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China researchers teleport photon from the ground to a satellite via quantum network

Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
Can someone explain this to me like I'm Donald Trump?

American science is the Best science! It's winning big league. You should have seen the particle, she was a bombshell, you just want to move on her like a bitch. Some people were saying the Chinese made their own version. Not as good as Trump's. The Trump brand is stronger than ever. Take my daughter Ivanka. The Fake News Media and their Lying Crooked Failing New York Times buddies were (and you should have heard them ask me for an interview, they can't get enough of me (I turned them down, I don't need any more exposure (have you seem my numbers? Huge numbers. Amazing.)))... Clinton got the debate answers. They gave her the answers. Who even knows what collusion means? Roving packs of blacks are terrorizing inner cities, it's a living Hell, but we're already making American Great again. Have I told you about the great work Ben is doing? Ben? Where's ben? *puts hand up to forehead* There he is. Ben is doing tremendous work. Just great work. Some people told me not to hire him after I beat him huge in the election. But he's doing the best work. His numbers are great. Look, some people say China got entangled, sounds like they might be the ones behind the hacks (by the way there's no proof anyone hacked our election, no mater what the LOSERS in the media say (and if they were hacked, it was probably a fat guy (and Hillary was the one who got hacked, so tell me why the FBI still doesn't have her server (Shouldn't they investigate her for collusion? Bill Clinton talked to Susan Rice on an airplane. Disgusting. Nasty, ugly people. (They asked me to rent a condo in my beautiful apartment building and I turned them down flat. Don't need them. Have you seen my numbers?))))). Sad!
 
Particles are identified by a very limited number of properties. If you can make a particle at end B have the exact same properties as a particle at point A you have essentially transported A to B, since now a thing identical to A exists at B. Its like physical faxing
Teleportation doesn't mean what I think it means. :(. That's like saying we made 50,000 footballs the same and we are essentially teleporting footballs because we shipped them all over the country.
 

13ruce

Banned
American science is the Best science! It's winning big league. You should have seen the particle, she was a bombshell, you just want to move on her like a bitch. Some people were saying the Chinese made their own version. Not as good as Trump's. The Trump brand is stronger than ever. Take my daughter Ivanka. The Fake News Media and their Lying Crooked Failing New York Times buddies were (and you should have heard them ask me for an interview, they can't get enough of me (I turned them down, I don't need any more exposure (have you seem my numbers? Huge numbers. Amazing.)))... Clinton got the debate answers. They gave her the answers. Who even knows what collusion means? Roving packs of blacks are terrorizing inner cities, it's a living Hell, but we're already making American Great again. Have I told you about the great work Ben is doing? Ben? Where's ben? *puts hand up to forehead* There he is. Ben is doing tremendous work. Just great work. Some people told me not to hire him after I beat him huge in the election. But he's doing the best work. His numbers are great. Look, some people say China got entangled, sounds like they might be the ones behind the hacks (by the way there's no proof anyone hacked our election, no mater what the LOSERS in the media say (and if they were hacked, it was probably a fat guy (and Hillary was the one who got hacked, so tell me why the FBI still doesn't have her server (Shouldn't they investigate her for collusion? Bill Clinton talked to Susan Rice on an airplane. Disgusting. Nasty, ugly people. (They asked me to rent a condo in my beautiful apartment building and I turned them down flat. Don't need them. Have you seen my numbers?))))). Sad!

Amazing post and i read it in Trumps voice too.

Anyway pretty cool news always interested in science.
 
Every time there's some news story on "quantum teleportation" or "entanglement" or whatever, it always sounds super exciting for sci-fi-like applications and everyone gets psyched. Then, inevitably, someone who is actually good at quantum mechanics comes in to the thread and explains that, while the result of the experiment is great scientifically, it's never as big and cool and science fiction-y as people are presenting it.

Basically, I'm gonna wait for GaugeBozo to come in and explain this before I get excited.
 

Maximo

Member
finally no more taking the bus to work

With only a small margin of error!
tumblr_mgc3xxEHh61qdezf9o1_500.gif
 

Plum

Member
Every time there's some news story on "quantum teleportation" or "entanglement" or whatever, it always sounds super exciting for sci-fi-like applications and everyone gets psyched. Then, inevitably, someone who is actually good at quantum mechanics comes in to the thread and explains that, while the result of the experiment is great scientifically, it's never as big and cool and science fiction-y as people are presenting it.

