OT - Teleportation NOW

[Hand of Evil]

A bit off topic but a very interesting story. Can we see teleportation in our lifetime?

http://www.msnbc.com/news/768248.asp?0dm=-21DT

 

[BiggusGeekus]

A TEAM of physicists at the Australian National University announced on Monday that they had successfully dismantled a laser beam in one location and rebuilt it in a different spot about 3 feet (1 meter) away in the blink of an eye.
Project leader Ping Koy Lam said there was a close resemblance between what his team had achieved and the movement of people in the science-fiction series “Star Trek,” but reality was still light-years away from beaming human beings between locations.
“In theory, there is nothing stopping us from doing it, but the complexity of the problem is so huge that no one is thinking seriously about it at the moment,” Lam told a news conference.
Lam said science was not too far from being able to teleport solid matter from one location to another.
“My prediction is ... it will probably be done by someone in the next three to five years — that is, the teleportation of a single atom,” said Lam, who has worked on teleporting since 1997.
He said teleporting a human, however, would pose a nearly impossible task, since a human contains something on the order of an octillion atoms

So much for it being a 5th level spell.

 

[Henry]

Question: In WHOSE lifetime?

Within the next 10 years, I could safely predict that one atom (probably a hydrogen or helium atom) will be teleported within a space of a few feet. I would lay money on the fact that I will NEVER see a human teleported. I'm only gonna be around for another half century or so.

What I CAN wager is that quantum computers would help solve the problem of teleportation of humans - sort of like asking the high-school graduate brother to help pay for the younger brother's college tuition.

 

[hong]

W00t!

Go ANU!

Not that I know anything at all about what they're doing.

 

[kenjib]

Sounds really cool, but it doesn't sound like teleportation. According to the article they are completely obliterating the subject and creating a replica elsewhere. The original is destroyed. Matter isn't moved, just replicated. It sounds to me more like a matter resynthesizer than a teleporter.

 

[bolen]

I have done quite a bit of reading on this. It is more evidence of what Einstein termed the "spooky nature of quantum mechanics.

The big idea I had was this we take an entangled pair of photons then you go off in your rocket ship. I could send a Morris code by measuring my photon's spin state. As soon as my photon has a measurable spin yours must have the opposite spin.

Sounds like I just sent information faster then light. NO!!!

Here is why I am wrong. When I prepare my entangled state I had 3 states to choose from. The end result is I don't know which entangled state I start with, so I cant predict the spin of the other entangled state so I can't use this for FTL communication

Look on the Los Alamos pre-print for more. This has been a HOT topic for the last few years.

 

[ForceUser]

Good lord. Spooky.

Has anyone else read Michael Chriton's Timeline? I believe this is the technology he used in that book.

 

[bolen]

yea, that is a quote by Einstein. He thought that all physical reality was completely deterministic. Quantum Mechanics throws that idea out on it's ear. Quantum Mechanics is WEIRD to say the least. Much stranger then anything on TV sci-fi plus it is real. Folks are doing precise tests of it and all these "spooky" effects are holding up.

My response is what right do you have to tell nature how she should behave at the realm of the quantum. You only have experience in this macro-scopic world. Not in the world of photons and atoms.

 

[333 Dave]

Good lord. Spooky.

Has anyone else read Michael Chriton's Timeline? I believe this is the technology he used in that book.

Yeah, that was a good book. I noticed the similarities too.

 

[Napftor]

Should the teleportation of matter come to pass, the government that gets it first wins. Bombs wll be zapped into whatever countries defy them and then BOOM. Maybe I've just been DMing too long...I hope.