maybe. (Score:5, Funny)
I own many of the technical manuals, and they go to pains to handwave over this part of it, making a big deal about "Heisenberg compensators" and working through how these machines capture the data (basically every quantum number in the system, in real time, digitally). All of the gear you mention usually has something called a "phase transition coil" that does the complicated job of making the matter non-corporeal. One can assume the mass is turned into energy, the books won't dissuade you from this, but mass into energy isn't a phase transition, and the amount of energy you'd get from the average human mass would destroy the Enterprise several times over.
The likely explanation a writer, cornered, would give you is that these devices handle matter that is in an as-yet-undiscovered, highly exotic, highly energetic, wavelike, and protean phase of matter, that might as well be energy from our modern-day perspective. In the canon, an object being transported is never referred to as energy, but as "phased matter," which would seem to support this.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going off to sleep with my highly exotic, highly energetic, and as-yet-undiscovered girlfriend.
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The infamous undiscovered cun.....no I just can't do it
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As I recall, the dilithium crystals were not the source of energy; they were merely there to regulate the matter-antimatter reaction. As far as I know the origin of the antimatter was never explained. Forget dilithium; if we had their (presumably unlimited) supply of antimatter, energy would become the least of our worries.
Re:One step closer to an ansible, maybe. (Score:4, Informative)
The type of system they're talking about is where you use entangling to imprint the differences between two particles on a third one. They're fundamentally different and resemble neither the ansible nor star trek transporters.
Re:One step closer to an ansible, maybe. (Score:5, Informative)
if you're trying to send data, you'll still need to send photons (or other particles) from one location to another. when you're talking about quantum entanglement and sending data across distances, what you're doing is taking two photons in the same location and tieing them together, then sending one of the particles across a distance. when it gets there, it's still tied together (unless something screwed it up on the way), but if you try to manipulate your photon then it unties from the other, so you cant use it to send info faster than light.
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Not so; the problem isn't that it untangles, it's that no useful data can be sent FTL. Sure, you can change the state of the particle, and the entangled particle will also change state. But you can't determine the meaning of the changed state unless you have a traditional (read: non-FTL) communication channel to compare results of your analysis.
Patrick Van Esch explains it much better
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there is 1 wave function. you're not observing one of the particles, you're collapsing the wave function.
when you first entangled the two particles, you made it so that they both had to have the same property. and you sent one of the particles to your buddy. because you were careful about sending it, and making sure it didnt bump anything else, you know that they still have to have the same property. you dont know what that property is yet, becaus
Re:One step closer to an ansible, maybe. (Score:5, Funny)
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one way people think of it is that, say there are an infinite amount of possible states for the particle. what there really is is an infinite amount of universes, and each universe has 1 particular state of the particle. and in each universe, the state of that particle matches the state of the particle it's entangled wi
Teleport? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Teleport? (Score:5, Funny)
In other words:
No red-shirted crewman were harmed in this experiment.
Re:Teleport? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Teleport? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Teleport? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Teleport? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Teleport? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Teleport? (Score:5, Funny)
Nah, he's dead Jim! (Score:5, Funny)
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By the way, IAAT (I am a teleporter). I don't get to work work in the Canaries though. It's a shame.
Accurate headline? (Score:5, Insightful)
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spooky? (Score:3)
Re:spooky? (Score:5, Interesting)
and "spooky" is a reference to Einstein's phrase "spooky action at a distance"
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On that note, I think that encryption of a transmission of matter in data form is extremely important. Can you imagine what an intercepted transmission of that nature would do? It would bring an entirely new meaning to identity theft. What about in a war situation, if the leader of th
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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. Thi
Re:spooky? (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's put it this way - there are two sects in the field of teleportation that I'm aware of right now.
Sect 1 defines teleportation as the tearing down of matter, converting it into energy, transport that energy, and convert it back into matter.
Sect 2 defines teleportation as scanning all of the information about an object, transport that INFORMATION to destination, create replica, then tear down the original.
Star Trek subscribes to version 1, unless of course you're watching a very particular episode.
Anyway, in both cases, you recall hearing the term "pattern buffer" in trek, right? In either case, you have to break Heisenberg's Law (Heisenberg compensator anyone?) about knowing the exact state and location of all particles that make up an object. You store that information, transmit it to the other site, and from that site you either reconstruct the original, or duplicate the original.
The frightening thing is, I see this program in my head writing an XML document, with trees and braches going something like atom/particle/state, and gzip compress it, then transmit it over the fastest method available, decompress on the other side. Just add matter.
Wow I'm sick.
Einsteins view at least (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Einsteins view at least (Score:4, Informative)
You can't actually transmit information using entanglement. (From my even more limited understanding, in quantum teleportation, the entanglement is used to extract the quantum state of an object and store it in a photon, which is then sent somewhere else using something like fiber.) You don't control the state of the particle when you first observe it; it is completely random. If you actually change one particle, the two particles are said to "decohere" and are no longer entangled.
