
First Teleportation From One Macroscopic Object to Another - Anon84
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/507531/first-teleportation-from-one-macroscopic-object-to-another/
======
petercooper
I'd always wondered what it must feel like to be faced with a radical new set
of ideas, for example, people 80-120 years ago with the "atomic" age. I feel
that total confusion with this. Many of the ideas around atoms have been
simplified enough for schoolchildren to understand now. I wonder if
schoolchildren in 100 years from now will find quantum mechanics and
instantaneous transportation similarly rudimentary and easy to understand.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
> _I wonder if schoolchildren in 100 years from now will find quantum
> mechanics and instantaneous transportation similarly rudimentary and easy to
> understand._

They will. And, to some extent, they will be wrong. There's nothing
rudimentary about a nuclear reactor, yet indeed the basic concepts are now
available for a bright primary school student to grasp.

I think we just got better at creating a more accessible mythology that stands
in place of rigorous math for the laypeople.

~~~
doctoboggan
I would not call it mythology, instead I would use the term analogy.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
Right. Well, what I had in mind was the huge pile of sterile discussions on
topics such as black holes, speed of light, quantum mechanics, etc, that one
could see all the time on... well... just about any forum online. And most of
the comments during such a discussion are... I would not even call them
"wrong", you'd need at least some relation to reality to earn this badge.
They're more like pure fantasy, unhinged.

For those people, modern science has replaced mythology.

But I agree with you. Pop science, correctly done, is heavily indebted to
analogy.

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monochromatic
> a demonstration that paves the way towards quantum routers and a quantum
> internet

I can already tell that this article is going to be ridiculous fluff without
even reading past the headline.

~~~
mikegirouard
The last line is right on par too…

> None of those challenges seem like showstoppers. Which means that practical
> quantum routers and the quantum internet that relies on them are just around
> the corner.

Seems like quite a statement to make.

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tokenizer
I've been hearing about qubits for awhile now and don't really understand the
significance of having quantum entanglement in a network. Can you entangle
multiple clients in a mesh, and add or remove entanglements? Is that even
possible in the future with this?

Or can you manufacture entanglement with each connection, where you initiate
the entanglement with a client, and maintain that connection during transport?
I'm really just curious if you can use this technology, and literally replace
the methods of connections and transport as we use them now, or if this is
simply a single function method.

~~~
Xcelerate
Two cool things:

1) You can have perfectly encrypted communication that no one can eavesdrop on
(not even theoretically).

2) You can transmit twice as much classical information using superdense
coding: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdense_coding>

~~~
droithomme
> You can have perfectly encrypted communication that no one can eavesdrop on
> (not even theoretically).

That is an interesting observation because there is a flip side to it. I can
sell you some ordinary looking gear that contains a quantum entanglement based
eavesdropper. You can have your device in a cave 20 miles below the earth's
surface in a bunker running off diesel generators, with no connections outside
the bunker, and here I am, watching everything you do.

~~~
ZoFreX
Can someone with a greater understanding of quantum physics chime in here - is
this correct?

~~~
btilly
It is not correct. Quantum entanglement is easy to break, and once broken will
not re-establish on its own.

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Osmium
Note that this is "teleportation" of quantum information and not teleportation
of matter. To the layman, referring to this sort of thing as teleportation
seems a bit misleading to me.

~~~
maushu
I concur, but still, instant teleportation of information? Awesome.

No more lag because of distance, no wires, no radiation... the future is going
to be awesome.

I wonder, since this experimented worked on macroscopic scale, it will
possible to transmit "energy"?

~~~
derekdahmer
Quantum teleportation does not allow for faster-than-light information
transition.

While changing particle A makes particle B change, the second's information
can't be understood without transmitting a third piece of information from A
to B.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation#A_summary>

~~~
olalonde
Does that mean that Quantum teleportation will never have practical
applications? If you need to send a third piece of information at the speed of
light or slower, why not send all your information through that channel?

~~~
joeyespo
From what I've been reading it's mostly for security, not speed. Using Quantum
teleportation, nobody can get any useful data from intercepting that third
piece of information.

