TELEPORTATION : REVEALING GOVERNMENT RESEARCH

The public release of an Air Force commissioned research paper about the possibilities of teleportation was met with some brief attention from the press and scorn from the scientific community.

"It is in large part crackpot physics," said physicist Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University. He described the Air Force report as "some things adapted from reasonable theoretical studies, and other things from nonsensical ones."

The fact remains that the idea of teleportation, the disembodied transport of objects across space, once restricted to the realm of paperback books and grade B science fiction movies, has finally staffed to receive attention from some scientists who are not afraid to "look outside of the box." Of course they risk being ostracized by their peers who despise such far-out thinking much as the early Church despised Galileo for declaring the Earth might not be the center of the universe.

Not all teleportation research, however, is getting the cold shoulder; there is an interesting field of research going on right now called Quantum Teleportation that has a lot of scientists excited about its future possibilities. True quantum teleportation involves an unknown quantum state entering a transmitting apparatus and a similar unknown state emerging from a remote receiving station. Quantum teleportation could be harnessed for fast, powerful computers or communication networks.

In 2004, researchers from the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Science used an 800 meters long optical fiber fed through a public sewer system tunnel to connect labs on opposite sides of the River Danube. The link establishes a channel between the labs, dubbed Alice and Bob. This enables the properties, or "quantum states," of light particles to be transferred between the sender (Alice) and the receiver (Bob).

In the computers of tomorrow, this information would form the qubits (the quantum form of the digital bits 1 and 0) of data processing through the machines. The Austrian team encoded their qubits using a property of light particles, also called photons, known as polarization. This property describes the direction in which they oscillate.

Quantum teleportation relies on an aspect of physics known as "entanglement," whereby the properties of two particles can be tied together even when they are far apart. Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance."

The teleportation study used an experimental method in which Alice performs a joint measurement on one photon in the entangled pair and on an "input" photon. As a result of this measurement, Bob transforms the quantum state of the other photon in the entangled pair into that of the input photon.

The researchers were able to teleport three distinct polarization states between Alice and Bob via the fiber-optic cable through the tunnel. The significance of this research was that it took place under "real world" conditions. In the underground sewer pipe tunnel, the fiber-optic link was exposed to temperature fluctuations and other envirorunental factors that could interfere with the process.

But let's be honest, we are only talking about small particles of light and energy being teleported with these experiments. Is this the best that our great minds have come up with so far? Or, is there something else going on that we're not being told?