Teleportation

So I have an hour or so before my next class, and I am unable to play the video game of my choice. Therefore, I believe a quantum mechanics ramble on my new blog is in order.

I discovered awhile ago that the technology for teleportation is further along than I once believed. Though it is not quite how I imagined it would work, and I would most certainly not use it with a human body.

I always thought of teleportation to be similar to the transporters in Star Trek, which operated by transforming beings into energy particles, moving the particles to the destination, then re-forming the particles into beings again. The kind of technology we've discovered in reality is more similar to cloning. But perhaps I should start at the beginning...

Traditionally, the crux of teleportation has been its seeming contradiction to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that you can never measure and thus know all the information contained within an atom. The more information you try to gather from the atom, the more of the atom you disturb. By the time you're finished measuring and observing the atom, it no longer looks like the same atom you started with. Without knowing the makeup of the the original object, how could you transfer it to another location across space?

So, the answer to this question, in an extremely simplified explanation, is a little weird. The following will describe how a particle can influence the state of another particle without either particle having any interaction with each other. Meaning that particles that are separated by space know things about each other that they shouldn't.

Particle A is scanned, and the information gathered from particle A transfers over to a new particle B, which has had no prior or current contact with particle A. The result is that particle B, with all the information gathered from A, becomes an exact replica of particle A.

Now, this may sound like replication. But bear in mind that particle A was destroyed due to the information gathering. So, technically, this would either count as cloning, or teleportation. But seeing as how cloning would imply two particles being intact at the same time as exact replicas, I'm leaning toward teleportation.

So, in order to transfer the information from particle A to B, this procedure requires the intercession of a third particle, C, which acts as an information carrier. But the weird thing is that particle C visits particle B -before- particle A, and therefore transfers the information of particle A's construction backward to particle B. Which, I suppose, would support the theory that time does not only travel in one direction. Google it. Kinda creepy when you think about it...

This technique has been used to teleport photons, coherent light fields, nuclear spins, and trapped ions, according to IBM researchers. So, without many of us knowing, teleportation has been, and probably currently is used in labs already.

I apologize for the headache.