Beam me up, QM …

Scotty in Star Trek episode
"Wolf in the Fold" (Image via Wikipedia)

"Beam me up, Scotty"

Related source » European Physicists Smash Chinese Teleportation Record  - Technology Review: 'via Blog this'
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

“Today, European physicists say they've broken the record again, this time by teleporting photons between the two Canary Islands of La Palma and Tenerife off the Atlantic coast of north Africa, a distance of almost 150 kilometres. […] These experiments are proof-of-principle runs for a much more ambitious idea — quantum teleportation to orbiting satellites. Since teleportation is the basis of more-or-less perfectly secure communication, the prize here is a global communications network that cannot be hacked, even in principle. […] The question, of course, is who will be first to orbit. The Europeans have a space agency that could be persuaded to test this idea, but they won't be in a hurry. China is currently showing great ambition in space and will want to show off its technological prowess. […] The contrast with the US couldn't be clearer.” [emphasis added]
— KFC, 05/21/2012 (technologyreview.com)

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Shades of, "Beam me up, Scotty". We're not ready to teleport humans (yet!), but you have to start somewhere small, like a photon, for instance. Enter the weird reality of quantum mechanics (QM).

Today's physicists are accomplishing some feats that not that long ago were strictly science fiction. And the goals are not restricted merely to amaze, but to accomplish something as important as perfectly secure communication; secure communication "that cannot be hacked, even in principle"!

The only sad note in this quoted news-story is the observation that American physics is not part of such cutting-edge technology. Sigh …

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