Physicist Discovers How to Teleport Energy
This article talks about a proposal on how to teleport energy via quantum entanglement. (See actual paper here.) Based on everything I’ve ready about the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, particularly this paper by Frank Tipler, if you really could teleport energy, that would disprove the MWI, wouldn’t it? (Since MWI says there is no quantum non-locality)
Come to think of it, would it also disprove General Relativity? If you can really teleport energy, it seems like you’d be passing information as well, even though that is supposed to be impossible. But I remember reading a Roger Penrose book where he said if you could send any time of information faster than light, it would arrive before it was sent. So wouldn’t the energy arrive before it’s sent?
And would this mean you can build a power plant on earth and then have it deliver power to a mars colony?
Care to enlighten us (and entangle us) Vader on what this really means?
Bruce Nielson
February 8, 2010
I’d like to hear your comments on this one, Vader.
Vader
February 8, 2010
Any faster-than-light transport will violate causality in some reference frames, so I tend not to take seriously any FTL proposals. But I can look this one over if you’d like a more specific critique.
Bruce Nielson
February 8, 2010
Yes, a more specific critique would be nice. This violates my understanding of physics at many levels. But if it were true, I’d be happy to have had my understanding violated for something this cool. But I guess, at this point, I’m assuming something is wrong with the proposal at a fundamental level and I just can’t understand it.
Ben Pratt
February 8, 2010
Reading the first section of the paper, it’s clear that in order to know which measurement to make at the second particle (B) in order to extract the energy injected at A, one must first transmit information about the measurement done on A the old-fashioned way from point A to point B. Causality is safe.
As for scaling up such a system to actually deliver energy, I don’t know how practical such a thing may be, simply because the amount of energy teleported is related to the “consumption of ground-state entanglement.” I’m not an entanglement expert, but I interpret this to mean that a given entangled system can only be used to teleport a certain amount of energy before entanglement completely breaks down. So the boon of teleported energy must be weight against the energy cost of repeatedly setting up the entangled system.
Ben Pratt
February 8, 2010
*weighed
Vader
February 8, 2010
Another point is that transporting energy faster than the speed of light may not be as useful as it sounds. A flow of energy is possible only when there is a net increase of entropy. It’s really entropy you want to manipulate, and since entropy is a measure of information, a method that requires the information to be transported at the speed of light may not allow any useful flow of energy faster than the speed of light.
But I still haven’t actually read the paper, so I’m speaking purely out of my hat here *wheese wheese*
Bruce Nielson
February 8, 2010
I was wondering if it was something like this.
Bookslinger
February 13, 2010
What? No post on this:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1111660620100212?type=marketsNews
Star Wars (ie, SDI), is now a reality.
Bookslinger
February 13, 2010
Reagan is smiling down from Heaven, er, the Spirit World.