![]() ![]() (The same also happens to B.) In summary, you would see the original particle A disappear here on Earth, and reappear an instant later on the Moon. There is a price to pay however: the original particle A will be destroyed in the process as it loses all its information and thus also its identity. (I’ve added a green box at the bottom of my original post with a more detailed explanation of the quantum teleportation protocol if you’d like more mathematical detail.) That way, some of A’s information gets shared with B, and since B is entangled with C on the Moon, the information is passed on further to C, enabling C to transform itself into a copy of A. So instead, we entangle A with the other particle B here on Earth. The problem however is that we cannot simply scan A to extract its information (remember Heisenberg?). In order to do this, we somehow need to extract all the information about A, and teleport that information to the Moon, so that C can use it as a kind of blueprint to turn itself into A. Now, the aim of quantum teleportation is to change the identity of the particle C on the Moon and to turn it into an exact replica of A. One of those (B), you would keep here on Earth, while the other one (C) would be send to the Moon. First of all, you would need to generate a pair of entangled particles B and C. Let’s imagine you wanted to teleport a particle (let’s call it A) from the Earth to the Moon. The exact teleportation protocol is a little tricky, so bear with me for a moment. The key to teleportation is to use this entangled pair as a communication channel to transmit the information you want to teleport from one place to another. And yet, somehow the atoms seem to communicate with one another, allowing scientists to teleport information from one place to another. There is no visible connection: no forces, no pulleys, no telephone wires, no nothing. (If you’d like to know more about this mysterious quantum link, don’t hesitate to read my previous post on Bertlmann’s Socks and the Nature of Reality.)Īrtistic depiction of two entangled atoms. “It’s like two people playing dice, each in a different galaxy, and always getting the same result, even though the result is determined by pure chance,” said Rupert Ursin. If you entangle two particles, they will share a magical but invisible bond, such that if one particle gets affected, the other one will feel it too, no matter how far apart they are. But in 1993, a bunch of smart-ass physicists found a way to circumvent Heisenberg’s principle by using something called entanglement.Įntanglement is one of those quirky concepts from quantum mechanics which even Einstein called “spooky”. So for years, scientists believed teleportation was just a science fiction pipe dream. ![]() ![]() You see, there’s this little thing in physics, called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which says that the more accurately you try to scan something, the more you have to disturb it, and the more you will change it, making it fundamentally impossible to extract the information of an object without destroying it entirely. If you don’t want to arrive at your destination with a leg sticking out of your head or your organs inside-out (remember the inside-out baboon in The Fly?), you would of course want to scan yourself accurately enough. “Quantum Teleportation.” Scientific American (April 2000): 50-59. In the future, we might go to a teleport terminal where we would step into a transporter to beam ourselves to whatever destination we’d like. No more traffic jams or airport security lines. ![]()
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