2 17 2004 50653

Teleporting 3D by 2D Means

A fax machine for a 3D object! Making use of the same principle in 2D for 'teleportation' in 3D. What exactly is teleportation? Is it seen in our day-to-day life or is it a reality only in fictional stories of Star Trek? Is it some type of instantaneous (disembodied) transportation? Instantaneous!

Einstein's theory of relativity doesn't support this definition saying that the fastest speed is the speed of light. So, it can't be instantaneous, can it? This changes the definition to 'teleportation is some form of (disembodied) transport'. Well, teleportation, in the words of fiction writers, is used to describe the feat of making a person or object disintegrate in one place, while a perfect replica appears elsewhere. Looking at it from this viewpoint, we see different examples all around us:
  1. Telephone/Cellular (Turning electricity to waves)
  2. Fax; will transport images
  3. World wide web
  4. DTH connections
Are these really examples of teleportation? These are really forms of copying. They leave the sound, image, whatever, behind, and transport the data collected from it into space in some form of waves or signals. This is how they send data across. And they must be having some sort of machine to convert these signals back into a replica of the original data. But these are conventions in two dimensions. How is this going to be achieved in three dimensions? Pretty much the same way. The original object will be scanned in such a way so as to extract all information from it, and this information will be transported to some other location and used to recreate the original object, maybe not from the same material, but atom by atom into the same pattern as the original object. There may be some machines which measure the positions, velocities, and types of atoms throughout the entire person, and then send that information (say by radio waves) to the place where the body is reconstructed by another machine. A fleeting thought; how much information are we talking about anyway? Well the visible human project by the American National Institute of Health requires about 10 Gigabytes (that's about 10^11 = 100,000,000,000 'bits', this is about ten CD ROMs) to give the full three-dimensional details of a human down to one-millimeter resolution in each direction. If we forget about recognizing atoms and measuring their velocities, and just scale that to a resolution of one-atomic length in each direction, that's about 10^32 bits (a one followed by thirty two zeros). This is so much information that even with the best optical fibers conceivable, it would take over one hundred million centuries to transmit all that information. It would be easier to walk. If we packed all that information into CD ROMs, it would fit into a cube almost 1,000 kilometers on a side. Until now, scientists did not take teleportation seriously, because it was thought to violate the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, which forbids the measuring or scanning of an object or an atom for extracting all its information. According to the uncertainty principle, the more an atom/object is scanned, the more it gets disturbed by the scanning process, until it reaches a point that the original state has been totally destroyed 'without' completely extracting enough information to make a replica. This is indeed a very logical argument that, if information cannot be extracted, then it is not possible to recreate a perfect replica of the original. But six scientists from IBM Research have solved this dilemma, by using a celebrated and paradoxical feature of quantum mechanics known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect. In brief, they found a way to scan out part of the information from an object A, which one wishes to teleport, while causing the remaining, unscanned, part of the information to pass, via the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect, into another object C which has never been in contact with A. Later, by applying to C a treatment depending on the scanned-out information, it is possible to maneuver C into exactly the same state as A was in before it was scanned. A itself is no longer in that state, having been thoroughly disrupted by the scanning, so what has been achieved is teleportation, not replication. The unscanned part of the information is conveyed from A to C by an intermediary object B, which interacts first with C and then with A. What? Can it really be correct to say 'first with C and then with A?' Surely, in order to convey something from A to C, the delivery vehicle must visit A before C, not the other way round. But there is a subtle, unscannable kind of information that, unlike any material cargo, and even unlike ordinary information, can indeed be delivered in such a backward fashion. This subtle kind of information, also called 'Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) correlation' or 'entanglement', has been at least partly understood since the 1930s, when it was discussed in a famous paper by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen. In the 1960s, John Bell showed that a pair of entangled particles, which were once in contact but later moved too far apart to interact directly, can exhibit individually random behavior that is too strongly correlated to be explained by classical statistics. Experiments on photons and other particles have repeatedly confirmed these correlations, thereby providing strong evidence for the validity of quantum mechanics, which neatly explains them. Another well-known fact about EPR correlations is that, they cannot, by themselves, deliver a meaningful and controllable message. It was thought that their only usefulness was in proving the validity of quantum mechanics. But now it is known that, through the phenomenon of quantum teleportation, they can deliver exactly that part of the information in an object, which is too delicate to be scanned out, and delivered by conventional methods. References: IBM Research Laboratories

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