“Teleportation — Science of Impossible”
Impossibility is really so tough word to say because if you just look around into yourself and will find that our existence was also an accident and an impossibility that now came as true. At quantum levels, each particle works on probability and there is no certainty of any movement. So you may think that any single quantum fluctuation in the space-time would create something so weird questions, violating our laws of physics. So let’s free up yourself from fanatical physics mindset and get ready to drown into the ocean of Impossibilities.
In our childhood, we all may have seen many science fiction movies and stories, novels and also tales including magical worlds etc. But gradually as we grow up, we lose up all our excitement of exploring something new because we now understand that those such magical and fictional doesn’t happen in the real world. But, Have you ever asked yourself that Is it not be possible to fly in the air without any wings or copter?
Or Is it not possible to get invisible in spite of our presence? So these questions are also can be answered through many scientific perspectives. But today I have chosen much more interesting question of “Teleportation”.
So before we start climbing upon the theory of teleportation, let’s try to think more about Impossibility. “Impossibilities” or, in simple words that writers used to say is, Science Fiction is truly a major prediction of future in terms of technology and science. But why is it called a future prediction?
So let me tell you that few things in this world are meant to people that it is not possible. But when one thinks about that impossibility that simply called a future prediction. Few times, a discovery or invention is kept under dark by some science-haters or either by orthodox people. So for that time, it remains as a talk of future. Or few times the truths and realities are knocking our doors but we remain silent at that moment. Sometimes, we don’t have more advanced technologies that make us put our foot backwards and firstly improve the existing resources and technologies. And very few times, few concepts make such awkward and absurd concepts which really seems to be impossible. That’s only the reason of future prediction of a science fiction impossibility.
As once our great scientist Albert Einstein has said:
If a first an idea doesn’t sound absurd, then there is no hope for it.
Let’s build a concept of Teleportation:
Teleportation, or the ability to transport a person or an object instantly from one place to another, is a technology that could change the course of civilisation and alter the destiny of nations. It is really magic. [ Again I repeat Magic can be Science And Science can be Magic, the need is to follow the laws of nature.] No one will move for a long journey and they will teleport here and there in seconds. In fact I will also dream of using teleportation in my life. And really, life would get easy. We could simply teleport us to schools, offices and market. Our lifestyle will get totally changed and in simple words, Teleportation would change everything.
- But, Is it possible to teleport from one place to another? If so, then what are concepts or phenomena through which teleportation is possible?
The very first question that is a straight question to this topic, I will totally explain it then answer it. So it really requires a full description of that. So let’s go through it’s arising concepts and phenomena:
According to the very first profound research-based theory i.e, Newtonian theory, teleportation concept is totally rejected because Newton’s laws are based on the idea that matter is made up of tiny, hard and indivisible atoms. According to its laws, objects do not move until they are pushed and they do not suddenly disappear and reappear somewhere else.
So as we will move in 19th century, we will see few major discoveries took place which marked as very first steps towards the research of quantum mechanics. Discoveries revealed by James Clerk Maxwell opened one secret that light is an electromagnetic wave with a speed of 300,000 km/s. As it was still a beginning but in the 20th century it happened a miracle when,
In 1905, Einstein had shown that light waves can have particle-like properties and they can be described as small packets of energy are called ‘quanta’ or simply photons. It is now confirmed that photon exhibits dual behaviour at the same time, called wave-particle duality. While analysing the bizarre properties of atoms and subatomic particles, physicists finally discovered that electron acted like waves and could make quantum leaps in their seemingly chaotic motions within the atoms, also known as quantum teleportation.
- What, electrons can have wave-like properties then how it got discovered and by whom?
Yes, Electron can also exhibit wave-like properties like as to photons. So this idea was first pointed out by frech physicist Louis de Broglie who won nobel prize for this discovery.
- So, if an electron is a wave so what is its wave equation, as we plot the graph of different physical phenomenon?
This question had been asked by fellow physicist of Erwin Schrodinger, Peter Debye. And this question gave a challenge to Erwin Schrodinger to describe electron wave equation. Research started behind it…
Ever since Newton created calculus, physicist had been able to describe waves in terms of differential equation. So ,in the same way as James Clerk Maxwell had taken the force field of Faraday and formulated his differential equations for light, Schrodinger formulated wave equation of an electron through differential equations of Calculus. And now his works started sending shockwaves in field of physics, replacing the Niels Bohr’s model and proposed electron as wave having strange orbit not circular shells.