Again, I'm just an interested amateur, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
Call me dumb... (Score:5, Insightful)
We can already transport data through space without using quantum entanglement at all -- it's called radio.
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It's actually a far more advanced version of the Star Trek technology.
Say, for example, that you are in orbit and someone on the surface wants to know what colour shirt a crewman is wearing.
With the inefficient Star Trek model, you'd have to send the crewman down, wearing the shirt.
With this
Re:Call me dumb... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Call me dumb... (Score:5, Interesting)
There are lots of other problems, though. First of all, they can't even teleport single photons yet. All they can do is teleport a single degree of freedom of a single photon, such as polarization or transverse spatial state. Secondly, scaling the teleportation process up to macroscopic objects would require isolating the object to be teleported from its environment in order to preserve quantum coherence. I imagine vacuum exposure would make this procedure uncomfortable for... you know... living things.
It should be noted that quantum teleportation is not able to transfer matter or energy from transmitter to receiver. All the protocol can do is transfer the quantum state of a particle (or, in the future, groups of particles) from transmitter to receiver. That doesn't mean that humans can't be teleported, though; the receiver would simply keep a stock of raw materials such as carbon, hydrogen, calcium and oxygen atoms out of which to reconstruct the person.
For the moment, quantum teleportation bears little resemblance to its sci-fi namesake. It's still useful for sending secure messages because of one bizarre property of teleportation: a teleported state can be sent between points A and B without ever existing between those points. It's also the best way to network quantum computers.
Re:Call me dumb... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, I dunno. Six thousand years doesn't seem like that long to me.
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
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On the other hand, the rest of your post makes very little sense to me. As long as the teleportation process is carried out at sufficient resolution to capture all the relevant details of my consciousness, and I emerge on the receiver pad with all my memories and personality, I don't understand how it could be anything but successful. If you're refe
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Probably, but consider this: can you really prove your consciousness remains continuou
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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
When the day come... (Score:2)
Re:When the day come... (Score:5, Funny)
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Think Russia might reactivate their Nova program [wikipedia.org]?
Re:When the day come... (Score:5, Funny)
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 aroun
Re:IndependEnt! (Score:4, Funny)
more like ender's game... (Score:2, Interesting)
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IANAP.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:IANAP.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:IANAP.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Think of entanglement this way: you've got two particles, each of them in a superposition of two states (horizontal and vertical polarization, for example). The "spookiness" of entanglement lies in the fact that the particles are created in a state where (for example) they have to have opposite polarizations. Thus even though each particle is in a (literally unknowable) superposition of horizontal and vertical, when you measure the first particle and find that it's horizontally polarized, that automatically means that a measurement on the second particle will show that it's vertically polarized. This occurs even if the second measurement is made a millisecond after the first measurement, and the two particles are on opposite sides of the galaxy.
At first glance, this is remarkable. At second glance, it's just conservation of momentum: say the two particles are created from another particle with angular momentum=0. Then the sum of the two angular momentums needs to be 0, so their polarizations must be opposite. The "spookiness" Einstein referred to lies in the fact that quantum mechanics says that both particles are literally horizontally AND vertically polarized, up until the point where the first one is "collapsed" onto horizontal (or vertical). Then all of a sudden the states of both particles are well defined, which occurs even if both particles are separated by a great distance. Einstein took this spookiness to mean that quantum mechanics must be incomplete (namely, that each particle DID have a well defined state that quantum mechanics simply can't describe), but 30 years later a physicist named Bell found a way to experimentally test the issue using "Bell inequalities". Quantum mechanics predicted the outcome of these experiments (google Aspect experiments in the 1980s) up to very high sigma values.
The problem with using these correlations for superluminal correlations is that each measurement just gives you a random horizontal or vertical outcome. The only interesting facet of these measurements is that, when you meet up with the guy who has the other entangled particles (at sublight speed), you find that your answers correlate perfectly. This isn't useful for communication! The only way that it could be used for communication is if quantum mechanics has small nonlinear terms which would allow one party to "bias" his collapse preferentially onto horizontal or vertical. Unfortunately, decades of testing have shown that any nonlinearities in the Schrodinger or Dirac equations underlying quantum mechanics are very, VERY small.
Bummer. On the other hand, FTL communication automatically implies backwards-in-time communication (and thus travel) so at least we don't have to worry so much about being killed by our own grandchildren.
Re:IANAP.... (Score:5, Informative)
The gist of the argument is that special relativity divides the universe into three regions of spacetime: the timelike future (which is the set of all points where you COULD be in the future if you could travel at any speed up to and including the speed of light), the timelike past (which is where all events that could POSSIBLY have an affect on you at the present reside) and "elsewhere", which is comprised of all other events. An example of an "elsewhere" event is the state of the Mars rovers RIGHT NOW. I can't possibly know that at the moment because there's about a 30 minute light travel time delay. It's important to realize that FTL communication connects you to an event in "elsewhere" in a causal manner.
