Bear On Business

(Continued from yesterday…)

The reason teleportation is constrained by the speed of light is because information needs to be transmitted in a conventional way. That is, for teleportation to work, some amount of data need to be sent from one location to another. Data can be sent wirelessly—just as information can be transmitted via satellites. But the amount of information required for teleportation is huge—orders of magnitude more than telepresence, for example. No need to worry that teleportation will make fiber obsolete.

Of course, by the time teleportation of humans or objects becomes a reality, our grandchildren (or more accurately their grandchildren) will have mastered air waves and thereby made fiber obsolete. This is a century or so beyond the horizon of Zayo’s Investment Thesis.

I want to emphasize a point about quantum teleportation. We transfer blueprints at the speed of light today. Teleportation, though, involves something more profound than simply transferring information from one place or another. Only half of the information needed to re-construct a quantum teleported message or object is transmitted. The other half is not transmitted—it is already waiting at the other end. Though separated geographically, particles with a common history can become entangled. The transmitted information combined with the untangling is what results in the old object vaporizing and the new one materializing. This is weird but real. It is unbelievable yet scientists are actually doing in the real world. Moreover, commercialization of entanglement is beginning. My guess is people will have become used to it gradually such that by the time teleportation is a reality, it will seem natural to our descendents. 

Quantum Encryption–a perfect form of keeping information secure–will be the first form of commercialization. I will come back to this in a future blog—though not for a while. I need to get back to Zayo’s Investment Thesis.

I suspect many of you noticed I chose April 1 for a post on teleportation of people. “Clever,” you thought. “I wonder how many people were fooled by the seemingly legit CNN link.”

April Fool’s Day. Beam me up, Scotty. Give me a break. Could anyone be foolish enough to believe that teleportation is not only theoretically possible but is actually being demonstrated? Well, this is no April Fool’s joke. The articles are real, and the implications are both weird and profound.

There is an important catch. Explaining the catch is difficult. I’ll try.

Billiard balls are used as an example by Valerie Jamieson, physics editor of New Scientist Magazine, in the CNN article:

One way of imagining it is to think of a snooker table with balls on it. In the traditional view of teleportation a spinning ball will de-materialize at one end of the table and exactly the same ball will re-materialize at the other end. In quantum teleportation the spinning ball stays where it is, but its spin is transferred to another ball somewhere else on the table…It is an aspect or a ‘property’ of the original ball that has been transmitted rather than the ball itself. Although to complicate matters the process of transmission would destroy the original ball.

Note the significance of her last thought: the process would destroy the original ball. In practicality, the ball would disappear from one end of the table and an exact replica would reappear at the other end. Matter did not transport. But the object (or data or person) in effect did. This is mind-boggling and potentially troublesome.

An important qualifier is that the teleported object, data or person, does not re-appear instantaneously. It reappears only after some information is transferred from one location to the other–and the information transfer is time-constrained by the speed of light.

Lear jets are quick, but light is quicker. New York to Hong Kong at the speed of light would make for a pretty efficient day trip. At light speed, dinner at home is doable even if your business trip was on Mars. Unfortunately, though, the speed of light constraint prevents time travel. Oh well.

Zayo’s Investment Thesis also benefits from quantum teleportation’s speed of light limitation. How? More tomorrow.

Perhaps I was too quick to conclude that fiber is A-OK for a long time. Click here to see a teleportation article that appeared in The Independent in June of 2007. An excerpt from the article:

Scientists have set a new record in sending information through thin air using the revolutionary technology of quantum teleportation - although Mr. Spock may have to wait a little longer for a Scotty to beam him up with it. A team of physicists has teleported data over a distance of 89 miles from the Canary Island of La Palma to the neighbouring (sic) island of Tenerife… The scientists did it by exploiting the “spooky” and virtually unfathomable field of quantum entanglement - when the state of matter rather than matter itself is sent from one place to another.

This doesn’t seem to bode well for fiber optics. 

You say you never heard of The Independent? Perhaps you’ve heard of CNN. The article Beam me up: Just how close are we to teleportation? was published in October of 2007. An excerpt:

Now teleportation, long a staple of the world of science fiction — what episode of Star Trek would be complete without Captain Kirk et al “beaming” off the Enterprise onto the surface of some distant planet? — is being talked of as a serious scientific possibility. More than just talked of, indeed: over the last couple of years physicists … have achieved a rudimentary form of teleportation…

Certainly this puts a wrinkle in our fiber roll-up strategy. But it doesn’t stop there–oil companies, auto makers and airlines should feel a bit threatened as well. Another excerpt from the article:

And what of the “classical teleportation” so integral to the adventures of Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and Harry Potter? Will there ever come a time when actual people, rather than just the particles of which they are made up, will be able to beam from one place to another? … in principle at least, it is perfectly feasible to teleport humans without violating any of the fundamental laws of physics.

Information instantly moving from one place to another. People teleported across oceans and between planets. How can this be possible? 

I thought this title would garner your attention.

One of my passions is theoretical physics. I’m not sure why and I don’t know if I should offer this up with pride or admit to it with embarrassment. Regardless, the topic fascinates me.

Star Trek, though only on TV for two seasons, left a lasting impression on our culture. The Saturday Night Live skit in which John Belushi played Captain Kirk is among my fondest SNL memories. “Beam me up, Scotty” is Star Trek’s most famous phase. Captain Kirk would be on the surface of some strange planet; just as the angry alien was about to zap Kirk, chief engineer Scotty would transport the captain to the ship. Kirk’s being would zap out of existence at the planet and instantly re-assemble in the ship. It is a nice form of transportation, even for those who have access to a corporate jet.

Teleportation seemed to be nothing more than a convenient invention of science fiction. How could something disappear in one location and immediately reappear at another?  This seems to violate all plausible laws of physics. Until recently, scientists never considered that this phenomenon was possible. But they were wrong.

It turns out we live in a strange universe, one in which teleportation is possible. You don’t believe me? Read tomorrow’s April 1, 2008, post.