Teleportation is
defined as, “The ability to move from one location to another without
physically occupying time or space in between” (Wikipedia, Teleportation). This
action involves dematerializing an object which will be transported, and then, getting
and sending the atomic configuration to another location where it will be
reconstructed.
We need to understand the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to understand
teleportation. This principle states that you can’t know the location and speed
of a particle at the same time. The Uncertainty Principle has been the main
barrier for teleportation for many years, but the Caltech group in charge of
this research was able to get around it.
First, we need to know that in March 1993, the physicist Charles Bennett
along with IBM said that quantum teleportation was possible by copying the
object to be transported and destroying the original one. Since the 29th
of that same month, when they made a report in the Physical Review Letters,
experiments have been made using photons -a particle of energy that carries
light- and it’s been proven to be possible. There have been a couple of groups such
as Caltech that have made some experiments. In 1998 the Caltech group successfully
teleported photons across 1 meter, but how? They used a phenomenon called
entanglement which needs three photons to achieve teleportation. This
phenomenon basically needs (1) a photon to be transported, (2) a carrier photon
and (3) a receiver photon. The information from photon 1 will be passed onto
photon 3, creating an exact copy of photon 1. Photon 2 needs to entangle to
photon 1 to carry the information and then this new photon will entangle with
photon 3 to make a new photon 1 with the information from entangled photon 2,1.
This all sounds
like such beautiful technology will be in our hands some time soon but not so
fast. If we want to teleport bigger things, it becomes a little more complex.
For instance, the dream of humankind, transporting ourselves, would need a
machine to analyze every single atom in our body which is made up of around 1028atoms, which is more than a
trillion trillion atoms. Then we would have to send that information to the
destination and there should be another machine which will reconstruct us
exactly as we are. There is no room for mistakes; a millimeter of error would
lead to neurological, physical or even psychological defects. And there is one
other theory that suggests we should combine teleportation with genetic cloning
digitization.
“In this bio-digital cloning,
tele-travelers would have to die, in a sense. Their original mind and body
would no longer exist. Instead, their atomic structure would be recreated in
another location, and digitization would recreate the travelers' memories,
emotions, hopes and dreams. So the travelers would still exist, but they would
do so in a new body, of the same atomic structure as the original body, programmed
with the same information.”
There are other applications in which we could make
good use of quantum teleportation, one of them is that we can actually improve
the way we see telecommunication nowadays. In 2002, researchers at the
Australian National University were able to teleport a laser beam. This leads us to the concept of
quantum computing which will lead us to develop networks that would be
able to work with information at unimaginable speeds. So imagine opening any kind of website or
watching your favorite videos on you tube, any kind of information we send or
download on internet nowadays would have not to be carried anymore but
teleported. We don’t need to wait too much time until we see normal Internet
becoming “Quantum Net.”
Sources: science.howstuffworks.com, How
Teleportation Will Work
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleportation
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