Basically, I'm gonna wait for GaugeBozo to come in and explain this before I get excited.

Can science stop making every cool discovery only semi-cool and every not cool discovery "holy fuck we're all going to die," levels of not cool?

That would be nice, get on it science people.
 

Falcs

Banned
Until we discover that this is not really teleporting you, but only making a copy of you at your destination and the real you is destroyed in the process.

This is pretty much the reason why I would NEVER trust teleportation. Even if it became a common thing, how would you ever know that everyone who has used it isn't actually a clone/copy of the original and just doesn't know it, and the original died when they first teleported.
 

Kwame120

Banned
We know the number on the bottom of the dice because we made the dice. How do you know the entanglement even exist in the first place if you can't measure both instances? Is it just a theory? That's like saying "if I flip this quarter in my bedroom and it lands heads, then the quarter in the kitchen must be tails, and I know that because I can see the quarter in the bedroom is heads". Like what? You didn't explain at all how you'd know the quarter in the kitchen is linked to the quarter in the bedroom, or how you are confirming the quarter in the kitchen is actually heads. Your saying "they are only entangled if you don't look at them". That's like me saying "the fridge is full so long as you don't look inside it" (the fridge is actually empty, but you don't know that so you'll just assume I'm telling the truth). How have they proven this is actually happening?
If you consider the dice, then our "entanglement" comes from the physical form of the dice. 6 is opposite to 1, so if you roll a 6, you know that the underside must be 1, owing to the physical structure of the dice. However, note that your dice roll is still random, you just have certain results that determine the result on the other side of the dice.

It's crudely similar in quantum mechanics. You may have a quantum system that spits out two electrons, the two electrons always having opposite spin, for example. (An electron can only have one of two spin states when spin is measured, spin up or spin down.) So if you measure one of the electrons to have spin up, then the other one has to have spin down. This could be tested in the laboratory by measuring and comparing the spin results for each pair of electrons. Now in quantum mechanics, we do not always have definite states for our system, it can exist in a superposition of states. That is to say that electron A may be in a superposition of spin up and spin down, so measuring the spin of electron A could yield either result. As electron A and electron B are entangled, then A having spin up means that B has spin down, and vice versa. So if you separate A and B by a large distance, performing a measurement on A causes an instantaneous change in the state of B, as A and B must always have opposite spin states.
But if that's true then why did a person in this thread say it can't be used to send data? If your changing the state of a and b reflects it, why can't you use that as a binary code for transmission?
As the result of each measurement is random, person A cannot transfer information to person B using the paired electrons.
 

Chirotera

Banned
Until we discover that this is not really teleporting you, but only making a copy of you at your destination and the real you is destroyed in the process.

This legit terrifies me. Like, I'd be dead. But then there's this other me that would be walking around that thinks its me and for all purposes it is me, and everyone acknowledges them as me, but it's not me! And there'd be no way to tell otherwise, even the me that had just materialized after being teleported.

Like, what the fuck?
 
This legit terrifies me. Like, I'd be dead. But then there's this other me that would be walking around that thinks its me and for all purposes it is me, and everyone acknowledges them as me, but it's not me! And there'd be no way to tell otherwise, even the me that had just materialized after being teleported.

Like, what the fuck?
The new you would retain the memories of the old you but the old you would just be gone. I dunno if I could do it. If I teleported somewhere right now, he would remember me getting in the teleporter but the me getting into the teleporter is dead. Its such a mind fuck. No teleporty for me.
 

ibyea

Banned
Every time there's some news story on "quantum teleportation" or "entanglement" or whatever, it always sounds super exciting for sci-fi-like applications and everyone gets psyched. Then, inevitably, someone who is actually good at quantum mechanics comes in to the thread and explains that, while the result of the experiment is great scientifically, it's never as big and cool and science fiction-y as people are presenting it.

Basically, I'm gonna wait for GaugeBozo to come in and explain this before I get excited.

