I have yet to convince my wife that there is any of interest to her in science fiction. I'll stop during my channel surfing on a classic episode of Star Trek, and she'll usually get up and go paint her nails or something like that. Her argument is that most of what goes on is not realistic. It's not only fiction, it's far-fetched fiction. Yet it surprises me how many things we have seen on Star Trek are coming to fruition.
For instance, think about those bulky flip-open communicators Kirk and Spock carried around. Even the writers of the original Star Trek couldn't have imagined communicators the size of the modern day Motorola Razr phone. The more compact communicators of Captain Picard and The Next Generation?. Bluetooth. Those banks of lights and switches on the command deck? These days, scientists are developing input devices that follow your eye movements--you don't even have to touch a control panel.
So it's not that surprising that scientists are getting one step closer to making teleportation a reality. With all the mention of "quantum" this and "quantum" that, I didn't really follow what these guys were talking about in this story, but I'll take their word for it.
Ah, someday my wife will understand. Someday...
Thursday, October 5, 2006
Beam me up, Scotty!
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4 comments:
I think this is more of what is immediately significant about their discovery:
"It is really about teleporting information from one site to another site. Quantum information is different from classical information in the sense that it cannot be measured. It has much higher information capacity and it cannot be eavesdropped on. The transmission of quantum information can be made unconditionally secure," said Polzik whose research is reported in the journal Nature.
You can hack it if it never travels between the source and destination. It in effect skips the travel over the internet and just "shows up" on another machine.
As long as that machine is less than a meter away of course, but it's a start.
Did anyone else notice that the Mr. Brainiac scientist ended a sentence with a preposition?
Ha! He thinks he's so smart. He can teleport information, but he can't figure out the proper place for a preposition.
Ah, the grammar police is back in full force.
I actually had to review that sentence for a few minutes to make sure it didn't include any grammatical errors. Wait, did this sentence contain any errors?!
I tried that method with Battlestar Galactica. Everyone from me, to her female friends, to her old graduate school professor for whom she holds a lot of respect, have endorsed this show, yet she's still adamantly resistant to giving it a view.
The real question is whether or not in general speaking do you, Scooty, ever end a sentence with a preposition because it looks like he is talking to a reporter.
No, and you need a coma before because.
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