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PHYSICS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
turn event at will, so that even highly improbable events become commonplace. So if you want to jet off to the nearest star system, you would
simply change the probability that you will rematerialize on that star,
and voilà! You would be instantly teleported there.
In reality the quantum "jumps" so common inside the atom cannot be easily generalized to large objects such as people, which contain trillions upon trillions of atoms. Even if the electrons in our body
are dancing and jumping in their fantastic journey around the nucleus, there are so many of them that their motions average out. That
is, roughly speaking, why at our level substances seem solid and permanent.
So while teleportation is allowed at the atomic level, one would
have to wait longer than the lifetime of the universe to actually witness
these bizarre effects on a macroscopic scale. But can one use the laws
of the quantum theory to create a machine to teleport something on
demand, as in science fiction stories? Surprisingly, the answer is a
qualified yes.
THE EPR
EXPERIMENT
The key to quantum teleportation lies in a celebrated 1935 paper by Albert Einstein and his colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen,
who,
ironically, proposed the EPR experiment (named for the three
authors) to kill off, once and for all, the introduction of probability into
physics. (Bemoaning the undeniable experimental successes of the
quantum theory, Einstein wrote, "the more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks")
If two electrons are initially vibrating in unison (a state called coherence) they can remain in wavelike synchronization even if they are
separated by a large distance. Although the two electrons may be separated by light-years, there is still an invisible Schrôdinger wave connecting both of them, like an umbilical cord. If something happens to
one electron, then some of that information is immediately transmitted to the other. This is called "quantum entanglement," the concept
PHYSICS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
turn event at will, so that even highly improbable events become commonplace. So if you want to jet off to the nearest star system, you would
simply change the probability that you will rematerialize on that star,
and voilà! You would be instantly teleported there.
In reality the quantum "jumps" so common inside the atom cannot be easily generalized to large objects such as people, which contain trillions upon trillions of atoms. Even if the electrons in our body
are dancing and jumping in their fantastic journey around the nucleus, there are so many of them that their motions average out. That
is, roughly speaking, why at our level substances seem solid and permanent.
So while teleportation is allowed at the atomic level, one would
have to wait longer than the lifetime of the universe to actually witness
these bizarre effects on a macroscopic scale. But can one use the laws
of the quantum theory to create a machine to teleport something on
demand, as in science fiction stories? Surprisingly, the answer is a
qualified yes.
THE EPR
EXPERIMENT
The key to quantum teleportation lies in a celebrated 1935 paper by Albert Einstein and his colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen,
who,
ironically, proposed the EPR experiment (named for the three
authors) to kill off, once and for all, the introduction of probability into
physics. (Bemoaning the undeniable experimental successes of the
quantum theory, Einstein wrote, "the more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks")
If two electrons are initially vibrating in unison (a state called coherence) they can remain in wavelike synchronization even if they are
separated by a large distance. Although the two electrons may be separated by light-years, there is still an invisible Schrôdinger wave connecting both of them, like an umbilical cord. If something happens to
one electron, then some of that information is immediately transmitted to the other. This is called "quantum entanglement," the concept