# Scientists teleport first object ever from Earth into space



## Cli-Fi (Jul 14, 2017)

Wow I honestly never thought I'd see this happen, let alone in my lifetime.


> A photon — a tiny sub-atomic particle — was "transported" from the Gobi Desert to China's Micius satellite some 310 miles above the surface.



Beam me up? Scientists teleport first object ever from Earth into space


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## thaddeus6th (Jul 14, 2017)

I think short range teleportation of similarly small matter has been around for decades, but that range is significant. 

Can't help but think of both humanitarian and military capacity. Imagine transporting water immediately to a drought zone. Or putting nerve gas in the midst of a military installation.


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## Cli-Fi (Jul 14, 2017)

thaddeus6th said:


> I think short range teleportation of similarly small matter has been around for decades, but that range is significant.
> 
> Can't help but think of both humanitarian and military capacity. Imagine transporting water immediately to a drought zone. Or putting nerve gas in the midst of a military installation.



Yeah we have a ways to go before that happens, but honestly thought it was impossible to do such long range distances.


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## Ensign Shah (Jul 14, 2017)

*puts hand up* Me next!


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## Brian G Turner (Jul 14, 2017)

So far as I understand it, there was no "teleportation" - but instead the experiment used entanglement, a basic feature of Quantum ElectroDynamics. 

I think the point of note of the story is that the distance is apparently greater than anything done before with this - but the dressing it up as "teleportation" is just sexing the story up unnecessarily. 

2c.


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## SilentRoamer (Jul 14, 2017)

What the Chinese have done has been done before although never at that distance, but it is not teleportation, that's actually a pretty bad descriptor of the process. Essentially this is information replication - the physical particles already exist it is just their measured states which don't, it works on the principle of Quantum Indeterminacy, namely that the state of the particle can't be known until measured. 

I honestly don't think the distance really matters (in terms of how this works I think the distances could be anything) and I think the Chinese are just a bit ahead of the game. It has huge potential for Communications and to be honest there are papers that talk about it revolutionizing the networks - imagine an encryption key that was completely uncrackable because the decryption key only existed in a point of time and space.

I wish it was really teleportation but it isn't. What the article fails to also mention is that the property of the "master" photon was measured and not set by the research team, in other words the information sent is random to the measurement at the moment. 

Still, the slow grind of progress moves ever onwards.


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## SilentRoamer (Jul 14, 2017)

Brian beat me to it.


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## thaddeus6th (Jul 14, 2017)

Ah, quantum physics. Or 'magic', as it sometimes sounds like.


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## Ursa major (Jul 14, 2017)

> A photon — a tiny sub-atomic particle — was "transported" from the Gobi Desert to China's Micius satellite some 310 miles above the surface.


Never having been to China, let alone the Gobi Desert, I can't match this achievement...

...but I have sent many photons into space while not being fully in control of a torch on a cloudless night....

What I haven't done is make an _instantaneous_ change to a particle already in space... which isn't remotely like "transporting" an object  into space....


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## dask (Jul 14, 2017)

SilentRoamer said:


> the state of the particle can't be known until measured.


Not sure what "state" here means, location, size, type?


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## Ursa major (Jul 14, 2017)

I suspect a spin doctor will inform us....

​


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## Harpo (Jul 14, 2017)

Cli-Fi said:


> Wow I honestly never thought I'd see this happen, let alone in my lifetime.
> 
> 
> Beam me up? Scientists teleport first object ever from Earth into space



(pedantry) if I could see a thing happen *not* in my lifetime, I'd be a time-traveller (/pedantry)


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## Vertigo (Jul 14, 2017)

I saw the report on this a little while ago (it might even have been here in Chrons). My understanding is that @Brian G Turner and @SilentRoamer are correct; this was not teleportation (or at least not as we know it in popular media) though transportation was the hardest part. The problem was to generate the two entangled photons and then the hard part; to transport one of them to the satellite and capture it there. Essentially, I think, they had to fire a laser at the satellite that sent just that one single proton and then capture that photon that is capture it without absorbing it. Then a change of state in one photon will be mirrored in the other. The trouble is that if you fire a single photon at, say, a satellite the chances are it will be absorbed by striking some molecule on the way which is no use.

There's a much more complete report here China Shatters "Spooky Action at a Distance" Record, Preps for Quantum Internet and you'll notice that it is from a month ago.


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## SilentRoamer (Jul 14, 2017)

dask said:


> Not sure what "state" here means, location, size, type?



Momentum, Position, Spin and Polarization. All measurable and entangleable! (I'm coining that word!)


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## Lumens (Jul 15, 2017)

My toothbrush has gone missing. Are the chinese beaming random stuff into space as a practical joke now?


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## Cathbad (Jul 15, 2017)

The Toothbrush Fairy strikes again!!


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## dask (Jul 15, 2017)

SilentRoamer said:


> Momentum, Position, Spin and Polarization. All measurable and entangleable! (I'm coining that word!)


Probably a stupid question but I'll ask it anyway: how can we measure a particle if we don't know what its state is?


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## Vertigo (Jul 15, 2017)

dask said:


> Probably a stupid question but I'll ask it anyway: how can we measure a particle if we don't know what its state is?


