Is there anybody there???

[Holliday]

Maybe we'll find in years to come that we've got the physics all wrong and things aren't limited by the speed of light - but it doesn't seem very likely.

Quantum teleportation achieved over ten miles of free space

[Sam]

Quantum teleportation achieved over ten miles of free space

You still have to move the entangled photon to the other location.

[Holliday]

So you do, shows what I know about it all.

Another link then, a lot of technical jargon, but interesting none the less!;

A Curiosity of Spirit (FULL DOCUMENT) AstroEngineer's Blog

[toml42]

Quantum teleportation achieved over ten miles of free space

ok, this is something you have to be very careful with. as faster than light = time travel = terrible mess!!

This is weird, confusing stuff, and i won't claim to completely understand it, because no one does!

But everything we know about this phenomena so far can be reconciled with relativity, even if it does not appear to be at first.

Relativity forbids the transmission of information faster than the speed of light (because faster than light = time travel), and one has no control over the result of the observation of a spin state, so there is no transmitting or receiving of useful information.

what quantum teleportation is loosely akin to, is you and a friend both closing your eyes and randomly picking up a stone, you know one of them is black and one of them is white. you hop on jet planes and agree not to check what stone you have until you are at opposite sides of the Earth.

when you arrive, you find you have the black stone, so you know he must have the white stone, without even looking!

you need two pieces of information to deduce this, the observation of what colour your stone is, and the knowledge that he must have the other. you had the second piece of knowledge before the experiment even began! therefore, you are transmitting or receiving no knowledge other than what you carried with you the whole time.

of course, quantum mechanics is a little more complicated, but everything we know about it suggests that we cannot choose the result of a measurement, it must be completely random, so we can never actually transmit or receive any information faster than light.

there are 4 main thoughts on this phenomena.

1. "hidden variables" the theory that the answer is there right from the beginning but we couldn't observe it - currently suspect, but not entirely down

2. Nature doesn't mind transmitting certain things faster than light somehow so long as it isn't information, we'll just have to deal with it. (my favourite)

3. We're doing it wrong. We'll sooner or later discover a method to transmit data faster than light and time travel becomes possible, universe becomes very messy.

4. everything we know is false. we should start from scratch. this seems to me the least likely option, as our current theories do a fantastic job at nearly everything else, they just need a little tweak somewhere.

My head hurts by now, and i expect yours does too, have fun!