Traditionally, the crux of teleportation has been its seeming contradiction of the Uncertainty Principle, which states that you can never measure and thus know all the information contained within an atom (the more you measure, the more you disturb, until the thing no longer looks like what you started with). Without knowing the make-up of the original object, how could you replicate it across space?
The answer is spooky, or to be precise, spooky action at a distance. In a (vastly oversimplified) nutshell, this spooky action describes the ability of a particle to influence the state of another particle without these particles ever having any measurable interaction. In other words, particles separated by space know things about each other they should not.
This has allowed the following procedure:
Particle A is scanned and thus changed, but the information gleaned is transferred spookily to a new particle B, which has had no contact with A. Based on the information it picks up, particle B becomes an exact replica of particle A (but since particle A was completely farked—not to be confused with FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—the procedure is technically teleportation and not replication).
If you want to severely damage your frontal lobe, consider that this procedure actually requires the intercession of a third particle, C, which acts as an information carrier, but must visit particle B (the result) BEFORE visiting particle A (the model), and thus transmits its information backward in time.
Yes, this is very, very spooky. But, according to IBM researchers, the technique has been used in the lab to teleport photons, coherent light fields, nuclear spins and trapped ions. The application of EPR entanglement is also seen as a promising step toward a quantum computer or Internet.Join me every Monday morning for more grandtastic goodies from The Geeks' Guide to World Domination. Or if you like your geekery delivered fresh, consider subscribing to my rss feed or joining my Facebook Fan Page.
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