Humanity is advancing rapidly towards a place where the news sounds an awful lot like science fiction. In fact, yesterday, Chinese scientists reported that they “teleported” a photon over hundreds of miles using a “quantum satellite.” But this isn’t Star Trek. It’s the real world.Read more: http://gizmodo.com/scientists-teleport-a-particle-hundreds-of-miles-but-w-1796818859Which happens to mean it’s a lot less exciting than Star Trek-style teleportation, unfortunately. But it’s still really cool, I promise!
This “quantum teleportation” doesn’t actually involve teleporting a real object—it’s not really teleportation at all. The scientists are actually sending information about a particle of light in a way that can only be accessed by two observers. This could have major implications for the future of computing—it would make for incredible data encryption. But encryption with this technology is still pretty far off.
Still, the researchers write in their new paper, “This work establishes the first ground-to-satellite up-link for faithful and ultra-long-distance quantum teleportation, an essential step toward global-scale quantum internet.” Let’s walk through what that means.
Last summer, China launched a satellite, called Micius, designed to test communications based on the principles of quantum mechanics over large distances. They released their first results last month, demonstrating that they could “entangle” particles over record distances—hundreds of kilometers.
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