Yeah, quantum teleportation is not teleportation people think it is. It is more of a way to copy a quantum state by entanglement and classical transmission of information.
 
I wrote about entanglement before, so...

Entanglement means correlation. Imagine you have a pair of gloves, you put each on a box at random. Then you give one box to a friend, send him to the Moon and keep the other box. You open your box and find you have a left-handed glove. Clearly, you already know that your friend on the Moon will find a right-handed glove when he opens his box, and no information has to be transmitted from you to your friend or from him to you for this, there is no mystery.

The situation in Quantum Mechanics is quite similar. Pairs of particles may be produced such that their initial state is correlated. This is called an entangled state. You may produce them then separate then by a large distance. Upon performing a measurement, if you find you particle is in a "left-handed" state, you will know for sure that the other will be "right-handed", just like the gloves. Clearly, they are correlated because of the initial state in which they were prepared, like the gloves, and no action a distance is needed.

The weirdness comes because unlike the gloves, where the left handed glove was always left handed, whether you looked in your box or not, in QM the state is only determined upon measurement, i.e., opening your box. This is quite analogous to the famous Schrödinger cat: the cat in not dead or alive until you perform a measurement to determine it. Since the state in determined at the moment of observation, you may then imagine that when you open your box and it comes out "left", your particle rushes to tell the other particle: "hey, I came left-handed, you must come out right-handed, or else!". However, no such signal may be transmitted if the separation between the particles is greater than the distance light would cover in the time between measurements, because transmitting information faster than light is impossible. Even worse, if the separation is that great, it is possible to find a frame of reference where your friend opened his box first, and so, his particle would be the one that influenced yours. Clearly it would be a contradiction, and what most people conclude from this is simply that the state is undetermined until the measurement, but the theory is still local, i.e., there is no faster than light signaling involved. You open your box when you want, your friend opens his, and there is nothing weird about it, because you can only tell each other what result you got if you compare notes, say, by phone, and that is always slower than light.

It turns out that the correlations from entanglement in QM are stronger in a sense than in classical physics, and allow for violation of something called Bell's Inequality. People have done all sorts of experiments trying to find loopholes, but in the end, the predictions always agree with QM. It is a well established theory.

as for quantum teleportation:

I really wanted to talk about is how "teleportation" works in real life, that is, Quantum Teleportation. In this process what is moved is not matter, but the information on the exact quantum state of a system of particles, that can then be reproduced on another identical system.

Basically one needs a particle (or many) whose state one wishes to teleport plus an additional entangled pair of particles. One particle of the entangled pair is kept at the original location and the other is sent to the receiver. The entanged pair of particles are in crude terms, like a pair of socks, if you know one is right, the other must be left, so even though they are separated by a large distance, learning the state of one of them means you also learn the state of the other.

In order to teleport the state of a particle, the person who wishes to do so makes a measurement on its state and also on his or her half of the entangled pair. Because of the entanglement, what happens is that the other particle of the pair, that is in the location you wish to teleport to will be put in a particular state, which is not yet the state you wanted to teleport, but is related to it. The first person then beams the result of their measurement to the the receiver (this is the step where actual transfer of information happens, and it is necessarily not faster than light), and this is enough information for them to reconstruct completely the state of the particle you wanted to teleport, by simple operations.

I'm sorry if the explanation was too confusing, you may find many more details (as well as a precise mathematical description) in the Wiki article. What I wanted to say that is relevant to this debate is that the processes of learning the state of the system you wanted to teleport necessarily destroys it, in an irreversible measurement. That means that at no point are there two copies of the system, as at the moment the measurement is made, the original is effectively destroyed, but all the information that specified its state is preserved. The result that you cannot make a copy without destroying the original is amusingly enough called the No-cloning Theorem

As others have said elementary particles in nature are not distinguishable, not even in principle, so if you put two identical systems in the same state, they are completely identical, and no measurement can tell them apart. Since there is no remaining copy, per the last paragraph, that means that for all intents and purposes, the person on the other side is as much "you" as it can be, and there' nothing you can do to disprove that.

TL,DR: It's not faster than light, and what you teleport is the state, not the physical particle, but since photons are indistinguishable, it amounts to the same thing.
 