Now it got confirmed that electron can have wave-like properties but what is waving? It was answered by Max born who said that these waves are actually sets of probability. These waves tell you only the chance of finding a particular electron at any place and at any time. In other words, the electron is a particle, but the probability of finding that particle is given by Schrodinger wave equation. So, it is now confirmed,
The Larger the waves of any particle, The Greater the chance of finding the particle at that point.
So with these developments, Werner Heisenberg added his uncertainty principle which says that,
You can’t know both the exact velocity and the position of an electron at the same time nor you can know its energy measured over a given time.
- Why the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg points to such impossible phenomena?
Because at the quantum levels, all the basic laws of commom sense are violated. Newton law of motion is not obeyed by these electrons. Everything seems to be horrible because an electron can disappear and reappear elsewhere and the most spooky one that electrons can be at the many places at the same instant of time. That’s the quantum theory reality is that it is spooky. Ironically, Einstein, the god father of quantum theory, were horrified by the introduction of chance into fundamental physics. So you may think that how strange the Quantum physics is!
Heisenberg uncertainty principle is controversial but it worked so it became a revolutionary theory. Actually, the simple fact is that electrons can seemingly be at many places at the same time forms the basis of whole chemistry. In fact, all of chemistry, which explains the molecules inside our bodies, is based on the idea that electrons can be many places at the same time, and it is this sharing of electrons between two atoms that hold the molecules of our body together Now it was a matter of subatomic particles like electrons and photons can be at many places, what about us?
Well, for this question, Newtonian physics should be neglected and this question is allowed under quantum mechanics only. However, is that one would have to wait longer than the lifetime of the universe for this to occur. (If you used a computer to graph the Schrôdinger wave of your own body, you would find that it very much resembles all the features of your body, except that the graph would be a bit fuzzy, with some of your waves oozing out in all directions. Some of your waves would extend even as far as the distant stars. So there is a very tiny probability that one day you might wake up on a distant planet.)
Now come to the question that I had questioned at very first of this post:
Is it possible to teleport from one place to another?
In reality, the quantum “jumps” so common inside the atom cannot be easily generalized to large objects such as people, which contain trillions upon trillions of atoms. Even if the electrons in our body are dancing and jumping in their fantastic journey around the nucleus, there are so many of them that their motions average out. That is, roughly speaking, why at our level substances seem solid and permanent.
So while teleportation is allowed at the atomic level, one would have to wait longer than the lifetime of the universe to actually witness these bizarre effects on a macroscopic scale. But can one use the laws of the quantum theory to create a machine to teleport something on demand, as in science fiction stories? Amazingly, the answer is a qualified YES.
Other theories revealing Quantum Teleportation
Well, that was an introduction of Quantum Teleportation and now we are going to explore more ideas which unravel the secrets of Quantum Teleportation. Let’s move our ideas further to EPR Experiment.
The key to quantum teleportation lies in a celebrated 1935 paper by Albert Einstein and his colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, who, ironically, proposed the EPR experiment (named for the three authors) to the introduction of probability into physics. (Bemoaning the undeniable experimental successes of the quantum theory, Einstein wrote, “the more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks”)
If two electrons are initially vibrating in unison (a state called coherence) they can remain in wavelike synchronization even if they are separated by a large distance. Although the two electrons may be separated by light-years, there is still an invisible Schrôdinger wave connecting both of them, like an umbilical cord. If something happens to one electron, then some of that information is immediately transmitted to the other. This is called “quantum entanglement,” the concept that particles vibrating incoherence have some kind of deep connection linking them together.
Now, Let’s start with two coherent electrons oscillating in unison. Next,
let them go flying out in opposite directions. Each electron is like a
spinning top. The spins of each electron can be pointed up or down.
Let’s say that the total spin of the system is zero, so that if the spin of one electron is up, then you know automatically that the spin of the other electron is down. According to the quantum theory, before you make a measurement, the electron is spinning neither up nor down but exists in a nether state where it is spinning both up and down simultaneously. Next, measure the spin of one electron. It is, says, spinning up. Then you know instantly that the spin of the other electron is down. Even if the electrons are separated by many light-years, you instantly know the spin of the second electron as soon as you measure the spin of the first electron. In fact, you know this faster than the speed of light Because these two electrons are “entangled,” that is, their wave functions beat in unison, their wave functions are connected by an invisible thread” or umbilical cord. Whatever happens to one automatically has an effect on the other.