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jeremyarussell
I need to catch up on my quantum physics, every time I read that someone
pulled off quantum teleportation I'm disappointed when I read the line "here
we realize quantum teleportation between two remote atomic-ensemble quantum
memory nodes, each composed of 100 million rubidium atoms and connected by a
150-meter optical fiber" taken from the source article.
<http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.2892>

I know there's a difference between what they did and regular fiber optics. It
just doesn't seem to be quite the same. Can it be done without the
interconnecting material? If not it's really useless. When I picture practical
uses of quantum teleportation I picture things like rovers instantly sending
data and receiving instructions.

~~~
mistercow
>When I picture practical uses of quantum teleportation I picture things like
rovers instantly sending data and receiving instructions.

That won't happen. It's impossible to transmit classical information faster
than light via quantum teleportation. You don't necessarily have to have
"interconnecting material", but there will always have to be a classical
information channel, and that will always be light-speed bound.

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sravfeyn
I have question that suits the context.

Will Quantum Teleportation, if possible, let us reduce, if not remove, the
hardware for communications? As in, there will be no need for giant fiber-
optic cables or wireless routers?

~~~
jcfrei
no, there's still a huge confusion out there towards what constitutes quantum
teleportation. all I can say as a layman is that this title is very
misleading, you still need a standard information channel to transport the
information about a single qubit. wikipedia has more:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation>

------
leeoniya
I wonder if in 50 years only quantum physicists will truly understand how
technology works. Perhaps the days of cheap tinkering with electronics are
numbered, in the future requiring multi-million dollar quantum labs.

~~~
jakeonthemove
I think it'll be more akin to the situation with through hole and SMD
components. The former allowed one to tinker with PCBs with a simple soldering
iron, while the latter require a reworking station no matter what you want to
do.

Thankfully, these stations have dropped in price _a lot_ \- you can easily buy
a good one for ~$200-300, which would allow you to repair your phone, modify
your motherboard, resolder memory chips and whatnot...

~~~
steve_b
I have a rework station but almost never use it for SMT. I find a good pair of
tweezers and chip quik makes working SMT easy and fast.

[http://www.digikey.ca/product-detail/en/EROPAASA/EROPAASA-
ND...](http://www.digikey.ca/product-detail/en/EROPAASA/EROPAASA-ND/114196)
[http://www.digikey.ca/product-detail/en/SMD4.5NL/SMD4.5NL-
ND...](http://www.digikey.ca/product-detail/en/SMD4.5NL/SMD4.5NL-ND/1164267)

~~~
jakeonthemove
I've broken and overheated countless SMDs with tweezers - I guess my hands are
too shaky for this kind of work :-)

------
blahpro
That closing line is a bit optimistic: “Which means that practical quantum
routers and the quantum internet that relies on them are just around the
corner.”

~~~
bproctor
I'd guess it's a pretty big corner

~~~
mitchty
I'll peg it at the perpetual 5 years away corner.

------
hcarvalhoalves
I have no idea how this whole thing works (quantum mechanics, entanglement,
"teleportation"), still there are news all over saying it's the future.

I shouldn't need a degree in Physics to understand how it works. Is it really
that complicated and magical, or is it still so barely understood that no one
can explain in simple terms?

Anyone feels the same?

~~~
asayers
It depends how deep an understanding you want. You don't need a degree in
Physics, but if you want anything more than a superficial idea then you do
need degree-level knowledge of the necessary maths and physics.

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
I don't need a degree in Physics to understand Newton's laws, even though I
couldn't derive these laws on my own. Heck, the explanation fits in three
lines, and it explains a ton of things.

That's the kind of understanding I mean. It seems there isn't one concise,
simple explanation for these effects. I wonder if it's because the reasoning
behind it is _that_ complex that you need to resort to esoteric math and
abstractions (in which case, the current theories might be crude, Occam's
razor and all), or if it's because no one truly comprehends it enough to
explain concisely.

By the way, I picked up Leonard Susskind's lectures to watch. It was all fine
up to special relativity - his explanation about frames of reference was so
obvious, it just made sense. After that, though, nothing made sense anymore.

~~~
asayers
Newton's Laws fit into three lines because most of us are already familiar
with the integral concepts: force, mass, inertial reference frames, etc. The
concepts involved in quantum mechanics are fairly alien to most people, so
explaining the theory takes longer. The fundamentals of orthodox QM can be fit
into three principles: 1) The Time-Dependent Schrödinger Equation; 2) The
Time-Independent Schrödinger Equation; and 3) The Born Rule. Even writing
these out in full doesn't take long. Explaining what they mean, however, can
take a while.

Frames of reference are fairly obvious in SR. In General Relativity they're
more non-trivial.

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simpleshadow
I've written about an alternative "teleportation" method in what I call a
Teleroom: <http://www.thenureality.com/the-teleroom>

I get excited about the potential of replicating data of physical things. :D

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sravfeyn
Many of the ground-breaking research and the research papers I study for my
Physics term papers originate from Chinese Scientists. I just mean Chinese
Scientists appear more frequently and this is a perfect example.

