Teleportation...???

Discussion in 'Physics & Math' started by JimmyJames, May 20, 2001.

  1. kmguru Staff Member

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    Spacegate

    Is there anything in quantum physics that prevents us building a stargate like contraption at say Los Angeles and Newyork connected by an optical data network such that you step into the Los Angeles booth and a few millisecond later step out at New York?
     
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  3. 01001010 ... unique ... Registered Senior Member

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    instead of this de-construction/re-construction, we should be thinking of other methods, such as spatial warping. Like inthe movie Event Horizon, they used gravity to bend space. So that the shortest distance wasn't a strait line, the shortest distance was nothing. All you have to do is bend space so that the distance between the two points is lessened or even close to non-existant for that period of time.

    It's not as complicated as taking someone apart atom by atom and then putting them back together somewhere else, and worrying about if the "conscienceness" will be intact or if all the atoms were assembled correctly.

    This way, you don't have to worry about that. All you do is reduce the distance, not breeak down matter to it's smallest form.

    Black holes bend space all the time so it theoretically is possible.
     
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  5. Crisp Gone 4ever Registered Senior Member

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    Spacegate & black holes

    Hi all,

    kmguru:
    There are no real constraints. The issues to address in this kind of technology are mostly practical ones... Like preventing data gets lost, not quite a good idea

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    01001010:

    The idea has been put forward a couple of times for all sorts of problems (FTL, intergalaxian exploration, ...) but unfortunately warping space and time has far more problems than the current "teleportation" idea's. For example: how would you prevent your wormhole from collapsing ? It takes quite a lot of energy (read: more than the entire earth could deliver). To form a wormhole you would need black holes. I don't think many people would appreciate a black hole being put in New York and another in Los Angeles for teleportation reasons

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    Bye!

    Crisp
     
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  7. wet1 Wanderer Registered Senior Member

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    From Newscientist:

    From here to there
    Will we ever be able to teleport people to faraway places? It all depends on the strange uncertainties of the quantum world
    TO A classically trained physicist, perhaps the most galling aspect of the quantum world is the way that nothing seems real until it is measured. Suppose you want to know something about a quantum particle - say the polarisation of a photon of light. Before you make the measurement, the photon isn't really polarised in a particular direction. Instead, it has a ghostly range of possible polarisations, each with some probability of being measured. When you measure the photon's polarisation you will get a definite answer. But the snag is, all the other ghostly possibilities will vanish in the process, and the original, indefinite state is lost forever.
    So the act of measuring a particle actually destroys some of the information about its pristine state. That would seem to make it practically impossible to copy such particles and reproduce them elsewhere. But ironically, one of the quantum world's strange tricks turns this argument on its head. It turns out that you can re-create an unmeasured quantum state - as long as you are prepared to sacrifice the original. The trick exploits the very uncertainty that makes quantum measurements so puzzling in the first place.
    It was the physicist Charles Bennett from IBM's labs at Yorktown Heights in New York who introduced the world to the idea of quantum teleportation in 1993 - in theory that is. Bennett and his co-workers found a way for an imaginery character called Alice to teleport a particle to her friend Bob, some distance away. What happens is that Bob creates a particle in exactly the same state as Alice's original particle - even though Alice never knew what that state was.
    Suppose Alice and Bob wanted to copy a photon. Alice can't just measure her photon and send the results to Bob, because that would destroy some of the information Bob needs. Fortunately, quantum theory has a more subtle means of communication. An extra pair of "entangled" photons opens up the teleportation channel between Alice and Bob.
    According to quantum theory, you can tangle up a pair of photons so that their properties are inextricably linked. This holds true even if you send them to opposite ends of the Earth: measure one photon at the North Pole and you immediately determine the state of the other photon at the South Pole.
    Perplexed? You're in good company. In fact, Albert Einstein and his younger colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen dreamt up this photon scenario to show just how absurd and unacceptable quantum mechanics was. It appears to demand the impossible - measurements in one place producing an instantaneous effect somewhere else. Ironically, experiments have shown that "EPR" pairs of particles do indeed communicate in this "spooky" (Einstein's word) fashion. More of this later. For now there's Alice and Bob's problem to solve.
    Alice has an unmeasured, pristine photon that she wants to teleport to Bob. First, she creates a pair of linked EPR photons, keeping one with her while sending the other off to Bob. She then arranges for her unmeasured photon to interact with her EPR photon, measures the result of that interaction, and sends the answer on to Bob the old-fashioned way - by phone, e-mail, fax or carrier pigeon.
    And now the mysterious part. Bob receives Alice's message, and depending on what it says, performs some prearranged operation on his EPR photon - the other half of the entangled pair that Alice created. For instance, he might change the polarisation of his photon by an amount that depends on the information Alice sent him. At the end of this procedure, Bob's photon has become an exact replica of Alice's original unmeasured photon. The quantum state of that photon - although not the photon itself - has been teleported from Alice to Bob.
    What's going on here? Well, to re-create the photon - to teleport it - you need to transmit two kinds of information about its state. One kind is the ordinary, everyday information. That's the easy part. You can measure it and send the details by an ordinary route. But what about the quantum information - the stuff that disappears when you make your measurement? The trick to transmitting this lies in the secret, spooky connection between Alice and Bob's EPR photons. By persuading her unknown photon to interact with her EPR photon, Alice made Bob's EPR photon, the other half of the entangled pair, interact with the unknown photon as well.
    Via the spooky EPR channel, Bob therefore receives some strange, quantum information about the state of the photon Alice wants to teleport. That's not the whole story though, because Alice also has to measure something about the interaction of her two photons, and send the result to Bob. But if all is done correctly, Bob receives a combination of spooky quantum information and plain old classical information that allows him to reproduce Alice's original unknown photon.
    Not surprisingly, this is an extremely tricky experiment to get right. The joint measurement that Alice makes on the unknown photon and her EPR photon must be carefully designed and executed. Alice and Bob have to ensure the EPR photons remain absolutely untouched by any unwanted external interaction. If either photon were to bump into a stray atom somewhere along the way, for instance, that would destroy their spooky connection. But last year two teams of scientists, one at the University of Innsbruck and the other at the University of Rome, managed to teleport a photon. From one side of their lab to another, anyway.
    There are a few interesting provisos about this process. First, Alice has to send Bob the results of her measurements by a standard, slower-than-light means, so even though the spooky part of teleportation is instantaneous, the equally essential non-spooky part is not. Quantum teleporting can't happen faster than light, something Einstein would be pleased to learn. Second, Alice's measurement destroys the quantum state of her original photon. Third, neither Alice nor Bob will ever actually know what that original quantum state was. Directly measuring a quantum state will always destroy information about it in an unpredictable way. Alice can teleport a quantum state to Bob only on the strict understanding that neither party can ever know exactly what state they teleported.
    But what does all of this mean for Star Trek style teleportation, where an entire person is transported from one place to another? Certain difficulties spring to mind. To teleport a collection of atoms, rather than just a single photon, the EPR channel of communication has to transmit not just one item of spooky quantum information but a whole package of it. This requires not just a large number of individual EPR pairs, which would be bad enough, but a single EPR complex encompassing a huge number of particles. It would be well nigh impossible to construct such a state, let alone send it off into the ether without destroying its integrity.
    And that's not at all. To teleport Jean-Luc Picard, you would have to send a complete specification of the collective quantum state of every last electron and atom in his body - all in an instant. A tall order. Alice would have to devise a single, instantaneous measurement that would ensnare all this information at once, and Bob would have to perform a similarly complex reconstruction at the other end. And suppose you destroy Jean-Luc Picard's quantum representation in one place and re-create it in another. Would the reconstruction be, in every respect, the same man? Would it act as the original would have acted? That's for you to figure out...
     
  8. kmguru Staff Member

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    11,757
    Crisp:

    Elsewhere I wrote: Somewhere I read, according to physicist Julian Barbour, and Wheeler-DeWitt equation, TIME does not exist. Even the Universe is too small. We live in Platonia, where every instance lives forever. (Plato argued that reality is composed of eternal and changeless forms...). The impression of motion only arises due to a special structure of our perception...

    Some think, that when physicists finally iron out a new theory of the universe, both time and space may not be included...


    Do you think Julian's theory can help our teleportation problem?
     
  9. thecurly1 Registered Senior Member

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    1,024
    The only thing reasonably close to teleportation would be creating a wormhole as a shortcut between two points.

    Splitting us up, transfereing us and putting us back together is virutally imposible.
     
  10. Crisp Gone 4ever Registered Senior Member

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    1,339
    Hi all,

    Wet1,

    Interesting article: it addresses the fundamental problem of creating an exact replica of a particle/photon at a location different than the original. However, I don't think quantummechanics will prevent us from teleporting objects/humans from one location to another.

    The article even mentions why: the ordinary information they talk about (position, momentum, ...) is exactly the information relevant for our discussion. You don't really need all the hidden quantumstates to reconstruct an object at a given location since even looking at a particle destroys all the quantumstates except one, the result of your measurement - so the hidden quantumstates don't carry any real useful information (they do from a theoretical point of view

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    ).