If you draw a spacetime diagram for two people, one of whom is moving very fast (at a conventional sublight speed) relative to the other, you'll find that the "elsewhere" of one observer intersects the past of the other. So using FTL communication and sublight engines to send a message to the past would work like this:
1. Bob gets in his fancy spaceship and travels directly away from earth at 90% the speed of light. He travels for 1 year (the time and speed aren't really important, they just allow the message to be sent farther into the past).
2. Alice, on earth, sends Bob an instantaneous message using her FTL communication device. It travels to Bob along what Alice considers to be her "line of simultaneous events" - the line in her spacetime diagram that goes through her present position and on through "elsewhere", to define the "present". It's not necessary for Alice's communication to be instantaneous, but it makes the argument (a little) clearer and doesn't really matter because going 1.0000001x the speed of light is just as impossible as going infinitely fast (as an instantaneous communication device would have to do).
3. Bob receives the message at the exact instant (in Alice's timeframe) as when she sent it. He then sends the message back to Alice using the same FTL device. The difference is that Bob is travelling at 90% of the speed of light, so his "line of simultaneous events" is completely different- it actually intersects Alice's "timelike past".
All of this makes a lot more sense once you get the hang of drawing spacetime diagrams, but it confused me for many years. You might want to google for tutorials on spacetime diagrams or "pole and barn" paradoxes to see some examples of spacetime diagrams...
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(of course, INAP either, so maybe I still have it wrong, stranger things have happened..)
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IANAP either, but I am an internet user! From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spooky_action [wikipedia.org]:
"Observations on entangled states naively appear to conflict with the property of relativity that information cannot be transferred faster than the speed of light. Although two entangled systems appear to interact across large spatial separations, no useful
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i could be wrong, or over simplifying it, but that's how i understand it.
Useless for transporting matter (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong Sci-fi (Score:2)
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*Overheard in the lab* (Score:3, Funny)
GIBBS - Hah. Interesting, interesting. You hear what you said? "Here goes nothing."
LORA - Well, I meant -
GIBBS - Whereas actually, what we propose to do is to turn something into nothing and back again. So you might just as well have said, "Here goes something and here comes nothing." Hah!
Yeah right (Score:2)
Basically this is no different than sending a file over a fiber optic link, except that you get some additional hardware-based security.
nice summary... or something (Score:2)
Paul Revere signalled using tiny packets of particles of light called photons, too.
First Paragraph: Quantum teleportation across the Danube [nature.com]
But of course you have to pay.
Without being able to read the actual paper (when oh when are we going to see researchers publishin
I doubt that governments will let this get out (Score:2)
In fact, it's potentially so dangerous and disruptive, I'd venture to say that even the military would be denied access to it, since it would quickly escape into the wild. Of course, N
All they teleported was Data? (Score:2)
Wake me up when they teleport Lore too.
"Star Trek style transporter" (Score:2)
Actual article title and author (Score:2, Informative)
Obligatory reference: (Score:2)
Alan: Great! Can it send me to Hawaii?
Transporters won't ever happen (Score:3, Funny)
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With Ron and Sid and Meg.
Ron stole Meggie's heart away
And I got Sidney's leg.
-Douglas Adams
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.
Philosophical Questions (Score:3, Informative)
Stephen Hawking says... (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the interesting ideas is that since you would have every possible particle of information about an object, or person -- that you would not only be able to transport things, but also duplicate them much in the same fashion that a computer can copy and duplicate files.
Spooky..
Give me data, not matter (Score:3, Interesting)
Why does everyone get so hung up with transportation of matter, when data is so much more exciting and more relevant to the world we live in.
What I want to see is the first two-way transmitter/receiver that works via quantum entanglement. Instant communication over any distance!
Just imagine the possibilities -- real time communication with probes throughout the solar system, or even further. Eventually it might be possible to have a mobile phone that works anywhere in the world, without the need for a satellite network and with no signal blind spots. Countries could increase their backbone bandwidth without the need for more fibre cables. TV and Music could be broadcast from anywhere, to anywhere in real time. I'm sure you can think of hundreds of other applications for this.
Re:Give me data, not matter (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Matter? Yeah, right. (Score:4, Informative)
Sure they have. That's why all the Star Trek transporters employ "Heisenberg compensators". Duh.
'tis uncertain... (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, but as soon as they heard of it, they couldn't locate it.
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Re:The "Independant"? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dear Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dear Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
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infact; v; 1. to agressively attack with facts and/or information 2. the state of being so set upon ("I'm infacting as hard as I can, Captain!", "Help! Help! I'm being infacted!") n; any implement used in the execution of such
See also "LART", "clueing"
I'm not so sure that "Independant" is an infact, but it makes my head hurt so you may be right.
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