Spooky Action at a Distance….Cool
The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They also teleported the information a distance of half a meter but believe it can be extended further.
“Teleportation between two single atoms had been done two years ago by two teams but this was done at a distance of a fraction of a millimeter,” Polzik, of the Danish National Research Foundation Center for Quantum Optics, explained. “Our method allows teleportation to be taken over longer distances because it involves light as the carrier of entanglement,” he added.
Quantum entanglement involves entwining two or more particles without physical contact.
cnn
Einstein didn’t bleieve in entanglement. He was wrong.
The problem posed by this weird action at a distance is that it can, and has, violate the principle that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Which is potentially the real significance of today’s announcement. While it is unlikely that we will be saying “beam me up Scotty” anytime soon, we may have ultra secure, faster than light ways of sending information from here to, say, Mars. Which would be a huge step in the real battle to get off this planet and out into the solar system and, later, the stars.
Written by jay on October 5th, 2006 with
1 comment.
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#1. December 15th, 2006, at 11:00 PM.
They said that light is the carrier of the entaglement. Doesn’t that mean the information can’t travel faster than light?
Even if the action can seem to operate faster than the speed of light, that doesn’t necessarily mean we can use it to send information. There are materials with indices of refraction less than one, but even though a light pulse actually exits the material before it enters it, no information can be transmitted that way.