According to a recent article in Live Science humankind may be one step closer to hearing that now familiar phrase “beam me up.”
Scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute located at the University of Maryland (USA) have successfully transported information between two separate atoms across a distance of a full meter. This is a phenomenal achievement in the advancement of teleportation technology. Over the past few years researchers have been able to teleport single atoms a few centimeters but this will mark the first time two atoms were transported for nearly a yard without loss or degregation of information.
WOW! Sounds like they are slowly making progress. Of course, this still means that it may not happen in my lifetime, but it could happen within my daughter’s lifetime or her children may see it happen. Even so, thanks for continuing to keep us posted. Let us know when they transport something larger than just an atom.
Live Science is hamming it up, but unfortunately this experiment has nothing to do with the “classical” teleportation of matter or energy. this is quantum teleportation, it’s all about information transfer. essentially, this is an experiment in quantum entanglement, whereby they were able to transfer information (a qubit) between an enangled pair of atoms over a short distance. this has massive implications for quantum computing, but it won’t lead to Scotty at the controls.
unless of course every last bit of information that describes “you” is recorded, you are killed at one end and reconstructed by some form of matter compiler at the other. because quantum teleportation deals in information, not hunks of meat.
I agree with the second comment on this, but taken a few steps further this could evolve into FTL communication, then we would be capable of interstellar comms but would still have to deal with Relativistic time dilation if we actually travel between solar systems…
human is composed of trillion if not thousand trillion of atoms. Given this progress, I guess we need at least another 800 years before a full human payload of atoms can be transported in a focused beam. But then, hey, human beings in 1910s would have guessed that it would take another 500 years of progress for a plane with several hundred tons of payload to fly up into the sky
And we can guess that right after this is made safe for humans to use someone will complain about having their atoms scattered all over the place.