
Scientist Teleport Matter More Than Three Feet - gibsonf1
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,482264,00.html
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mechanical_fish
Very nifty result, so it's a pity about the lead:

 _Scientists have come a bit closer to achieving the "Star Trek" feat of
teleportation._

This is like me picking up a trowel and claiming that I've come a bit closer
to the feat of moving the moon from one orbit to another.

Words cannot express the loathing I have for the term _quantum teleportation_.
Those of us who have read the _Star Trek Technical Manual_ [1] get the joke,
sort of, but for everyone who doesn't already understand the physics the
metaphor is broken, and now we appear to be stuck with it. It's a shameless
piece of linkbait that also seems _designed_ to confuse the issue: It confuses
the communication of quantum states with the movement of objects, and it
subtly encourages us to think of this phenomenon as a weird, magical, "spooky
action at a distance". ("Action at a distance" is the very definition of
"teleportation".) That's a concept that we need to get _out_ of physics
education. [2]

One of the fun bits of Feynman's _QED_ lectures is his grumbling about names
like _quark_ , which were relatively new when he gave the lectures. He doesn't
seem to have been a fan of the Gell-Mann school of name selection. (Or perhaps
he just enjoyed teasing his colleagues?) But _quark_ turns out not to be so
bad: at least it's an otherwise meaningless word ( _flavor_ and _color_ are
only a little bit worse). But imagine if physicists had chosen to call quarks
"cheerios". Every news article on particle physics would be accompanied by a
photo of some breakfast cereal, and people would keep asking about the milk.

\---

[1] This article really _is_ about a "Heisenberg compensator". That much is
true.

[2] The phrase "spooky action at a distance" is a holdover from Einstein, who
coined it in order to ridicule the concept of quantum entanglement.
Unfortunately, Einstein was wrong: entanglement is real. But he was also
really eloquent, so his argument lives on despite being wrong.

~~~
medearis
You're right -- the teleportation aspect should almost be secondary. I think
the reason the article got stuck with this headline is that it attracts
eyeballs (hey, it got me interested).

The more "hacker" relevant section is the surprisingly accurate section on
quantum computing. If such a computer could be built, it would mean a
breakdown of pretty much all current crypto algorithms.

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jrockway
Fox News is the source? I want to say something about "higher standards" but I
am too dumbfounded to find the words. Fox News. Seriously?

~~~
jerf
Well, since CNN decided science wasn't newsworthy enough to actually spend
money on, what do you expect? There's no reference to the story that a quick
search on CNN will reveal.

Besides, look more closely. It's not FoxNews, it's sourced from LiveScience.
Which I suppose is my cue to cry "No linkjacking!" and cut&paste
[http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/090123-teleportation-...](http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/090123-teleportation-
atoms.html) .

This whole whining thing about Fox News is just ad hominem embedded in a
fashionable, trendy pose. It's still a fallacy. This is better science
reporting than any I've seen on a mainstream site in a long time... precisely
because it's sourced from an actual science site, which puts it rather far
ahead of almost every other mainstream source other than perhaps the NYT.

(I'm not using mainstream as a pejorative here, just a descriptive term.)

~~~
andreyf
How about something, oh, I don't know, _peer reviewed_?

~~~
glymor
Would it not have just been more useful to have looked up the source yourself?

<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/323/5913/486>

If you're wondering why science writers don't normally link to the paper,
often they have pre-embargo access and there's no live link at the time of
posting. They should still give the DOI though.

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electromagnetic
Okay, I understand what they're talking about now. They're not talking about
teleportation, which they've done many times at much more impressive
distances, they're talking about the teleportation of _information_ , which
means you could have near-instantaneous communications between us on Earth and
someone _anywhere_ in the universe.

One end could be in downtown New York and the other end could be in the
Andromeda Galaxy; so long as you transported the entangled particles.

~~~
lisper
No no no no no. No.

<http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf>

~~~
mechanical_fish
This is a great link, _really_ great, and yet I fear it's inadequate to the
task of explaining the situation to a nonphysicist. [1] It makes use of both
(a) bras and kets and (b) a Zen koan. At this point we have abundant
experimental evidence that these things don't help most people.

\---

[1] Not that there aren't plenty of physicists who need help, too.

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tokenadult
Link from better source was posted earlier to HN:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=445528>

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sabat
Since this was covered by Fox News, we must assume that these were creation
scientists transporting matter using the power of prayer.