~~~
freehunter
China isn't the only one conducting this kind of ground breaking research, but
they do put a lot of money into it. I don't have any numbers, but I wouldn't
be surprised if China's investment in research was higher than most other
research countries.

------
confluence
Can someone with physics knowledge tell me the difference between quantum
entanglement and the following example:

2 pens spinning in exact opposition, one clockwise the other anticlockwise,
are hurled from a space ship in opposite directions. You do not look at them
when you are doing this. When a pen is found light years away, that person
instantly knows how the pen on the other side of the universe is spinning and
in what phase.

No teleportation has actually taken place. Information has not been
transferred faster than the speed of light. This assumes that pens travel
through empty space and do not interact with things that would affect their
rotation or movement.

~~~
ccozan
I'll venture for an answer: none. The moment you decide to check for a pen,
you sealed his fate ( ie. which rotation it has ) and also of the other pen.
So to say, you collapsed his wave. Kind of a Schroedinger's cat experiment.

The reason you know about the both pens in the moment you look at them is,
well, because they are "entangled". But no information has been sent. You had
this information all along with you, bound by the space-time and it's C speed
limit.

~~~
confluence
So is it's an ok analogy then (obviously heavily simplified)?

~~~
asayers
No, it's actually quite different.

The scenario you outlined is quite important and actually has a name: it's the
"Bertlmann's Socks" thought experiment, and if you want to read about it I'd
seriously recommend the paper by the great J S Bell[1].

To use the language of your example, both pens begin in a superposition of
clockwise and anti-clockwise. It's _not_ the case that each pen has a
particular spin value, and that we're simply unaware of which has which. The
pens _really are_ in a superposition.

Until, that is, a measurement is made on one of them. At this point the joint
pen-pen system collapses and both pens have determinate spin values. The
nature of the entanglement ensures that those spin values are different.

The notion that quantum-entangled particles could have well-defined properties
that we're just ignorant of was actually pretty popular in the early days of
quantum mechanics. In fact, the theory was put forward by Einstein, among
others. As it turns out, however, that we can test for this. The tests have
been done, and it seems Einstein was wrong on this one.

[1]: J. S. Bell (1980), "Bertlmann's Socks and the Nature of Reality"

~~~
confluence
Cool. But what if the two pens are spun randomly in a box by say a random
number generator spinner (each is pen is still anti-correlated - you just
don't get the spin) - such that you do not know that what state they are in
(superposition?). Then, probabilistically, they are both clockwise and anti-
clockwise - until of course you look at it, a point at which they "snap" to a
specific spin (which they already were in? You just didn't know it yet).
Wouldn't that give you your unpredictable states.

I'm sorry if this sounds stupid - I just want to understand.

~~~
asayers
It's not stupid - the difference between uncertainty and superposition is
subtle. Let's simplify to the case of one pen.

Say the pen is spun in the box by a classical random number generator. You
don't know which way the pen is spinning, but you do know that it's either
been spun one way or the other. You might say that the probability of finding
it spinning clockwise when you open the box is 1/2.

Now say the pen is prepared in a superposition of the two spin states, again
in the box. As before, we might say that the probability of discovering the
pen spinning clockwise is 1/2. However, this time we the probability isn't
generated by our lack of knowledge: we know exactly what state then pen is in.
When we open the box, however, the pen will change instantly to the state of
spinning clockwise, or the state of spinning anti-clockwise.

In the quantum case, the probability is an expression of what we think _will_
happen to the pen, not what we think _has_ happened to it.

It is hard to grasp, and harder still to believe. There is, however, good
reason for thinking that, sometimes, the pen changed just as we opened the
box.

~~~
confluence
I see - superposition and uncertainty are distinct concepts that should be
thought of differently.

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javert
Page doesn't seem to be loading right for me. There is no content, just
surrounding boilerplate (like links to other articles).

~~~
46Bit
It's a webfont not loading for you I suspect.

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ta12121
<http://xkcd.com/465/>