No that's the whole point we absolutely can measure all those properties; it's state.

And Incidentally I think I got the highlighted comment below wrong:


> I saw the report on this a little while ago (it might even have been here in Chrons). My understanding is that @Brian G Turner and @SilentRoamer are correct; this was not teleportation (or at least not as we know it in popular media) though transportation was the hardest part. The problem was to generate the two entangled photons and then the hard part; to transport one of them to the satellite and capture it there. *Essentially, I think, they had to fire a laser at the satellite that sent just that one single proton and then capture that photon that is capture it without absorbing it.* Then a change of state in one photon will be mirrored in the other. The trouble is that if you fire a single photon at, say, a satellite the chances are it will be absorbed by striking some molecule on the way which is no use.


With a little more reading I believe what they are doing is creating the entangled particles on the satellite and then sending them down to base stations on Earth and those base stations can then communicate using the entanglement. As explained below:



> Micius carries in its heart an assemblage of crystals and lasers that generates entangled photon pairs then splits and transmits them on separate beams to ground stations in its line-of-sight on Earth. For the latest test, the three receiving stations were located in the cities of Delingha and Ürümqi—both on the Tibetan Plateau—as well as in the city of Lijiang in China’s far southwest. At 1,203 kilometers, the geographical distance between Delingha and Lijiang is the record-setting stretch over which the entangled photon pairs were transmitted.
> 
> For now the system remains mostly a proof of concept, because the current reported data transmission rate between Micius and its receiving stations is too low to sustain practical quantum communications. Of the roughly six million entangled pairs that Micius’s crystalline core produced during each second of transmission, only about one pair per second reached the ground-based detectors after the beams weakened as they passed through Earth’s atmosphere and each receiving station’s light-gathering telescopes. Team leader Jian-Wei Pan compares the feat with detecting a single photon from a lone match struck by someone standing on the moon. Even so, he says, Micius’s transmission of entangled photon pairs is “a trillion times more efficient than using the best telecommunication fibers. … We have done something that was absolutely impossible without the satellite.”


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## Montero (Jul 16, 2017)

Ursa major said:


> I suspect a spin doctor will inform us....
> 
> ​



aargh.
quark, quark, quark, quark.


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## Biskit (Jul 16, 2017)

Montero said:


> quark, quark, quark, quark.


Sounds strange to me.


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## Vertigo (Jul 16, 2017)

We should all keep calm about this...


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## SilentRoamer (Jul 17, 2017)

dask said:


> Probably a stupid question but I'll ask it anyway: how can we measure a particle if we don't know what its state is?



As Vertigo says this is kind of the point. We don't know the state of the particle until measured and whatever the measurement is for one of the entangled particles then it is the same as the other particle. This is one of the principles of Quantum mechanics - this is the Observer principle and is often confused with the Heidenberg uncertainty principle.

Although I think "spooky action at a distance" is a far better descriptor than "teleportation"!



Quantum Mechanics is probably the least intuitive science.


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## Vertigo (Jul 17, 2017)

I'm not quite sure why they even use the terminology 'teleportation.' I suspect it might be the argument that if you have two identical particles, two entangled photos for example, and fixing the state of one fixes the state of the other identically then then two particles are now identical and at a very fundamental level it would be impossible to tell them apart and therefore the particle that has been acted on has effectively been at transported.

But personally I think that's pushing the definition of transported.


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## The Ace (Jul 17, 2017)

Katie Hopkins ?


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## SilentRoamer (Jul 17, 2017)

Vertigo said:


> I'm not quite sure why they even use the terminology 'teleportation.' I suspect it might be the argument that if you have two identical particles, two entangled photos for example, and fixing the state of one fixes the state of the other identically then then two particles are now identical and at a very fundamental level it would be impossible to tell them apart and therefore the particle that has been acted on has effectively been at transported.
> 
> But personally I think that's pushing the definition of transported.



Yeah I agree - unless my understanding is wrong we can't fix the states at the moment - only measure the pre-existing state. The limitation is we don't know what the states are until we measure them and by the process of measurement we in fact fix their state. I think this has more applicability for communications security than it does for any type of Star Trek transporter technology. 

Still, teleportation sounds cool and I suppose these sites need click baitery titles - advertiser revenues roll on....


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## Vertigo (Jul 17, 2017)

SilentRoamer said:


> Yeah I agree - unless my understanding is wrong we can't fix the states at the moment - only measure the pre-existing state. The limitation is we don't know what the states are until we measure them and by the process of measurement we in fact fix their state. I think this has more applicability for communications security than it does for any type of Star Trek transporter technology.
> 
> Still, teleportation sounds cool and I suppose these sites need click baitery titles - advertiser revenues roll on....


Yes my understanding is that the intention is to use entangled pairs for encryption keys, rather than FTL communications. It's an interesting dilemma; how do we see if it works FTL because we can't watch one particle to see when it changes state as watching it fixes it (and therefore the other one as well. So essentially as soon as we attempt to look at the particle intended to be the receiver we make it the transmitter)...aaaaaaahhhhh!!!


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