GeekyDad

Member
This legit terrifies me. Like, I'd be dead. But then there's this other me that would be walking around that thinks its me and for all purposes it is me, and everyone acknowledges them as me, but it's not me! And there'd be no way to tell otherwise, even the me that had just materialized after being teleported.

Like, what the fuck?

If "you" are already part of a cosmic consciousness passing through atoms that have coalesced (your body) to house transmissions of that consciousness, "you" will still be "you." In (my) theory, anyway.
 

LordKasual

Banned
But how do you know the state of the 2nd?

By comparing.

Which is why it cannot be used to send data faster than light.

Until we discover that this is not really teleporting you, but only making a copy of you at your destination and the real you is destroyed in the process.

Here's the real question that's going to blow your mind.

What if, as far as you're concerned, there's no difference?

"You" are going to know you were transported, and you're going to know you are now in a different place. You're also going to know you technically died during the process, but you're alive now.
 
This is a gross oversimplification and neglects the fact that such rapid turnover does not happen with neuronal cells, which most people assume is the seat of consciousness. It is true that neurons will sever axonic and dendritic limbs and reassign synapses and can undergo limited regeneration upon injury, yes, but the soma of the cell, which for all intents and purposes cannot be replaced, maintains continuity and contains many of the sites for production of NT's in the amounts and patterns which regulate synaptic transmission and are in essence the coding bits of the neural network and thus your behavior/mind. Furthermore, I'm sure everyone can look at paralytics and see why neuroregeneration is a big enough problem in the peripheral nervous system, and it's next to impossible (and in fact naturally inhibited) within the central nervous system. Damage to the brain is near-permanent, so it's not a stretch to say disruption of physical brain tissue would lead to disruption of consciousness. But we already know this, we call it dying.

But continuity of consciousness itself is another thing entirely, and you have to delve into very long philosophical discussions on the mind/body problem for which there aren't and likely won't ever be any real scientifically verifiable answers. As for teleportation of a conscious entity, in a way it's parallel to the quantum activity going on here. It's literally impossible for us to objectively observe from the subject's PoV, and for all intents and purposes if it looks and acts like a duck then we can't possibly ever know that it wasn't. The only one that could is the subject themselves, and in a failure state they wouldn't be able to communicate it with us anyway. Many smarter people than myself have posited that there is some sort of quantum aspect to our biology that gives rise to consciousness, and that a lot of the same objective limitations to observation of the quantum world likely apply to consciousness as well.

image.php
 

gaugebozo

Member
Every time there's some news story on "quantum teleportation" or "entanglement" or whatever, it always sounds super exciting for sci-fi-like applications and everyone gets psyched. Then, inevitably, someone who is actually good at quantum mechanics comes in to the thread and explains that, while the result of the experiment is great scientifically, it's never as big and cool and science fiction-y as people are presenting it.

Basically, I'm gonna wait for GaugeBozo to come in and explain this before I get excited.
509173840_1280x720.jpg


Actually, this is pretty cool. Quantum teleportation doesn't mean quite what it does in Star Trek, but the thing you get at the end is still indistinguishable from the original. Keeping the particles entangled over such a long distance is impressive.
 

Ambient80

Member
If someone didn’t say “Teleporter online, I have opened the path,” when this happened, then I’ll be very disappointed.
 

LordKasual

Banned
But continuity of consciousness itself is another thing entirely, and you have to delve into very long philosophical discussions on the mind/body problem for which there aren't and likely won't ever be any real scientifically verifiable answers. As for teleportation of a conscious entity, in a way it's parallel to the quantum activity going on here. It's literally impossible for us to objectively observe from the subject's PoV, and for all intents and purposes if it looks and acts like a duck then we can't possibly ever know that it wasn't. The only one that could is the subject themselves, and in a failure state they wouldn't be able to communicate it with us anyway. Many smarter people than myself have posited that there is some sort of quantum aspect to our biology that gives rise to consciousness, and that a lot of the same objective limitations to observation of the quantum world likely apply to consciousness as well.

