Neat Geek Stuff
The ABC reports that Scientists teleport Schrodinger’s cat
Researchers from Australia and Japan have successfully teleported wave packets of light, potentially revolutionising quantum communications and computing.
The team, led by researchers at the University of Tokyo, say this is the first-ever teleportation, or transfer, of a particular complex set of quantum information from one point to another.
They say it will make possible high-speed, high-fidelity transmission of large volumes of information, such as quantum encryption keys, via communications networks.
You have to really love it to understand what they are talking about, but this is great if they can replicate it on a reliable basis. Be warned that both “teleport” and “Schrödinger’s cat” are being used as jargon, so the meanings may not be what you thought they meant. [There is more than a little Alice in Wonderland in the world of quantum computing.]
Decades ago I started writing a science fiction novel that depended on instant communication across space. My solution was to have devices that all contained a flake from one large crystal that had the property of sympathetic vibration no matter how distant the individual pieces were. That is close what “entanglement” is all about.
6 comments
“Decades ago I started writing a science fiction novel that depended on instant communication across space.”
… rather like the “ansible” that appears in several of Ursula LeGuin’s works.
I have grown comfortable with the idea of superposition simply from reading about such things many times from many sources, starting in my college days and ending… well, most recently, last year. But I can’t conceive how “collapsing the waveform” could be used in a communication system of this sort. I guess if I live long enough, I’ll have to (read: get to) start all over, learning from the latest popular physics books of 2016. One could have worse tasks to anticipate!
You have to come back to “real” space to actually find out if it was a one or a zero. Consider the possibilities of Triany, which wouldn’t be that hard to do if current hardware was more reliable, i.e. no voltage has meaning like plus or minus voltage, or no magnetic field as well as the current north and south polarity determination. It would be easiest in a synchronize communication link, and requires much more precision, but it is possible to do.
It is all about maximizing through-put as we approach the limits of our current manufacturing processes. It also requires R&D that is so lacking in the US, so we watch from the sidelines as others do it somewhere else.
Oh yes… Very cool stuff! 😀 Been following the developments in quantum mechanics, fuzzy logic and other allied fields for decades (since I was introduced to the concepts by a physicist at UCSC when I visited Santa Cruz in the 80’s).
I’ve been very interested in multi-state (or N-State) logic for a long time. A fellow by the name of Peter Lablans believes he has a patentable system of N-state logic, and I have been following his writings for a few years. Very interesting stuff! (Well, it is if you are an electronics engineer specializing in digital control systems, and are a true geek!) 😀 He has a company called Ternarylogic LLC.
Ternarylogic LLC
Some demo’s & examples here:
N-State Switching
I wish I had more time (and didn’t feel like crap most days) to get back into these fields. I shelved a concept design for a new kind of computer system about a decade ago (which I worked on with my ex-pat UK Physicist friend and another young fellow who was a true IT genius (he did a lot of work with Linus and RedHat and wrote a lot of the code for their secure Linux kernels. He was one of the 7 top-level BSD & Linux kernel auditors in the World. 🙂 We wrote a paper on (what we termed) SOE (Secure Operating Environment), but decided in the end not to publish. We were even offered $25mill at the time by a High-tech VC firm (with extraordinarily fair and good terms) to develop a prototype & proof-of-concept. Unfortunately, it was a case of seriously bad timing and a lot of bad sh*t happened. *shrug* I still have all the documents and my diagrams, and look at them with some nostalgia now and then, and even do a little *re-design* tinkering based on newer & more advanced technologies & concepts. 🙂 And I am pleased to say, that ever after 10 years, there is nothing even close. 😆
Who knows… Maybe, one day… 😉
It is hard for most people to understand the value of a system with three digits, when they really don’t understand that regular computers only have two. I used to have a sweatshirt that said “There are 10 kinds of people in this world – those that understand binary and those that don’t.” It is probably in a box somewhere.
