this is what i learnt today!

ok, welll, its still half a day.

While reading an article on Teleportation, I found my attention waning with the lengthy (thou this site really condenses stuff very well into pretty managable bits; I cannot read dry stuff for too long anyway) explainations on how Teleportation works, and how this Caltech team managed to teleport a photon thru 1m of coaxial cable.

Teleportation works by destroying the original, and replicating it in the new place.

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.

My take: woohooo PROGRESS! *majulah*

The understanding of 4 paras of words came when I read this:

In other words, when Captain Kirk beams down to an alien planet, an analysis of his atomic structure is passed through the transporter room to his desired location, where a replica of Kirk is created and the original is destroyed.

They shuda just said this in the beginning!! *roll eyes*

Anyway, just extra information for you. Pretty exciting!

The most recent successful teleportation experiment took place on October 4, 2006 (NOT TOO LONG AGO!) at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark. Dr. Eugene Polzik and his team teleported information stored in a laser beam into a cloud of atoms. According to Polzik, "It is one step further because for the first time it involves teleportation between light and matter, two different objects. One is the carrier of information and the other one is the storage medium". The information was teleported a little more than three feet (half a meter), as opposed to the minute distances achieved in previous experiments.

And left this to the last. This is what we're all waiting for ANYWAY:

!!! Human Teleportation !!!
We are years away from the development of a teleportation machine like the transporter room on Star Trek's Enterprise spaceship. ( aww :( )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.

For a person to be transported, a machine would have to be built that can pinpoint and analyze all of the 1028 atoms that make up the human body (we only have 1028 atoms? I thought more...). That's more than a trillion trillion atoms (ok, the article confused me here. they said 1028 atoms=more than a trillion trillion atams. So.. how come?). This machine would then 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.

In the Star Trek episodes, and the spin-off series that followed it, teleportation was performed by a machine called a transporter. This was basically a platform that the characters stood on, while Scotty adjusted switches on the transporter room control boards. The transporter machine then locked onto each atom of each person on the platform, and used a transporter carrier wave to transmit those molecules to wherever the crew wanted to go. Viewers watching at home witnessed Captain Kirk and his crew dissolving into a shiny glitter before disappearing, rematerializing instantly on some distant planet.

If such a machine were possible, it's unlikely that the person being transported would actually be "transported." It would work more like a fax machine -- a duplicate of the person would be made at the receiving end, but with much greater precision than a fax machine. But what would happen to the original? One theory suggests that teleportation would combine genetic cloning with digitization.

In this biodigital cloning, tele-travelers would have to die (not a good idea...), in a sense. Their original mind and body would no longer exist. (sure sounds scary) Instead, their atomic structure would be recreated in another location, and digitization would recreate the travelers' memories, emotions, hopes and dreams. So the travelers would still exist, but they would do so in a new body, of the same atomic structure as the original body, programmed with the same information.

But like all technologies, scientists are sure to continue to improve upon the ideas of teleportation, to the point that we may one day be able to avoid such harsh methods. One day, one of your descendents (certainly WOULDN'T BE ME!) could finish up a work day at a space office above some far away planet in a galaxy many light years from Earth, tell his or her wristwatch that it's time to beam home for dinner on planet X below and sit down at the dinner table as soon as the words leave his mouth.

Quantum physics is... confusing...

Current MSN Nick: I love u in e mornin & in e aftn, I love u in e evenin & 'derneath e moon skibberderwinkke dinkiedink skibberderwinkie doo I love u