    One argument you might use is that a particle can have several energies at once (yes, this is quantummechanics - scary huh) and that this information might get lost during the replication process. Quantum mechanics tells you that a given particle can have a spreaded energy about one mean energy value. Statistically speaking, this is not really a problem at all: you will be succesful in getting most of the energylevels about right in your replica. There's one unfortunate - luckily statistically neglegible - situation that might arise: during the measuring of the energy of the original particles, you might get too high values for all particles (since quantum measurements have a "random" character), leading to a copy that has all the energy levels of the particles mixed up - possibly leading to an explosion of the replica or similar, not quite good for a human being transported.

    Even some mismatches in energylevels are not really a problem. The "spreading" in the energy of particles increases rapidly as time evolves, so you'll find your particle back in almost 100% its original energy distribution right after the teleportation.


    kmguru,

    Could you give me a bit more information on this (source you got it from would be a good start I guess) ? To be honest I have never heard of Barbour or the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. But to claim that time and motion are only because of human senses makes no .. sense ... to me: that would lead to some very wierd idea's. For example: a plant grows, even when nobody is looking at it - but if time and motion are related to perception, then this plant must have some sort of perception ? I think I got the idea wrong somewhere though

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    (but hey, it's 4am here so everything seems improbable and not plausible at the moment)

    Bye!

    Crisp
     
  11. HOWARDSTERN HOWARDSTERN has logged out.... Registered Senior Member

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    Fascinating! Pure energy!
     
  12. kmguru Staff Member

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    11,757
    Crisp:

    Here is the reference. You have to go to discover.com site to collect the article from the back issue.

    DISCOVER Vol. 21 No. 12 (December 2000)
    Table of Contents

    From Here to Eternity
    Imagine a universe with no past or future, where time is an illusion and everyone is immortal. Welcome to that world, says physicist Julian Barbour
    By Tim Folger

    Let me know, what you think.

    Thanks

    (I can PM you that article if you could not find it on the net or library)
     
    Last edited: Aug 28, 2001
  13. Amelia Registered Member

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    1
    Does anyone know how to teleport, me and my friends are doing a reaserch project on how to teleport. Can anyone help?
     
  14. superluminal I am MalcomR Valued Senior Member

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    I do. I'll be there in a second... Hang on...
     
  15. superluminal I am MalcomR Valued Senior Member

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    Apparently we're time travelling too...
     
  16. jayleew Who Cares Valued Senior Member

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    Unfortunately, your body is crushed into comso dust at the speed of light, but hey, it's a killer ride!

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    Seriously, the thought process is far from being understood. It really is a miracle how everything works together with accuracy and precision. At this point, we may be able to transport our bodies, but that's it.

    Interesting theory to bend space, isn't it. I wonder how much energy you need to do that?
     
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  18. kmguru Staff Member

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    11,757
    I had a dream that I was involved in a company that developed teleportation. I supported financially to develop the contraption. The last name of the person in charge was "Davis". It had a platform and a keypad to go to the other platform. I can not remember the details as to how it was done. I am hoping to dream again and get some clue...but apparently in the dream we found habitable planets from probes sent from Earth. That means, it is a long way down the road....
     
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  20. kmguru Staff Member

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    I wonder if we could put together bits and pieces from our members who have similar dreams to see if in fact dreams provide an window to the future....just a thought...
     
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  22. rlpete2 Registered Member

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    13
    Well, there are problems with the idea:

    1. Star Trek-style transporter:

    a. At present, we understand that it is not possible to determine simultneously the location and vector of a subatomic particle. Therefor, if your body were broken down and analyzed, to reconstruct at a remote location, the receiving device might put the atoms in the right spot, but the motions of components would be random - the electrons might be going the wrong way - and you would be dead.

    b. Were such a process possible, it would permit the reconstruction of multiple copies of you. That would raise significant ethical and legal issues, such as: which one of you owns your house?

    2. Spacewarp - wormhole:

    a. Wormholes exist only in theory, that they are possible. Unlike black holes, none have yet been observed.

    b. Creating or controling a wormhole would require energy on the scale of at least a medium sized black hole.

    c. Considering that black holes rip material objects to pieces, it seems unlikely that a meterial object could go through a wormhole in any form but disorganized energy.

    d. The closest thing to a space warp that has been observed is the gravitational lensing of light by a massive object. The bending is very slight, not enough to bring distant places into proximity.

    3. That leaves one remaining possibility, the organic approach: Just the right combination of tequila, jalapenos and certain illegal herbs has been known to give the perception of mobility through time, space and states of mind. Be sure to order pizza ahead of time, as you will be very hungry when you get back.
     

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