Posted on 01/23/2009 3:36:44 PM PST by Free ThinkerNY
Scientists have come a bit closer to achieving the "Star Trek" feat of teleportation. No one is galaxy-hopping, or even beaming people around, but for the first time, information has been teleported between two separate atoms across a distance of a meter - about a yard.
This is a significant milestone in a field known as quantum information processing, said Christopher Monroe of the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland, who led the effort.
Teleportation is one of nature's most mysterious forms of transport: Quantum information, such as the spin of a particle or the polarization of a photon, is transferred from one place to another, without traveling through any physical medium. It has previously been achieved between photons (a unit, or quantum, of electromagnetic radiation, such as light) over very large distances, between photons and ensembles of atoms, and between two nearby atoms through the intermediary action of a third.
None of those, however, provides a feasible means of holding and managing quantum information over long distances.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I volunteer Barack Obama to go first.
My sisters house has wifi
They did say replicators and transporters were very closely related
What the big goal here is not just secure communications, but doing so over increasing distances.
For instance, at the speed of light, just communicating with someone on Mars would be delayed anywhere from 3 to 22 minutes, unless a quantum communications device was used.
But this raises a question: can such communications defeat causality? So far, the answer seems to be “no”.
Without going into a lot of detail:
The article seems to discuss this in terms of information transfer. Seems like part of the information transferred would be the kinetic energy level of the original ion.
If the transfer occurs over any substantial distance north and south, seems like the kinetic energy level will be out of sync with the location transferred to unless the information is altered to allow for that. If they can alter the information transferred, that makes for interesting possibilities.
I read a novel a year or two ago with exactly that premise. There was also a Tesla-based movie a couple years ago with the premise. Great stories both.
MM (in TX)
Superluminal?
Probably.
Einstein was wrong.
ping
What do you call a person who’s atoms are all separated?
Dead.
Even if you put them back together.
I saw a sci fi flick a few years back that went into it. An alien race refused to give us the technology outright because our compassion would prevent us from destroying the original person. Instead they did the teleporting for us to be sure the original was destroyed.
Yep. My take as well. You kill the person and create a copy. The problem goes even deeper. Human consciousness is something nobody can explain or grasp. In fact, if you didn’t have one you could not be convinced through any scientific test that it even exists. Where would that consciousness go when you were vaporized?
And if it doesn’t go to the “copy” would the copy be “alive” or just so much meat - a corpse?
You read my mind!
Yup, and I figure if they ever do manage to “teleport” someone, even if they come out perfectly down to the very atoms, they’ll still be “dead” when they come out the other side.
>Yup, and I figure if they ever do manage to “teleport” someone, even if they come out perfectly
>down to the very atoms, they’ll still be “dead” when they come out the other side.
Well, there is the other option. Ala Stargate and R. Jordan’s Wheel of Time, using wormholes/tesselects to ‘skip’/’bridge the intervening space.
The transference of consciousness could create even more problems if it became possible. Think of the possibilities of the perfect spy.
Now I’m missing the show Quantum Leap.
· Google ·
What's the "energy needed" ... Cost / benefit?
other than that, KEWL! 
My take too. No way I’m volunteering to be vaporized.
I heard an opposite opinion a long time ago challenging that position that still bothers me, and I don’t have an answer for it: Not one atom or molecule that was in our bodies ten years ago is still in it. They’ve all been recycled. So in a sense, we’re already a copy of something that existed in the past and doesn’t exist any longer.
Actually that’s a pretty interesting thought. It seems that the only thing that’s permanent is our consciousness.
A human being is more than matter. The atoms in a person’s body and brain may change over time, but the real you isn’t generated by your body or your brain. The real you exists outside of space and time; your brain and body are the means by which you interface with space and time. Should your body suffer enough damage, it will cease to function, but you will carry on.
And don’t be confused between what things seem to be and what they are. The physical aspects of a human being (his or her “accidents”) can and do change with time, but the person behind those accidents (his or her “substance”) cannot change, since it exists outside of time.
If true teleportation of people ever becomes possible it would lead to some interesting moral questions. Since no matter is actually being transferred, you would end up with a copy in a sense. The star trek transporters we think of would basically have to vaporize the original.That pondering has already been done, in a great SF story:At least that's my take on it. More interestin stuff fer ponderin.
The most traditionally science-fictional story in the book, "Think Like a Dinosaur", uses two props of the genre, aliens and matter transmitters, to set up the narrator's moral dilemma. Michael Burr works for the hanen, an alien race resembling dinosaurs: he guides infrequent human star-travellers through the 'migration' process. In the course of the transfer, the humans are copied, one of the copies travelling on to their stellar destination, while the other is exterminated before regaining consciousness - the hanen way of thinking (hence the story's title) allows no sentimentality over the eradication of the copy left behind. When Burr releases a traveller from a malfunctioning device, only to discover that transfer has actually been effected, he must end the life of the copy he can only view as human... In this story, the technology is not cutting edge but a device of artistic licence, which aficionados of Hard SF might deplore - a clever method of achieving an artistic end: the unflinching examination of the human psyche, and Kelly does it brilliantly.---infinity plus review of Think Like a Dinosaur by James Patrick Kelly
Was it The Prestige?
I dumped my TV in ‘97, but to that time one of my absolute favorite shows was Quantum Leap.
Well, it can’t be too beneficial, they only went one mile.
/rimshot
Yep, Quantum Leap kicked ass, excellent show.
Baby steps.
But can you duplicate the soul?
Yes, The Prestige with Hugh Jackman. I thought it was just about competing magicians, but it turned out to be a cool sci-fi movie and the moral implications were very evident in this movie.
Yeah, The Prestige. It came out at roughly the same time as another magician movie. The Illusionist, maybe? In any event, they both turned out to be really good movies and I bet the confusion over the two ended up hurting both.
MM
Yeah, The Prestige. It came out at roughly the same time as another magician movie. The Illusionist, maybe? In any event, they both turned out to be really good movies and I bet the confusion over the two ended up hurting both.
MM
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