Transporter?

NooB on the Sci forum, so if this is in the wrong forum, feel free to move it!

Anyhoo... I remember hearing a couple of years ago that they successfully transported a single atom from one part of a room to the other, ala The Fly. Is there any update on this or has anyone else heard of it? I thought it was incredibly exciting, and while it was only a single atom, babysteps... ya know?

nesf

It wasn'ts so much transportation as an exercise in quantum entanglement (whcih I'm not going into). Basically what happened was that information was transferred from one spot to another instantly. There was no real physical transportation.

I'll write a longer and more complete reply if I have time later and if you're interested.

MrVestek

Hrm i think i remember what you're talking about. But didn't they manage to breake down a laser beam and actually reassemble it in another part of the room without coming from an actual generator in australia? There's a very very very primitive form of a transporter and would take a fair few years before we learned to transport a single atom, let alone a person or animal. But we can dream :-)

Capt'n Midnight

Oh chestnut time..

Would you die and a clone with your memories be created when you were transported (implications for souls too).
Ah the good old star trek pattrn buffer - how come it was never used for cloning ?

I seem to remember something about quantum effects that to get the information from each bit before you send it you remove the information from A and transfer it to B - in which case you might not die when transported - but then again your clone would not think otherwise.

Also wouldn't worm holes have to be massive to protect fragile humans from tidal effects/spagettifacton when using the. While falling through you accelerate depending on the local field - you don't want your head accelerating much faster than your feet. You want a gravitational field that changes slowly over distance - maybe 10g per m if you assume the feotal position.

Rambo

a little different but good read
http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/apr2000/957125418.Cs.r.html

edit

just found this
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/01/0129_030129_teleport.html

dudara

Like nesf said, it's all to do with quantum entanglement. I saw a talk during the summer where the authors had transmitted photons from a laser underneath a river in Germany.

Scientists have read the information from a photon, tranmitted that information and used it to create a new photon which is an exact copy of (or the same as) the original photon. So essentially clones are being created, and the originals destroyed

Manach

FYI I remember reading about it in the chapter 1 of the book "The bit and the pendulum". It was done by IBM labs by, I think, Charles Bennet.