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You all know how they teleport people in star trek, and various sci-fi stories, etc: now they have successfully teleported a photon of light - without destroying it and over a long distance. This is amazing - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3576594.stm
They have to start someplace. Look how radio started with just a spark gap and now we have TV, radar, AM, FM, sideband (DSB-USB-LSB) and even XM (radio). And not that awful long ago either.
Just a little bit of star trek trivia. The teleportation system in star trek was developped because Gene Rodenberry couldnt figure out a believable way to get his starships to land on a planet so he decided to beam the crew up.
The important part of this experiment is that is was achived outside of a laboratory enviorment. Also while this is not teleportation in the star trek sense it is the transfert of charateristics between two particles and as Moxnix said they have to start somewhere. It will be interesting to see how this developpes in the futur.
The magic of quantum physics hehe. This has been done before, (in 1998 I believe) a photon was 'teleported' over a distance of a few feet I think.
There's some complications with teleporting things larger than photons let alone transporting human beings. As the object being 'teleported' is not actually transported but a replica is created and the original is destroyed it would be difficult to achieve the perfect replication of a human being. Nevertheless this will be eventually possible.
This is amazing, even though it's not really being teleported outside of a contained transmission media, in this case fibre. Transfering the state or "polarity" over large distances at the speed of light could make computing today seem like toys. No less than toys. Imagine what a program could do - operating using a global network of fiber connections and processing data at or near the speed of light. Add in reduced instructon technology and I can see it now, future beings will "teleport" using satellite beams back to this moment in time to destroy the experiment. :)
The first teleportation of a proton coverd the distance of about a centimeter if I recall correctly. The problem is that due to radial convergence you only have a one in four chance of getting the teleported proton reassembled correctly, unless some serious advances have been made since I last looked into the experimentation.
There are also some theological concerns because the proton is not really teleported, rather an exact duplicate is created at the other end, and the original proton is destroyed. If this were a human and since teleportation would involve destroying the original, the question becomes, "Is the copy the "same" as the destroyed original?" Heavy questions.
Follow-up:Quote:
Originally posted here by MURACU
Just a little bit of star trek trivia. The teleportation system in star trek was developped because Gene Rodenberry couldnt figure out a believable way to get his starships to land on a planet so he decided to beam the crew up.
It was not only believability, but production costs. It would have cost too much money to have the ship land on the surface of a planet every week, which also contributed to the development of the transporters. This is also why it was so rare to see a shuttlecraft on the show...
Lol you are right, film a shuttle model or take a shot of a trasnporter room filled with people, then one where they aren't there. Then fade it in or out. Much cheaper. Plus it would not have been as much fun not seeing Bones get all rattled up about his body getting broken down and reassembled.
I did not realize in this experiment the "old" state was destroyed after it was teleported. Need some more info on that. Can anyone sum it up? Does changing the state back to a pre-existing condition constitute destruction or is it really destroyed?
This is more like other science fiction genre stories at present. If I said "Ansible" who would know what I am talking about? :) That seems more likely since there is so much information in a human body it would take 200 million or so years to transmit the data, even if we increase current bandwidth ability to be 99 million times faster than it is today it would still take a million years.
For instance according to one source a body of a particluar weight has: 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms. All arranged in a particular way that make a single entity live and breath and think. (there is another one for the creationists, one way or another it's a damn miracle. :) ) So you have to transmit the atoms, data to define their arrangement in a container (human body) and THEN the data that defines where in space and time it exists and then move it to another and calcualte it. Nothing is still in the Universe. So if you do some math is staggering, 200 millions years worth. Assuming I am on the right track.
Here you go Road. I hope it isn't too deep. The last line is what really sum's up your question.
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~qoptics/teleport.html
Quote:
In quantum teleportation, an unknown quantum state is faithfully transferred from a sender (Alice) to a receiver (Bob). To perform the teleportation, Alice and Bob must have a classical communication channel and must also share quantum entanglement -- in the protocol we employ*, each possesses one half of a two-particle entangled state. Alice makes an appropriate projective measurement (Bell measurement) of the unknown state together with her component of the shared entangled state. The result of this measurement is a random piece of classical information which Alice sends to Bob over their classical communication channel. Bob uses this information to choose a unitary transformation which he performs on his component of the shared entangled state, thus transforming it into an output state identical to the original (unknown) input. Notice that the input state is destroyed by Alice's projective measurement, so that teleportation does not result in "cloning" of a quantum state.
(*Teleportation protocol of C. H. Bennett et al., PRL 70, 1895 (1993).)
I hope the aliens on that future looks like T'Pol and not like Spock, Arnold S.,,, :P
I love this stuff it's such a great mind ****. You can travel anywhere but only from the prespective of outsiders. You will cease to be, never experence anything again, but a new being holding all your desires and memories would declare to the world that they went from one end of the world to the other, unharmed. :)
I'm a huge Star Trek fan, but I'm also very into Dilbert - found a section of one of his books, "The Dilbert Future" which applies and thought you'd like to read it -
Transporter
It would be great to be able to beam your molecules across space and then reassemble them. The only problem is that you have to trust your coworker to operate the transporter. These are the same people who won't add paper to the photocopier or make a new pot of coffee after taking the last drop. I don't think they'll be double-checking the transporter coordinates. They'll be accidentally beaming people into walls, pets, and furniture. People will spend all their time apologizing for having inanimate objects protruding from parts of their bodies. "Pay no attention to the knickknacks; I got beamed into a hutch yesterday."
If I could beam things from one place to another, I'd never leave the house. I'd sit in a big comfy chair and just start beaming groceries, stereo equipment, cheerleaders, and anything else I wanted right into my house. I'm fairly certain I would abuse this power. If anybody came to arrest me, I'd beam them into space. If I wanted some paintings for my walls, I'd beam the contents of the Louvre over to my place, pick out the good stuff, and beam the rest into my neighbor's garage.
If I were watching the news on television and didn't like what I heard, I would beam the anchorman into my living room during the commercial break, give him a vicious wedgie, and beam him back before anybody noticed.
I'd never worry about "keeping up with the Joneses," because as soon as they got something nice, it would disappear right out of their hands. My neighbors would all have to use milk crates for furniture. And that's only after I had all the milk crates I would ever need for the rest of my life.
There's only one thing that could keep me from spending all my time wreaking havoc with the transporter: the holodeck.
*chuckling* Hope y'all like the humor.
There is an urban mythe in this country about a man infront of a judge.
When asked if he had anything to say in his defence the man got a folding cigarette case out of his pocket flipped it open and said,"kirk to enterprise, beam me up scotty".
Add contempt of court to what ever he was befor the beek for :)