Scientists Achieve First Ever Quantum Teleportation
- Thread starter BlameTheWizards
- Start date
Actually, I can see stock markets being one of the first things to take an interest in this technology if they ever manage to develop it properly. Even a micro-second matters for them.J Tyran said:
Next to that, this has apparently interesting implications for things like cryptography and data tapping which sounds like something quite a bit more important at this point.
It has interesting implications for cryptography. You can have an utterly random key that both sides know and becomes useless if intercepted.iseko said:
J Tyran said:
The thing about this if it can be gotten to a working point is that is would be point to point, so no infrastructure is needed. Their are no wires that need to be put into the ground, you would just have two boxes that talk to each-other at any distance.
I think I preferred our old "almost uselessly shallow" style of science reporting to this new "actually false and incredibly misleading" flavor. It's one thing to restate an article in simpler terms, but its quite another to add your own input and speculation regarding a subject you don't know anything about and propagate misunderstanding amongst your readers. That's the opposite of reporting.BlameTheWizards said:
For one thing, as has already been said many times, that's not how entanglement works. It doesn't allow transmission of information faster than the speed of light, that would break causality. Less crucially, Google Fiber is called "fast" because it has high bandwidth, or volume of data it transfers over time, not because the data actually moves faster.
I get that this is exciting, but you have a job to do. Report.
But wait! Couldn't this still be used to transmit data? Imagine I had 2 pairs of entangled particles, and I gave you one of each pair. In their current form they are both grey (indeterminate), but each corresponds to a certain outcome of an event. Could a person on one end not send information about that event by "peeking" at one of the particles and thus collapsing the paired particle on the other end? Sure, you may not be able choose whether a given particle will be white or black, but you can choose which pair of particles to collapse.GabeZhul said:
Unless there's no way of knowing whether a particle has already been collapsed, in which case I really don't see how quantum entanglement is any different at all than a pair of marbles.
Unfortunately there is no way to know weather a particle is still entangled or not, because any measurement you take would collapse it. Picture you have two boxes with two colored lights in each alternating lighting up extremely fast with the other box alternating at the same rate but always the opposite color. If any one peeks into either box the lights in both boxes instantly freeze on whatever color they are on. Because the lights are in a box if you open one the other person does not know if the lights have stopped alternating or not. The only way to observe the light is to open the box, which action would of course trigger the stop it's self.Olas said:
Interesting, but I have a hard time getting excited about scientific breakthroughs like this that have little or no practical application in the present. In part because of the point others have made, that if this does turn out to be useful it will just be blocked by the powers that be. Most of the industries that would be most revolutionized by this seem likely to oppose it to retain their current infrastructure. Honestly, had I made this discovery I probably would have kept it under wraps, developed a product, and worked to get it out there before fully announcing how I did something so it wouldn't be as easy to trap the cat in a bag (so to speak).
That said, if this can be made to work practically, my first thought for the communications technology would be to use it on satellites and remote controlled vehicles sent to other planets, in order to cut down on the transmission lag and reporting. Being able to put something down on Mars for example that is able to act and react in real time would be... huge.
That said, if this can be made to work practically, my first thought for the communications technology would be to use it on satellites and remote controlled vehicles sent to other planets, in order to cut down on the transmission lag and reporting. Being able to put something down on Mars for example that is able to act and react in real time would be... huge.
To be fair I'm pretty tired (and I still haven't really slept since I wrote this). I only skimmed the discussion but to me it seemed like most people seem to be discussing this considering the limitations that Einstein defined, when the whole point of this is that Einstein is being proven wrong. What's more I'm speaking in the context of the article in terms of a perfected technology (where it references Mass Effect) not saying that we actually have this technology yet. Hence why I mentioned what occurred to me for one of the first uses IF we perfect it, rather than saying "we can communicate with probes right now".GabeZhul said:
When I use a term like "the powers that be" I'm being intentionally vague, corny, but it works. The way I see it is this, any kind of new technology is going to interfere with the current business structure as it renders things that people make billions of dollars off of in jeopardy. Unless a major telecommunications company could somehow get an early monopoly on this and fight for it, your pretty much looking at a situation where all of them have a vested interest in killing the technology in it's infancy before it ever reaches the potential talked about. After all the safest way to make sure nobody is rendered obsolete in a new race, is to ensure nobody has the tech. It sounds stupid, but consider that this is a big part of why alternative energy technologies and things like that have been so slow to get started, there is a vested interest by the current energy companies to not want them out there, if alternative energy had managed to actually get one or two of these huge companies as a patron early on, things would have been different, but all of them wanted to play it safe and keep with what was working rather than putting tons of cash into developing a new technology and then having to promote it, and of course inevitably worrying about the government breaking up the monopoly before they can recoup the development costs... which is not a bad thing mind you, since I dislike monopolies, but at the same time not allowing them hampers development because you basically have to share the technology you develop with business rivals after potentially sinking billions of dollars of your own money into it. The pros and cons of monopolies and how banning them has hurt technological development and encouraged businesses to want to play it safe within current models. Everyone wants others to share tech with them and cut them into the business, very few companies want to innovate and take that risk. Not to mention security concerns by the authorities, since as a general rule the more power you give citizens, the more retarded they are going to be with it, and given the potentials for abuse I can see here (which goes beyond simple communications, as I said it seems like it would allow you to do make uninterruptable signals which could be used to control virtually anything you wanted to set up). When you consider that they limit flight (jet packs, gyrocopters, etc...) heavily for security reasons and to maintain order, you can just imagine the controls they'd want to put on this.
But the article is fundamentally wrong, that is the whole point!Therumancer said:
It is not a technological limitation, so that quantum entanglement could be used for communicating once the tech is perfected; quantum entanglement literally cannot be used to transfer information. Period.
You see, this is the reason I really hate lazy scientific journalism; they keep giving people the wrong idea and once it takes root it takes way more effort to explain the actual science to them...
But then again, I guess it wonn't be hard to kill a communications technology that cannot be used for communication.Therumancer said:
I'll just say this: The problem of alternative energy mostly stems from the media, on two fronts: over-hyping any sort of alternative energy technology that is obvious not cost-effective yet and only exists as experimental or proof-of-concept (the electric cars and solar panels come to mind) while also giving spotlight to frauds and con-men (the perpetual motion machine crowd), both of which leads to disappointment when they fail to live up to the hype and reduced public interest and grants towards actually working tech.Therumancer said:
On the other end of the spectrum we have the vilification of the nuclear industry, where we are making ridiculously safe and efficient fission power plants (the newest generations are so advanced that the don't even generate radioactive waste products as they chain down the daughter-products to common lead), but the public is far less likely to hear about these instead of the media drumming on the malfunctions in decades-old power plants and dragging up Chernobyl and the other "nuclear incidents" over and over again, and thus torpedoing our actual best chance at averting the inescapable energy crisis that will come with the depletion of the planet's oil reserves.
But I digress, the whole "alternative energy debate" is an especially nasty beehive that I usually want to avoid as much as possible, but I just really wanted to point out that most of the development problems stem from unwarranted expectations and media scare-mongering instead of some sort of shady conspiracy by "big oil" or something.