Saturday, August 21, 2004

Am I Nerdy Enough?

Slashdot

I hope so!!

Ok, as a physicist I initially thought these must be crackpots. A careful read made it clear that the science is good, it's just the slashdot title and summary that don't make sense.

What they did NOT do is teleport particles of light. That just makes no sense. Light was used as the means of conveying the information used to teleport the quantum properties from one particle to another, without the particle having to travel.

By the way, the reason this is called "teleportation" is that the particle effectively travels at the speed of light -- its properties can be transferred by light. If this could be applied to humans, for example, it would allow for light-speed travel, without all the nuisances of acceleration. It should be noted that this does NOT violate the universal speed limit.

Oh, and before someone asks, this is entirely different from quantum tunnelling....


Quantum tunnelling?! What kind of moron would confuse this with quantum tunnelling!?? Oh my!!

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