ABOUT FACTS NET Science

I just read an article on Yahoo news on teleportation that sparked my interest in the subject again. The article was quite interesting and well written and discussed many things that teleportation would make possible when combined with quantum computers. The only flaws that was evident to me was the fact that when it mentioned teleportation to other planets, the fact was never mentioned that you would have had to be able to get there first to set up the receiving device and also the fact that quantum computers have problems.

Anyone that has seen Stargate has seen an example of a teleportation device. The gate itself dissembles the atoms of anything that enters it, including humans, and then reassembles them at the gate located at the destination. Star Trek also used a similar technology to beam people around but they didn't show a receiver, they were able to have you reassembled into thin air. Now of course this is all science fiction as we all know and while scientists talk about teleportation they state the fact, over and over, that the atoms have to be disassembled. I must admit that right now this looks like the only way it could be done, but there may be other, less traumatic, ways of accomplishing this, that no one has yet thought of. Maybe a device will be built, some day, that will bend space in such a way as to allow for instant transportation by just stepping over a line without disassembly. Could we create worm holes some day that will make the distance between two points 0?

I think that all of this may be possible and much more. Right now we look at the quantum computer as the great savior device that will allow us to do anything, but is it really? Maybe we will be able to somehow tap into the molecules in the universe giving us the power of billions upon billions of quantum computers. It seems like every time we think we have the ultimate something, something else comes along that is better. When the adding machine came out everyone thought that this was the ultimate machine for checks and balances, no one ever dreamed that a computer would come along that could do a day's worth of calculations in a fraction of a second.

Quantum computers are different, they have a weakness. They can not factor as well as our classical computers. It is estimated that it will take many years for them to catch up, assuming they can. You have to remember that classical computers are constantly improving Wait a second, maybe the quantum computer is not as great as we thought? Did you know that if a calculation is not completed fast enough on a quantum computer that noise results? It is said that the quantum computer is coherence limited. Maybe we won't be able to use them for teleportation after all.

Teleportation has been accomplished already but on a much smaller scale than on Stargate. Atoms have been teleported. Two teams of scientists accomplished this while working independently of each other. One team was in the U.S. and the other in Austria. What they accomplished was transferring quantum states between separate atoms. This was done without any physical link being used. This is only the barest of beginnings, but it is a first step and there must always be a first step. Life is not like a 1950's grade B movie where a scientist would construct a machine and accomplish teleportation on a human right away. I remember the movie The Fly, where human and fly atoms got mixed up while trying one of these experiments. We would have to be very careful that something like this didn't happen in real life. Teleportation has also been accomplished with light.

It is beginning to look like the power of our computers will determine the future of teleportation and many other things. Other methods now exist for getting things from one spot to another besides teleportation. We all know that documents can be faxed, but we may not know that the fax machine is over 200 years old. A demonstration was held with a primitive fax machine using stations in Napoleon's Army. The biggest breakthrough so far, in this area, is a machine copied from the plain old ink jet printer. Instead of ink, it accurately sprays out a type of plaster or wax that can build up an exact duplicate of what is being read on the other end. If someone wanted to ship a model of a hotel that was going to be built to Japan, they could just use one of these inexpensive machines to copy it at the other end. This may not be teleportation, but it is close.

Maybe we won't have to worry about inventing a teleportation device but will discover one on some distant planet, or maybe we have discovered one already on the Moon or Mars? This would be great, it would save us a lot of work developing the device. If we had one, I am sure we would never know because we have a history of keeping far too many secrets.

First we sent electricity down a wire, then a voice. Next we sent radio waves through the air, then tv signals. Next we sent the voice through the air. Will we someday send ourselves through the air as waves? Stick around for the rest of the story.