ain’t that the truth

Since there has been a lot of work being done over the last few years on quantum computation there have been a lot of articles published along the lines of “Quantum Teleportation is here, but it’s no Star Trek.”

To which I say: Pshah! Emphatically pshah sirs!

Quantum teleportation only bares the slightest resemblance to what we think of as teleportation, I mean, there are no flashing lights! No chance to accidentally turn a man into an inside-out monkey! No levers for intuitive control over the process of recomposing a person atom-by-atom-by-atom-by- ( * 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000ish )! My point being, ladies and gentlemen, don’t worry when you read stories like this one (or this one, etc) where they very clearly say that this technology is impossibly far from transporting humans. It was never designed for that!

One of the biggest problem with QT — related to transporting real people — is that you have to have as many atoms at the end as you start with, exactly as many. And they have to be blank. And you have to “entangle” them with the original person. Which, as far as I know the only way that we’ve got to entangle atoms is to super-freeze them (to pretty close to -459°^f) and turn them into a sort of super-sized cloud-atom-thing. That is to say, you have to do that to both groups of atoms, something which I don’t particularly want done to me, thank you very much.

No, I think — and it is very important to remember that I am terribly under-qualified to be even thinking, never mind talking about these things — that it is a much better idea to be exploding people. Because people are just mass and information, and mass is just energy, and information and energy are much easier to transport than mass. Of course, converting people to pure energy will probably require a heck of a lot of power, probably way more than just freezing them to near absolute zero.

But it will be hella flashy.

Technorati Tags: future, science, teleportation

First, new scientist reported on an experiment that really very strongly suggests that in some cases it is possible for photons to travel faster than the speed of light. Completely aside from the apparent oxymoron of saying that light traveled faster than itself, (being as “photon” is a word that means “unit of light”) this is the first directly observed violation of relativity that has ever been documented. To really appreciate how big this is you have to understand that the speed of light is, according to relativity–the most accurate model of the large scale universe ever devised–, the absolute upper bound for the maximum speed of anything, ever. Nothing goes faster than than the speed of light, the speed of light is what everything is relative to!

I hope that my redundancy conveys my excitement in the absence of my wildly flailing arms.

OK, the second thing to be reported, this one on one of the blogs of one of the editors of scientific american, is that some observers at a gamma ray telescope noticed that light at two very different energy levels (approximately an order of magnitude apart at the TeV range) coming from a distant supernova arrived with an approximately 4 minute separation. That is to say, assuming they didn’t overlook something, light that started at the same place and time arrived here at different times. As i mentioned in the previous paragraph, light is the thing which everything else is relative to, it’s what gives relativity its name. Not only is the speed of light in a vacuum (almost 300million m/s) supposed to be the absolute maximum speed for everything in the universe, all light is supposed to travel at exactly that speed. It seems very likely that quantum mechanical effects affected the light. And, what’s more, if you look at the end of the SciAm article you’ll see that the energy difference of the photons correlates to the energy of a string. Or something. Frankly i don’t quite understand that part.

So what’s the big deal? you might be asking. Isn’t this what science does? Well, yes. We basically knew that something like this was coming: the massive inconsistencies between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics means that something’s got to give. Somewhere, somehow, somethings got to be wrong. But this is the first time that we’ve seen it. To give you a metaphor that compares science to parties: Remember that time that you went to that party that the girl you really like and hope to finally make some headway with is supposed to be at. Because every time you’ve seen her she’s been on the other escalator or something, but all your friends say you two would get along great and share interests in those obscure things that nobody cares about. But now you see the door open and there’s a silhouette and…

Well, that’s where this discovery puts us. We’ve now got a silhouette.
If these observations stand the weight of scientific scrutiny then we are seeing the first empirical evidence prodding us to go beyond relativity. The last time something this big happened in science was the famous experiment when astronomers saw the sun bend the light of a star in its gravity well.

Technorati Tags: physics, science

I’ve heard multiple times (from reputable and semi-reputable sources such as blogs and newspapers, respectively) that up to 20% of various populations (most commonly french or american) believe that the sun orbits the earth.

I’ve never really believed it, so i created a facebook poll for 200 people who listed “the bible” in their favorite books asking the simple question “does the earth orbit the sun?” with a plain yes or no response the only possible options.

It’s going to cost me $21. Do you think that’s a waste of money? Does it depend on the kinds of results i get? I don’t think that any results won’t be interesting.

What do you think the results are going to be, percentage-wise? I’ll link to it when it’s done running (in about 24 hours) or provide a picture if facebook doesn’t allow that kind of thing.

Update: The results are in.

Technorati Tags: science, skepticism

This article is out of date, there are now over 600 scientists named steve who support evolution. “Creation Scientists” and Intelligent Design advocates are fond of creating lists of scientists who dissent from evolution, as though scientific theories are decided by majority vote. The largest one that I have heard of is misleading to the general public and to the scientists who signed it (follow the link if you want to know exactly why). It has over 400 signatories, but it is unclear how many of them are named steve.

Technorati Tags: ID, science