Sick of those Frenzied Morning School Drop-offs?
In 1998, physicists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), along with two European groups, made IBM’s teleportation theory a reality by successfully teleporting a photon — a particle of energy that carries light. In order to carry out the experiment, the Caltech group had to skirt a little something called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. As any boxed, quantum-state feline will tell you, this principle states that you cannot simultaneously know the location and the momentum of a particle. As predicted, condo for sale bangkok the original photon no longer existed once the replica appeared. The Caltech team read the atomic structure of a photon, sent this information across 3.28 feet (about 1 meter) of coaxial cable and created a replica of the photon on the other side.
As with all technologies, scientists will surely continue to improve upon the underlying concepts of teleportation. Explore the links on the next page to learn even more about quantum physics and teleportation. One day, such a harsh vision of life, death and teleportation may well seem barbaric and uninformed. Our ancestors may feel their bodies fade and dematerialize on one world, even as their eyes open on a planet untold light-years away.
Teleportation is one of those “Frankenstein” technologies that terrify us even as they inspire us. It could ultimately guarantee the survival of the human race and its peripheral technologies could change fundamentally what it is to be human. Surely, the power to travel instantaneously from New York to Bangkok or from Earth to Alpha Centauri is certainly a power worth grasping after. After all, if a machine can digitize everything that’s you and rebuild it on the other side of the planet, then why bother with a perfect copy?
This revelation, first announced by Bennett at an annual meeting of the American Physical Society in March 1993, was followed by a report on his findings in the March 29, 1993, issue of Physical Review Letters. Teleportation experiments cause quite the mess in science fiction, producing inside-out baboons, gene-spliced monsters and dematerialized madmen like nobody’s business. In reality, however, the experiments are thus far abomination-free and overall quite promising. The work continues today, as researchers combine elements of telecommunications, transportation and quantum physics in astounding ways. Since that time, experiments using photons have proven that quantum teleportation is, in fact, possible.
