One small step for teleportation

Quantum cryptography relies on qubit representaion of information as opposed to traditional 1's and 0's. Not just that, but thanks to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, you'll know right away if someone's messing with your communication. The reason quantum teleportation doesn't violate this principle is the "spooky action" of entanglement whereby the states of two particles are related despite their physical separation. Einstein resisted this notion because it wasn't in accordance to his idea that nothing can exceed the speed of light , not even gravity. But with entanglement, things happen seemingly instantaneously. Crazy shit. :doh:

Jam it back in, in the dark.

A subatomic particle might exist in two physical states with different energies. The probability of each outcome is described in a wavefunction that fluctuates over time and space. So in a sense there are intermediate states.

HUP states that the uncertainties in measurements of position and momentum for a given particle are inversely proportional (meaning that to know one accurately decreases the precision of the other). It's as if there's a collapse whenever you try to observe something. Take Schrödinger's cat... a cat is placed in a sealed box connected to a contraption designed to release a deadly poison with a 50/50 chance. As far as you know the cat is either dead or alive which is kind of like envisioning it as half dead and half alive at the same time (an intermediate state). As soon as you open the box, though, your vision collapses back into hard reality.

Add entanglement to the equation and you get a much higher level of privacy than you would given present-day cryptography. The way it works is that b/c of entanglement (via photons for instance), a message can be encoded in qubits and the recipient will receive a virtual copy of it with very little error. If a spy tries to decipher it, the error will increase and he will be detected. The information actually protects itself but feedback is necessary to confirm that no eavesdropping ocurred.

With teleportation, matter is encoded rather than messages. The orginal macromolecular object doesn't move in the process. Also, they have it at a fidelity of only 0.6, so it's far from perfect.

There's nowhere I can't reach.