The stuff of science fiction is becoming a reality. Popularized by television’s Star Trek , teleportation is making something disappear in one place and then appear in another. The word “teleportation” is a portmanteau, or blending, of “tele” and “portation.” From www.etymonline.com, “tele” is a Greek word-forming fragment meaning “far off, at or to a distance.” “Portation” is a fragment that comes from the Greek “ poros,” meaning “journey, passage, way.” We have “telegraph,” “telephone,” “television,” all of which have brought the world closer together in word (“graph”), hearing (“phone”), and sight (“vision”). All possible, we know.
But “teleportation”?! Scientists are not quite up to teleporting people, but they have figured out teleporting data. That’s different from transmitting data, having it travel over a route either by wire or through the air. “ Trans” is a Latin prefix meaning “across, beyond, to go beyond.” Teleporting is a process by which something disappears from one location and reappears at another. It involves the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that we can know the speed or location of something but not both.
As reported by Mashable, scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, reporting their research in a recent issue of Nature, succeeded in doing just that with information. There’s good reason why scientists are experimenting with information and not living creatures, especially people. Teleportation involves getting around the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. To put it simply, as this video from DNews explains, a person would have to cease existing in one place and be reconstituted in another. In other words, the creature would die in the original place and be reconstituted in the destination. Risky business.
“Beam me up, Scotty .”
In their much less risky experiment, the ETH team, as explained by Mashable, spaced three micron-sized electronic circuits (each a a billionth of a meter) on a 7 x 7-millimeter computer chip. (To keep this scale in perspective, a human being is estimated to contain 3.02 x 1032 gigabytes of data, with a gigabyte being 1 billion bytes. Teleporting that amount of data would take an incalculable amount of time.) Two of the circuits worked as a sending mechanism, while the other served as the receiver. The scientists cooled the chip to near absolute zero and ran a current through the circuits.
At that frigid temperature and small scale, the electrons in the circuit — which are the quantum bits of information, or “qubits” — started to behave according to the rules of quantum mechanics. The qubits became entangled, or linked, sharing identical quantum states, even if physically separated from one other.
Specifically, the qubits in the sender circuit became entangled with those in the receiving circuit because they exchanged photons. The ETH team encoded some information into the qubits in the sending circuits and then measured the state of the qubits in the receiver circuit. Whatever state the qubits were in the sender was reflected instantly in the receiving circuit. The researchers had teleported the information.
Other experimenters have teleported quantum bits, too, and have done so across a longer distance. But those teams only got the teleportation to work once in a while, perhaps a few percent of the time. The ETH team was also able to teleport up to 10,000 quantum bits every second, and get it to work right consistently. That's fast enough and accurate enough to build a useful computer. “Basically we can push a button and have this teleportation work every time,” Andreas Wallraff, professor at the Department of Physics and head of the study, told DNews .
Teleportation is not the first bit of science fiction that researchers are trying – and sometimes succeeding – to turn into science fact. Here’s a short and not exhaustive bibliography of what we’ve covered on the subject at Electronic Products :
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