Next on the list? A space ship capable of traveling at warp speed.
(Mirror Daily, United States) – Trekkies and nerds everywhere are rejoicing the latest developments in teleportation experiments. First flip phones, and then video calls, automated doors, high-power scanners and now, teleportation. It seems that Star Trek predicted future technology better than we initially believed.
Science fiction stories and movies have become a source of inspiration for the scientific community. It may be that the creators of Atlas were Isaac Asimov fans, as Alexander Szameit, a professor at the Jena University in Germany, the inventor of teleportation, is a fan of the Kirk and Spock space traveling ground-breaking television program.
According to Dr. Szameit, many of the technical wonders that were portrayed in the show decades ago are now part of modern-day life. Well, except flip phones, they came, and they went, being replaced by far more advanced technology. And the communication pins were just Bluetooth headsets with a fashionable approach.
So if almost every technological advancement that was present on Enterprise is already available, why not give teleportation a try?
Well, that is exactly what Szameit and his team attempted to do. The German scientist explained that classic, elementary particles like electrons or light particles exist in a different state than matter itself. They are spatially delocalized; this means that physically it is possible for them to exist in multiple locations at the same time.
And since such particles can be found in various places, there is a possibility that information can be transmitted from one point to another instantly. The theory behind this idea had been circulating in the scientific community for quite some time now, and it had been referred to as “quantum teleportation”.
But theory is nothing without actual results based on real experiments. So a team of scientists led by the Trekkie Szameit managed to conduct a successful teleportation experiment in order to prove the quantum teleportation theory.
In order to do so, they used an altered form of a laser beam. As explained by another member of the team, Marco Ornigotti, light beams can be modified like any other elementary particle. So they codified the light property with a particular information.
The result was that classic information was teleported instantly from one place to another. For the moment the procedure can only be applied to classical information and the teleportation only works locally.
But there are a number of practical applications for their discovery. For example, the field of communications can benefit greatly from the work of Szmeit and his team.
Hope is not lost, and maybe someday we will no longer travel by train or plane, but with the aid of a much faster, quantum technology. Star Trek predicted future technology better than we initially believed, so why not further the research in the teleportation field.
Image source: popsci.com