Wednesday, June 16, 2004
Teleportation experiments. Really
Some real life mad science here. Two separate teams have "teleported" a beryllium atom a short distance.
The method uses "quantum entanglement" to pass the information of the first atom to the second by means of a third. In the process, this information is lost from the first atom (oddly, this teleportation without the possibility of replication is one thing that always seemed fishy in Star Trek---but now it makes sense, which is scary, instead).
Alas, practical teleportation of objects complex enough to be interesting (DNA, a paramecium, a baseball, a cat) still seems out of reach. If anyone reading this understands quantum entanglement, please correct me, but surely it would be hard to entangle two complex objects---in some sense, a harder problem than teleportation. But I know just enough about quantum to know I know less than nothing about it...
The method uses "quantum entanglement" to pass the information of the first atom to the second by means of a third. In the process, this information is lost from the first atom (oddly, this teleportation without the possibility of replication is one thing that always seemed fishy in Star Trek---but now it makes sense, which is scary, instead).
Alas, practical teleportation of objects complex enough to be interesting (DNA, a paramecium, a baseball, a cat) still seems out of reach. If anyone reading this understands quantum entanglement, please correct me, but surely it would be hard to entangle two complex objects---in some sense, a harder problem than teleportation. But I know just enough about quantum to know I know less than nothing about it...
