465: Quantum Teleportation

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 05:06, 5 June 2013 by Jimbob (talk | contribs) (Transcript)
Jump to: navigation, search
Quantum Teleportation
Science should be exactly as cool as the headlines sound. Like the "RUSSIANS CUT APART AND REASSEMBLE DOGS" thing
Title text: Science should be exactly as cool as the headlines sound. Like the "RUSSIANS CUT APART AND REASSEMBLE DOGS" thing

Explanation

Quantum teleportation is a method of effectively taking a quantum state that exists in one laboratory and destroying it in the current laboratory and later recreating that exact same (unmeasured) quantum state in another laboratory that could potentially be very far away.

This is achieved by first creating an entangled quantum state in a laboratory and moving one part of the entangled quantum state to a faraway laboratory. Now let's say a scientist desires to teleport the quantum state |ψ> to a faraway lab. The scientists does a specific measurement on the combination of |ψ> and their half of the entangled quantum state and the outcome of their measurement will be two bits of classical information. They can then telephone over the results of their two bits of information to tell scientists at the faraway lab how to do a measurement on their half of the entangled quantum state, which will recreate the quantum state |ψ> at the faraway lab, effectively teleporting it. This is an important result in quantum mechanics, especially in regards to quantum computing

This is a far cry from being able to get Star Trek teleporters where macroscopic objects like humans (composed of 10^25 particles) could be teleported to an arbitrary place.

Transcript

[Reporter and a Scientist are facing each other, sitting in chairs.]
Reporter: So, Quantum Teleportation-
Scientist: The name is misleading. It's a particle statistics thing.
Reporter: So it's not like Star Trek? That's boring.
Scientist: Okay, I'm sick of this. Every time there's a paper on Quantum Teleportation, you reporters write the same disappointed story.
[Scientist leaves seat and moves behind it]
Reporter: But-
[Scientist has gone to device that was behind him and was out of the scope of the three previous panels.]
Scientist: Talk to someone else. I'm going to the Bahamas. <<Click>>
[The Scientist switches a device on.]
[Device labeled "TELEPORTER" is switched from "Quantum" to "Regular".]
<<VRMMM>>
[The scientist is beamed up in classic Star Trek fashion]


comment.png add a comment! ⋅ comment.png add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅ Icons-mini-action refresh blue.gif refresh comments!

Discussion

No mention in the explanation that having pooh-poohed the idea of quantum teleportation being anything like the archetypal fictional representation of matter-transporters, the guy then "goes to the Bahamas" via a box that has been flipped to "regular teleportation"... 178.107.249.215 22:38, 11 June 2013 (UTC)


I'm pretty sure that it's not the laws of physics that make teleportation impossible. Converting matter to energy and back again is entirely possible theoretically. It's just that engineering such a device would be almost impossible. Or you could use a wormhole, which is again just a matter of figuring out how you'd build the damn thing.108.162.216.106 01:05, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

RE: Engineering a device - also, it's not merely the conversion that presents the challenge, but that such a conversion would have to be highly-structured and practically instantaneous for Star Trek-style teleportation to work - Brettpeirce (talk) 20:09, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

Not sure about "the scientist is angry that there is no interest in his quantum version". It looks as much as if he's a general scientist (certainly one who prefers to personally use non-quantum teleportation) who just happens to be pestered by reporters who are after soundbites on 'quantum' things (or cold fusion, or genetic editing, or whatever is the current 'story') after someone (and it doesn't sound like it was him) published some paper on the subject. After all, reporters and news organisations tend to have a 'little black book' of contacts who are broadly experts on a wide subject and have been happy to try to explain things in reader-friendly terms. (Though, at least this one time, the inanity of the questioning has clearly broken whatever polite exterior was originally there when accepting the original impromptu interview request.) 172.71.242.58 20:08, 31 October 2023 (UTC)