More and more people are able to understand what this is all about, so it is going to happen. Like a lot of ideas, technology just needs to catch up with understanding. Charles Babbage’s machine worked [IBM actually had it built to see], but it couldn’t be built for almost a century after he designed it. It required a level of precision that wasn’t possible at the time. N-state computers will be built, but only when there is no way to milk money out of the current model and the tools are finally built to make it possible.
I have been very lucky in my life, and I have met some truly brilliant people, and even been extremely honored to have worked with some of them. One of these was Dr. Brenton R. Groves. He lives in Canberra now and has lived in Aus for a few decades. He once was a leading researcher at Goodyear Aerospace during the 60’s. He created the first computer generated dynamic model that was published in Science, March 1967
Computer-Generated Motion Pictures
The thing is, I learned an awful lot from these people, from many diverse fields. It was because of Brent that I went to UCSC. 🙂 Brent was something of an *expert* on Analog Computing, and analog computers were big in the Physics Dep’t @ UCSC, because they are perfectly suited to such things as Fuzzy Logic & Quantum Mechanics. Most other research institutions discarded Analog systems by the 70’s. A very foolish mistake. 😉 Brent used analog computers in various successful simulators & trainers (aircraft, pilot, ships, ship handling & submarine simulators). Many of his publications are still classified, a few have been declassified. This is one from 1969 titled “Advanced Submarine Systems Equation Study” (it’s a PDF):
A basic submerged control maneuvering trainer
I met Dr. Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica (and Maple beforehand), and Brent and I started a company to distribute for Mathematica and other products (such as ‘Extend’ from a very small company I discovered in Santa Cruz called ‘Imagine That!’. It was an amazing graphical (and very powerful) modeling/simulation system. It could model or simulate almost anything! Brent and I sold a heap of Mathematica & Extend to Macquarie Bank (with a bunch of Mac II’s & Sun Servers & Workstations). They used them to simulate, model and even predict markets, trends and financial flows. they were the first big Bank to move from Mainframes to Unix/Mac systems. 🙂
The thing is, Brent was always a fan of Analog Computing, and always believed they were misunderstood, and even unfairly maligned. He said a competent engineer with a decent understanding of analog computing & systems could do things at a fraction of the cost of trying to do the same thing with digital systems, and do a better job. And he was right. 🙂 My team of 14 engineers/programmers won several excellence awards back in the 80’s and proved it. Brent (and others) and I had begun work on a hybrid analog/digital system. The potential was simply amazing. 🙂
I used Mathematica/Extend to help me develop the concepts & models for our hybrid SOE (BTW, we were going to call the *OS* SOS! Of course… what else?) 😉 😆
Anyway… *sigh* I guess I’m in a somewhat melancholy mood lately. 🙂
Ahhh, well…
There are rumors, although no one knows how these things start, that not everyone gave up on analog computers, because certain things need answers that cannot be reduced to the limited numeric range of even mainframe computers in the 1960s and 1970s. Such limitation might be enough for a moon shot, but sometimes things need to be a bit more precise, and analog is the only way of doing it.
The rumor is that step motors might not provide the settings required, even with frequent corrections within a given limited time frame.
Another rumor is that an approximate answer might be better than no answer, as long as the level of approximation is known, as a hint might be all that is needed for certain puzzles, and that digital systems needed more data than was available to even provide an approximate value.
I think I mentioned that my Dad worked on guided weapons and targets/drones. We got to mess around with some interesting stuff when we were kids. Consider that if you are testing the manipulation of control systems like rudders and elevators that will be use in a fluid, like air, you can do it in water.
There are all kinds of rumors, even silly ones about seeing a 14-foot yellow boat with an outboard cruising around the bayou with no one it. People believe the strangest things.
It isn’t a rumor that the US military used analog computers the whole time I was in, and, to the best of my knowledge, still uses for certain things that would be a tremendous PITA to program a digital computer to do. Even the biggest and fastest machines can accumulate errors in multiple floating point operations. While this generally doesn’t matter, sometimes it does.