Scotty beam me up is closer then you think.

[Nico@FMA]

Content source

http://www.businessinsider.com/quantum-teleportation-of-information-2014-5

Dutch Scientists Just Shattered Our Conception Of How Information Will Travel In The Future

Physicists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands were able to successfully "teleport" information over a distance of 10 feet, reports the New York Times.

There's a lot going on in that idea, so let's break it down.

The rules for the subatomic world are totally unlike the rules for our macroscopic world. A particle can be in multiple places at the same time, and can even disappear on one side of a barrier and reappear on the other side without actually traveling through it. This comes from quantum theory, and while it sounds totally nonintuitive, it's one of the most successful models physicists have for understanding our world.

Many scientists around the world today are working to develop "quantum technology," which is simply any technology that hinges upon these totally "abnormal" properties of the super-small stuff that makes up our world. The Mount Everest of quantum technology would be to build a quantum computer that could quickly solve problems that would leave our classical computers stumped. Instead of the standard bits we use in computers today — ones and zeroes — quantum bits, or "qubits," can describe a one, a zero, or any value in between.

If this all sounds crazy or hard to understand, you're in good company with a lot of smart people. Hang in there. A legitimate, functional quantum computer (it's debatable as to if one has actually been built yet) would be absolutely bursting with computational potential.

Back to our Dutch scientists — they trapped qubits in diamonds and were able to establish a measurement of the qubits' spin. This measurement is the acual information that was "teleported," by way of a process called quantum entanglement. To simplify this idea a lot, entanglement is essentially what happens when one particle copycats another, even over a distance. Change the spin of one particle, the other instantly changes its spin to match.

Einstein famously decried entanglement, calling it "spooky action at a distance." But repeated variations of this experiment only lend more credence to it as a completely valid natural phenomena that we are slowly learning to manipulate.

Forget Google Fiber. Once this stuff is perfected, a quantum internet that's built upon it could mean instantaneous transmission and receipt of data around the world or even the universe! In 1964, an Irish physicist named John Bell predicted that this could be used to transmit data across light years of distance.

While 10 feet is no light year, it's certainly a step in the right direction.

 

[Nico@FMA]

Omg really?
Well we might be Dutch but we aint stupid.
I knew they where doing great stuff at the TU delft as they always have been a pioneer in research and are ranked amonghst the very top research universities around the world but this is just insane.

 

[Plasmadragon]

Quantum computation in and of itself is a fascinating topic due to the implications that are within the scope of the abilities of such technological superiority over what we have today. If one were to compare the initial projections of the increase in orders of computational potential to a physical concept, it would be thus: the most powerful processors or memory cards or drivers of today are to quantum computers as the wheel is to spacecraft.

Outrageously powerful conceptually, the quantum computer gets its muscle from rather simple reasons. With computers now, as mentioned above, binary, the 'language' which is represented by the observation of a device being either active or inactive through an electrical potential being arced across the connection points within the system and are further interpreted to represent an action due to the particular sequence of events as dictated within logic circuits (which of course a computer is just a fairly intricate example of a logic circuit), is essentially just the interpretation of two singular states of 'being' within the circuit. The prime difference between that kind of logic and a quantum computer is that the 'language' is 'infinitely' increased to represent any value that can be attained by whichever quantum structure is under observation and being implemented by a quantum computer as its driving representation of information. This essentially means that across a range of charges that can be dictated on a quantum level to a certain extent can each have unique meanings to a processing device and each be utilized as their individual packaging allows.

To wrap one's mind around this in yet another way... take for example how you are reading this forum post right now. You may be skimming through it, you might be reading it word by word... but in the end, the way you 'root level' read and understand what I have written is by recognizing the individual combinations of alphanumeric keystrokes I have given to you. Each letter combining into single words, words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, etc. We read by seeing and understanding the basics: the letter.

Imagine then, if instead of reading letter by letter to form words, you instead read 2 lines of words at once, still letter by letter. 3 lines of words, 5, 20, 100, 10000 lines of words all at the same moment. Then imagine if instead of reading letters at all, you simply had the ability to immediately recognize entire words instead of wasting computational potential of reading letter by letter, and could read more than one word at the same instant. If one were capable of such a thing, that person would certainly be able to read every piece of human literature in a matter of minutes, even seconds... This is what quantum computing means for data. The expansion of the core ability to 'comprehend' values from the simple on and off states, to on, off, everywhere in between, and sometimes extra-dimensionally.

Truly a fascinating topic, considering that the per sae limitations to quantum computing actually lies more in the human inability to grasp such a radical transformation of systems rather than the potential of the system itself.