Teleportation
Teleportation is known to most of us who have ever watched Star Trek. But how could the highly complex matter which makes up our bodies actually be broken down and transmitted in this way? Research has taken a step closer in recent months with the announcement that a photon of light has been successfully teleported from one location to another. The researchers involved said they had teleported a beam of light across a laboratory bench. They did not physically transport the beam itself, but transmitted its properties to another beam, creating a replica of the first beam. Such Quantum teleportation allows information to be transmitted at the speed of light - the fastest speed possible - without being slowed down by wires or cables. The experiment depends on a property known as entanglement, what Albert Einstein once described as "spooky action at a distance." It is a property of atomic particles that mystifies even physicists. Sometimes two particles that are a very long distance apart are nonetheless somehow twinned, with the properties of one affecting the other. The research was carried out by Kimble whose team created two entangled light beams, streams of photons. Photons, the basic unit of light, sometimes act like particles and sometimes like waves. They used these two entangled beams to carry information about the quantum state of a third beam. The first two beams were destroyed in the process, but the third successfully transmitted its properties over a distance of about a yard. Quantum physics suggests that matter is capable of existing in two forms either as a particle or a wave. It has been debated for years that it is the act of observation of the matter in the macro world that gives matter its actual solid form instead of its fuzziness. For example, imagine that you have a refrigerator, inside there are 6 eggs. Are the eggs in the door, the top shelf, or bottom shelf. Quantum physics suggests that they could be anywhere and everywhere at once. It is the...
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