Science & Health News

[toddao]

Quantum Teleporting

http://www.khouse.org/articles/2002/388/
The first actual teleporting experiment has now been reported in the scientific journal, Nature , by Anton Zeilinger and colleagues at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.2?? (Another research team, based in Rome, has done similar work and submitted its report to another journal.)? The work is the first to demonstrate "quantum teleportation," a bizarre shifting of physical characteristics between nature's tiniest particles, no matter how far apart they are.

"Scientists might be able to achieve teleportation between complete atoms within a few years and molecules within a decade or so," Zeilinger has speculated.?

The technique is still a long way away from the Star Trek process of beaming people around, but it raises the question, "Could teleportation be used on people?"? Could scientists extract information from every tiny particle in a person, transfer it to a bunch of particles elsewhere, and then assemble those particles into an exact replica of the person? There's no theoretical problem with that, several experts have suggested.? But get real: "I think it's quite clear that anything approximating teleportation of complex living beings, even bacteria, is so far away technologically that it's not really worth thinking about it," claimed IBM physicist Charles H. Bennett. He and other physicists had proposed quantum teleportation as early as 1993. "There would just be too much information to assemble and transmit," he and others have said.?

Well, we'll see.? (Is it just a question of bandwidth?) But there are other applications.