Posted on 01/14/2002 8:14:36 PM PST by My Favorite Headache
The Innsbruck Experiment
Captain Kirk and his crew do it all the time with the greatest of ease: they discorporate at one point and reappear at another. But this form of travel long has seemed remote to the realm of possibility. Now, however, it turns out that in the strange world of quantum physics, teleportation is not only theoretically possible, it can actually happen.
One group of researchers at the University of Innsbruck in Austria published an account of the first experiment to verify quantum teleportation in the December 11 issue of Nature. And another team headed by Francesco De Martini in Rome has submitted similar evidence to Physical Review Letters for publication. Neither group sent a colleague to Katmandu or a car to the moon. Yet what they did prove is still pretty startling. Anton Zeilinger, De Martini and their colleagues demonstrated independently that it is possible to transfer the properties of one quantum particle (such as a photon) to another--even if the two are at opposite ends of the galaxy.
Until recently, physicists had all but ruled out teleportation, in essence because all particles behave simultaneously like particles and like waves. The trick was this: they presumed that to produce an exact duplicate of any one particle, you would first have to determine both its particlelike properties, such as its position, and its wavelike properties, such as its momentum. And yet doing so would violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. Under that principle, it is impossible to ever measure wave and particle properties at the same time. The more you learn about one set of characteristics, the less you can say about the other with any real certainty.
In 1993, though, an international team of six scientists proposed a way to make an end-run around the uncertainty principle. Their solution was based on a theorem of quantum mechanics dating to the 1930s called the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect. It states that when two particles come into contact with one another, they can become "entangled." In an entangled state, both particles remain part of the same quantum system so that whatever you do to one of them affects the other one in a predictable, domino-like fashion. Thus, the group showed how, in principle, entangled particles might serve as "transporters" of sorts. By introducing a third "message" particle to one of the entangled particles, one could transfer its properties to the other one, without ever measuring those properties.
EXPERIMENTAL PROOF
Bennett's ideas were not verified experimentally until the Innsbruck investigators performed their recent experiment. The researchers produced pairs of entangled photons and showed they could transfer the polarization state from one photon to another.
Teleportation still has one glitch: In the fuzzy realm of quantum mechanics, the result of the transfer is influenced by the receiver's observation of it. (As soon as you look at, say, Bones, he will look like something else.) So someone still has to tell the receiver that the transformation has been made so that they can correctly interpret what they see. And this sort of communication cannot occur at faster-than-light speeds. Even so, the scheme has definite applications in ultrafast quantum computers and in utilizing quantum phenomena to ensure secure data transmission [see QUANTUM CRYPTOGRAPHY, Charles H. Bennett, Scientific American, October 1992].
For now, though, it will be a long time before a real Scotty beams up a living Captain Kirk.
--By Alan Hall, contributing writer
RELATED LINKS:
Quantum teleportation at the University of Innsbruck
Download copies of Innsbruck journal articles
Quantum research at IBM
Quantum information from Los Alamos National Laboratory
That is the basis of the movie. The censors let it pass only because the true meaning was distorted for the entertainment of the uninitiated.
That movie has got to make any thoughtful individual think.
Does this mean all those "Channelers" from the 80's and 90's were for real?
Those were really Atlanteans imparting their wisdom?
(Trying to maintain a sense of humor about this)
It sounds like there are some among us, who, with the proper "attitude adjustment" could actually affect the fabric of reality.
Likewise, instantaneous communication over vast distances would likely be the mode used by any civilised or advanced extraterrestrial life in the galaxy/universe(s).
A breakthrough in communication technology utilizing this phenomena could very well open up a vast intercourse with every ET race capable of doing the same.
Imagine the scienific and technological advances and breakthroughs if we were able to pool our information with other scientists from other worlds.
Although this is still theory, it bears some serious investigation.
Like some vast universal library, every question we have ever had about history, creation, political decisions, famous battles, ancient civilizations, etc. could be contained within the sub-atomic particle, if we can just learn how to access and utilize it.
Maybe the means of our own destruction as well.
The physical phenomena referred to in the post are real, but its author seems to have chosen the most absurd interpretation of them.
First, since these correlations cannot be used to transfer information, they do not violate Einstein's Theory of Relativity. That is a closed issue. Secondly, there are several explanations of the correlations that do not imply any kind of superluminal action at a distance. One is the Everett "Relative State" formulation, described here, and another is Cramer's "Transactional Interpretation", explained here.
Bohm's "holographic universe" idea has been around for a long time. To be blunt, in my opinion Bohm is a maverick who refuses to accept the intrinsic randomness of quantum events and has for decades been spinning candyfloss to salvage his cognitive dissonance. For a sympathetic view of the book, go here. For a more nuanced discussion, by the always lucid Kevin Sharpe, putting Bohm's views in better context, go here.
Finally, the word "hologram" is used as a metaphor. There is no experimental evidence that either the universe or the brain resembles a literal hologram. Metaphors generally make good copy but bad science.
[Disclaimer: my PhD in quantum mechanics was awarded over 30 years ago. A lot of brain cells have decayed since then.]
Physics News 399, October 26, 1998
PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE
The American Institute of Physics
Bulletin of Physics News
NONLOCALITY GETS MORE REAL. "Bell's Inequalities," the set of mathematical relations that would rule out the notion that distant quantum particles exert influences on each other at seemingly instantaneous rates, have now been violated over record large distances, with record high certainty, and with the elimination of an important loophole in three recent experiments, further solidifying the notion of "spooky action at a distance" in quantum particles. At the Optical Society of America meeting in Baltimore earlier this month, Paul Kwiat (kwiat@lanl.gov) of Los Alamos and his colleagues announced that they produced an ultrabright source of photon pairs for Bell's inequality experiments; they went on to verify the violation of Bell's inequalities to a record degree of certainty (preprint at p23.lanl.gov/agw/2crystal.pdf). Splitting a single photon of well-defined energy into a pair of photons with initially undefined energies, and sending each photon through a fiber-optic network to detectors 10 km apart, researchers in Switzerland (Wolfgang Tittel, Univ. Geneva, wolfgang.tittel@physics.unige.ch) showed that determining the energy for one photon by measuring it had instantaneously determined the energy of its neighbor 10 km away--a record set by the researchers last year but now demonstrated in an improved version of the original experiment. (Tittel et al., Physical Review Letters, 26 October 1998.) A University of Innsbruck group performed Bell measurements with detectors that randomly switched between settings rapidly enough to eliminate the "locality loophole," which posited that one detector might somehow send a signal to the other detector at light or sub-light speeds to affect its reading. (Weihs et al., upcoming paper in Phys. Rev. Lett., website at http://www.uibk.ac.at/c/c7/c704/qo/photon/_bellexp/)
I took a psych class from Pribram at Stanford in 1972 when he was beating the holographic stuff. While some of it made sense, I've looked at holographic explanations of various phenomenae over the years and have mixed feelings. I think Pribram was a couple of bolts shy of having a real working brain theory (as time has shown in brain research, there are an awful lot of discrete rather than holographic connections present). Still, it's pretty cool stuff even if it has nothing to do with what is really going on. Makes some physical sense on a cosmologic scale if not for brains.
Here's the kicker though, if the brain is holographic, and the universe is also finely holographically connected, is the universe then a brain? I actually think it is.
I would encourage you not to confuse the sense of awe at how far beyond our feeble minds would be a full understanding of the universe, with the sense of wonder at a mystical, intriguing sounding theory that would claim to explain the universe so much better.
The former is well founded in my view, whereas the later but a mirage in the desert of our mind.
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