When i was typing that other response, my mind kind of glossed over the odd kind of parallel with entanglement that a copied (instead of teleported) consciousness would have. If a teleporter screwed up and only copied instead of destroyed. For all intents and purposes, the only way to actually know something got fucked up would be for some system to inform you that the process didn't work....which couldn't be done through FTL communication.

Perhaps the consciousnesses would be in a superposition of "one person" and "two persons", until it was made obvious that it was no longer the case....???

Or, maybe consciousness is literally magic, and a copy of your brain would result in the universe allowing you to function through 2 different perspectives until one became aware of the other's existence, at which case "you" would assume only one and the other would become some other dude

Even though that isn't really required, because if all "you" requires is your exact history of interactions with the universe....there literally cannot be a copy of you, even if you were perfectly copied. The very knowledge that you are a copy would make you a different individual.


lol but probably not, who cares

in an odd sort of way, it really makes sense that the quantum world, what happens when you start peering into the programming of the universe itself, stops making sense. It kind of can't make sense, because our existence alone doesn't make sense. It just seems to be a really organized system that arises out of infinity and zero
 
I wrote about entanglement before, so...



as for quantum teleportation:



TL,DR: It's not faster than light, and what you teleport is the state, not the physical particle, but since photons are indistinguishable, it amounts to the same thing.

509173840_1280x720.jpg


Actually, this is pretty cool. Quantum teleportation doesn't mean quite what it does in Star Trek, but the thing you get at the end is still indistinguishable from the original. Keeping the particles entangled over such a long distance is impressive.

Thanks for coming in, science bitches. I'll allow myself the appropriate amount of excitement now.
 
Is this faster than light?

Can it be re-puposed for communication so I can play the Japanese at fighting games lagless on Steam (no online paywall)?
 

Blizzard

Banned
This is really weird that it's called teleportation of an object, when instead it seems to be quantum entanglement that instead results in duplication of state -- the original remains on earth.

Am I missing something? Is this teleportation in the same sense that "The sun teleports photons to earth by firing them into space"? The entanglement is the novel part as far as I can tel.
 
This is really weird that it's called teleportation of an object, when instead it seems to be quantum entanglement that instead results in duplication of state -- the original remains on earth. Am I missing something?
Actually the original state is destroyed. This is an important point, there can be no duplication. While the photon is not teleported, all photons are identical, so you couldn't tell it as long as the state is the same.

Is this teleportation in the same sense that "The sun teleports photons to earth by firing them into space"? The entanglement is the novel part as far as I can tel.
I'm not sure what you mean. This is a way to transmit the exact quantum state from one particle to another at a distance. Hence the name.
 

Chirotera

Banned
If "you" are already part of a cosmic consciousness passing through atoms that have coalesced (your body) to house transmissions of that consciousness, "you" will still be "you." In (my) theory, anyway.

Nah, that's alright man. I think if teleportation ever comes to fruition, I'll just take the bus.
 

Moose Biscuits

It would be extreamly painful...
God, these sorts of discoveries are always boring as hell when you get down to what they actually mean. Nothing cool happens any more.

It's like when I started doing a physics degree and found out that most of what you do is incredibly dull experiments in fifty almost imperceptibly-different ways and draw a hundred graphs and tedious explanations. And all the goddamn error checking!

In a way I'm glad I failed my degree, my dream of being a nuclear physicist bit the dust and justifiably so.
 

Ghost

Chili Con Carnage!
This seems really massive news for quantum networking, not just the distance but the fact they can communicate with satellites makes it seem likely that at some point in the future we could have a truly global internet with no cables or tubes limiting bandwidth, and as a bonus it's also completely secure (at the transport layer anyway).
 

Moose Biscuits

It would be extreamly painful...
What if you only knew when it's too late?

Well, by then I'd be dead, wouldn't I? And the new me probably wouldn't notice.

I'm pretty sure they can tell by brain scans that most regular brain function changes when you sleep: what if you today cease to exist when you become unconscious and a new version of you begins when you wake up?
 

Jobbs

Banned
Until we discover that this is not really teleporting you, but only making a copy of you at your destination and the real you is destroyed in the process.

This is the exact reason I'd never get into a transporter of any kind. There's simply no way to know that people aren't dying when they step in. There's no way to know.
 
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