teleportation

TELEPORTATION
...Make Your Way Through Space
ABSTRACT

Ever since the wheel was invented more than 5,000 years ago, people have been inventing new ways to travel faster from one point to another. The chariot, bicycle, automobile, airplane and rocket have all been invented to decrease the amount of time we spend getting to our desired destinations. Yet each of these forms of transportation share the same flaw: They require us to cross a physical distance, which can take anywhere from minutes to many hours depending on the starting and ending points.

The new millennium has come & gone but still we are using the same old technology for transportation & telecommunication. Now what if you could reach your destination within the blink of an eye, without even crossing a road. What if you could supervise important work in person rather than from your cell phone ??
what if there were a way to go from home to the supermarket without to use your car or from backyard to the International Space Station without having to board a spacecraft?

There are scientists working right now on such a method of travel by combining properties of telecommunications and transportation to achieve a system called TELEPORTATION


General process of teleportation

INTRODUCTION

The word TELEPORTATION was coined in the early 1900s by American fiction writer Charles Fort. Teleportation is the name given by science fiction writers to the feat of making an object or person disintegrate in one place while a perfect replica appears somewhere else. How this is accomplished is usually not explained in detail, but the general idea seems to be that the original object is scanned in such a way as to extract all the information from it, then this information is transmitted to the receiving location and used to construct the replica, not necessarily from the actual material of the original, but perhaps from atoms of the same kinds, arranged in exactly the same pattern as the original. A teleportation machine would work on 3-dimensional objects, it would produce an exact copy rather than an approximate facsimile, and it would destroy the original in the process of scanning it.

Teleportation involves dematerializing an object at one point, and sending the details of that object's precise atomic configuration to another location, where it will be reconstructed. What this means is that time and space could be eliminated from travel -- we could be transported to any location instantly, without actually crossing a physical distance.

Research

In 1993, the idea of teleportation moved out of the realm of science fiction and into the world of theoretical possibility. It was then that physicist Charles Bennett and a team of researchers at IBM confirmed that quantum teleportation was possible, but only if the original object being teleported was destroyed. This revelation, first announced by Bennett at an annual meeting of the American Physical Society in March 1993, was followed by a report on his findings in the March 29, 1993 issue of Physical Review Letters. Since that time, experiments using photons have proven that quantum teleportation is in fact possible.

In 1998, physicists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), along with two European groups, turned the IBM ideas into reality by successfully teleporting a photon, a particle of energy that carries light. The Caltech group was able to read the atomic structure of a photon, send this information across 1 meter (3.28 feet) of coaxial cable and create a replica of the photon. As predicted, the original photon no longer existed once the replica was made.

In performing the experiment, the Caltech group was able to get around the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the main barrier for teleportation of objects larger than a photon. This principle states that you cannot simultaneously know the location and the speed of a particle. But if you can't know the position of a particle, then how can you teleport it? In order to teleport a photon without violating the Heisenberg Principle, the Caltech physicists used a phenomenon known as entanglement.

The most recent successful teleportation experiment took place on October 4, 2006 at the Niles Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark. Dr. Eugene Polzik and his team teleported information stored in a laser beam into a cloud of atoms. Quantum teleportation holds promise for quantum computing. These experiments are important in developing networks that can distribute quantum information. Professor Samuel Braunstein, of the University of Wales, Bangor, called such a network a "quantum Internet." This technology may be used one day to build a quantum computer that has data transmission rates many times faster than today's most powerful computer.

Classification

Officially TELEPORTATION has been classified into:

sf-Teleportation
"The disembodied transport of persons or inanimate objects across space by advanced (futuristic) technological means”. This type of teleportation could use a physical connection between the two locations, such as a wire. Using existing technology, such as the Internet, or telephone lines, could be the means for this type of teleport. However, this means it would be extremely slow, since a typical living animal is approximately equal to 600YB (yottabytes). Compression could be utilized, but would have to be effective in keeping all data intact.

p-Teleportation
"The conveyance of persons or inanimate objects by psychic means."

vm-Teleportation
"The conveyance of persons or inanimate objects across space by altering the properties of the spacetime vacuum, or by altering the spacetime metric (geometry)." This category includes the use of wormholes for transport, and the modification of the speed of light.

q-Teleportation
"The disembodied transport of the quantum state of a system and its correlations across space to another system, where system refers to any single or collective particles of matter or energy such as baryons (protons, neutrons, etc.), leptons (electrons, etc.), photons, atoms, ions, etc."

e-Teleportation
"the conveyance of persons or inanimate objects by transport through extra space dimensions or parallel universes."

Human teleportation
The use of teleportation as a means of transport for humans still has considerable unresolved technical and philosophical issues, such as exactly how to record the human body sufficiently accurately and also be able to reconstruct it, and whether destroying a human in one place and recreating a copy elsewhere would provide a sufficient experience of continuity of existence. Believers in the supernatural might wonder if the soul is recopied or destroyed, and might even consider it murder. Likewise, someone with a secular worldview who considers the body synonymous with the self might also see the disintegration of a given corpus as the killing of a human being. The reassembled human would be a different sentience with the same memories as the original. Many of the questions are shared with the concept of mind transfer.



• The process of teleportation on a human
The laws of physics may even make it impossible to create a transporter that enables a person to be sent instantaneously to another location, which would require travel at the speed of light.





• Animated view of teleportation

For a person to be transported, a machine would have to be built that can pinpoint and analyze all of the 102k atoms that make up the human body. That’s more than a trillion trillion atoms. This machine would have to send this information to another location, where the person’s body would be reconstructed with exact precision. Molecules couldn’t be even a millimeter out of place, lest the person arrive with some severe neurological or physiological defect.

Conclusion
If a teleporter is really built, the subject will be teleported to the destination at the speed of light, which is the real advantage & spirit behind the research of teleportation. So think about your office or college as easily as you were going to house in your neighborhood or reaching a star or a planet at a speed which Newton or Einstein have not dreamed to be possible.

As all good things have limits teleportation also has its limits. The teleporter transfers matter at a speed of light & we know that light has its speed limit, the feeling of instantaneous teleportation is felt only on Earth & distances comparable with, or less than the speed of light. If a subject is transported to a galaxy at distance of about 4 light years away then it will take a period of 4 years ( of earth time ) for the subject to reach its destination.



• A Futuristic view of a teleporter


As everything invented or discovered in science can be used for or against mankind, this wonderful technology could also be used in an illegal way by trapping people in the form of a signal, or send destructive materials such as bombs. So this technology which is still in its infancy has real hopes for the future of mankind

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleportation
http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid7_gci213114,00.html
http://www.netalive.org/forums
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technovel_teleport_041103.html