"Teleportation," described as "long-distance 'disembodied' transfer" is now claimed to have been achieved
Beam Me Up, Scotty!
That futuristic phrase from the science fiction
television series Star Trek, with actor James Doohan as Scotty, was the command to instantly beam your physical being to another place in the universe like from one star to another or, for all other earthlings that want to stay close to the surface, like traveling from LA to the Big Apple in a fraction of a second.
Guess what? A kind of "teleportation," described as "long-distance 'disembodied' transfer" is
now claimed to have been achieved. The wonders of modern science keep getting weirder by the day. I can already see airline executives shaking in their boots, not to mention the
Hyperloop and "Uber"outfits--already so yesteryear...
Teleportation
Digging a bit deeper into the novel claims by the authors
(Raju Valivarthi, et al.) of that paper in
Nature Photonics, I'm already perplexed by the abstract that states:
Quantum teleportation faithfully transfers a quantum state between distant nodes in a network, which enables revolutionary information-processing applications. This has motivated a tremendous amount of research activity [references omitted]. However, in the past not a single quantum-teleportation experiment has been realized with independent quantum sources, entanglement distribution prior to the Bell-state measurement (BSM) and feedforward operation simultaneously, even in the laboratory environment.
and
This network is robust against noise in the real world with active stabilization strategies, which allows us to realize quantum teleportation with all the ingredients simultaneously.
Ingredients
Obviously, those are what must be the secret to the discovery, the right ingredients of the photons together with their "dis-entanglement." Also, accurate timing seems to be highly critical: a few 0.000000000001
th of a second can make the system fail. To put that into perspective: a beam of light will travel 0.3 mm (0.01 in) in that length of time.
The authors envision their finding to be of significance for a futuristic and secure internet system. Needless to say, I'm a bit doubtful. The
thermal expansion of 1 km of glass fiber alone is already in the order of 10 mm (0.3 in) per degree C, far greater than that required for the system to work.
The real crux though is what has been "teleported."
Pictures vs. Matter
What the paper shows is that
photons could be transmitted along a fiber-optic (FO) cable network. Whoppie-Doo. Isn't that what FO cables are supposed to do in the first place? Already a dozen or more years ago, while traveling through the countryside of Arizona, I saw posts along miles of sand road to advise of the buried FO cable along the road side. Sure enough, enterprising artisans near the mesas were well connected to downtown Big Apple customers via that "quantum teleportation" system of
pictures of their creations. The actual creations (physical matter) still had to be shipped via the available courier system to the buyer.
No "teleportation" invention will ever change that requirement! And as to the photons being "dis-entangled" or not, I'll need to study that in more depth, preferably over a glass of my favored "dis-entangled berry juice" still ripening on entangled vines.
In the meantime, please do not hesitate to call upon Scotty to do his work -- and Safe Travels!
Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser -- Bio and
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Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser is author of CONVENIENT MYTHS, the green revolution – perceptions, politics, and facts Convenient Myths