So, about much more EPR experiment is that It is considered as a hollow victory due to its non-application of it. Then, why it is considered victorious? EPR Experiment paved a path to some major riddles of physics. Later after Einstein’s era, this experiment proved Quantum theory correct but left a mystery that is:
If Information can travel with much more than the speed of light then how and why? Actually, information is not useful and it is random. For example:- If one boy is wearing red socks and another is wearing green socks. Then when you will check one’s foot socks’ colour, let’s assume you saw a red one then at the time you can easily predict another one is wearing green socks. Then what does this matter? These are random information, not the text messages in binary code. So until we have not got any application of this experiment to send information much more than the speed of light.
Breakthroughs in Teleportation with the passage of time
Since the original announcement of this breakthrough, progress has been fiercely competitive as different groups have attempted to outrace each other. The first historic demonstration of quantum teleportation in which photons of ultraviolet light were teleported occurred in 1997 at the University of Innsbruck. This was followed the next year by experimenters at CalTech who did an even more precise experiment involving teleporting photons. In 2004 physicists at the University of Vienna were able to teleport particles of light over a distance of 600 meters beneath the River Danube, using a fibre-optic cable, setting a new record. (The cable itself was 800 meters long and was strung underneath the public sewer system beneath the River Danube. The sender stood on one side of the river, and the receiver was on the other.)
One criticism of these experiments is that they were conducted with photons of light. It was significant, therefore, in 2004, when quantum teleportation was demonstrated not with photons of light, but with actual atoms, bringing us a step closer to a more realistic teleportation device. The physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Washington, D.C., successfully entangled three beryllium atoms and transferred the properties of one atom into another. This achievement was so significant that it made the cover of Nature magazine. Another group was able to teleport calcium atoms as well.
In 2006 yet another spectacular advance was made, for the first time involving a macroscopic object. Physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and the Max Planck Institute in Germany were able to entangle a light beam with a gas of caesium atoms, a feat involving trillions upon trillions of atoms. Then they encoded information contained inside laser pulses and were able to teleport this information to the caesium atoms over a distance of about half a yard. “For the first time,” said Eugene Polzik, one of the researchers, quantum teleportation “has been achieved between light, the carrier of information, and atoms.” We are now going to move our steps further so as to learn and explore the nature much better.
Why in the future, why not at present? Yes, we are now having that ability to teleport subatomic particles into space. That’s big deal. A very very thanks to China for this achievement. Let’s understand in brief.
Why it’s a big deal? Because of its broad vision. Actually, Chinese scientists have shown great efforts and teleported entangled pair of photons to much more altitude of ISS orbit to its satellite.
Chinese Scientists who made a major breakthrough in teleportation
The Chinese scientists conducted their experiment by shooting a single photon from several entangled pairs to the satellite Micius — which is one of the most sensitive photon receivers ever built — hovering above the base station every night. They kept the other photon on the ground. According to an MIT report, over 32 days, the Chinese scientists sent millions of photons to orbit and found positive results of teleportation in 911 cases.
“We report the first quantum teleportation of independent single-photon qubits from a ground observatory to a low Earth orbit satellite — through an up-link channel — with a distance up to 1400 km,” says the Chinese team.
Since from ages of evolution of human, they have been wondered by nature and its phenomena. Nature is just everything in which we are thriving. Once Albert Einstein told, “ Nature always shows the tail of the lion.” That means nature is itself a deep mystery which itself need to be unravelled.
With the passage of time, we face different aspects of our nature. When we gaze at stars they show something different and when we look with atom we see something much more different. We have discussed that electron has a wave-like property which represents the probabilistic nature of quantum particles. We now see that everything depends on probability. If your brain hasn’t given you such electronic impulse to read this post then you weren’t reading this line made up if numerous pixels. We can take many many examples regarding these. Our body mechanism work on this principle. Not only our body actually the whole universe is just a probability. What if this universe wasn’t there? So you see these imaginations are so spooky. Take another example of teleportation, it is a really unimaginable concept. But it is now a reality. What if, we become able to teleport molecules and finally DNA to the farthest reach of us. And finally a human. That would be a fantastic idea. Ok I think, I have reached to my words limits and I should say a goodbye to you as well. Well, you can ask any questions in the comment box regarding this topic.
Keep Exploring yourself and Keep Growing! Good day! Goodbye!
Originally published at letexploreletgrow.blogspot.com.