Dance of the Photons From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation

by Zeilinger, Anton

• ISBN13: 9780374239664
• ISBN10: 0374239665
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-10-12
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

In a series of ingenious experiments conducted in various locations, the author and his colleagues demonstrate the stunning reality of quantum entanglement using photons, or light quanta, created by laser beams.

Author Biography

Anton Zeilinger is a professor of physics at the University of Vienna, where he heads the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Underneath the Danube	p. 3
Space Travel	p. 9
The Stuff Called Light	p. 11
Light Is a Wave	p. 13
Light Is Particles	p. 15
Sheepdogs and Einstein's Particles of Light	p. 17
Einstein and His Nobel Prize	p. 25
A Conflict	p. 27
How We Became Certain of Uncertainty	p. 29
Quantum Uncertainty: Just Our Ignorance, or Is It the Way Things Are?	p. 33
The Quantum Excuse	p. 34
The Quantum Verdict Against Teleportation	p. 42
Quantum Entanglement Comes to the Rescue	p. 45
Entangled Quantum Dice	p. 47
The Original Teleportation Protocol	p. 50
Alice and Bob in the Quantum Lab	p. 58
Alice and Bob's Experiment-The First Steps	p. 65
The Polarization of Light: A Lecture by Professor Quantinger	p. 67
The Polarization of Individual Quanta of Light	p. 73
Alice and Bob Discover Twins	p. 87
...And Invent Hidden Properties	p. 96
John's Introduction of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen	p. 99
The Reality Criterion	p. 107
Reality in Alice and Bob's Experiment	p. 108
The Locality Assumption	p. 120
John's Story on Local Hidden Variables	p. 123
Alice and Bob's Experiment Gives Confusing Results	p. 128
John Bell's Story	p. 132
Alice and Bob Find Out That Things Aren't as They Think They Are	p. 140
Faster Than Light and Back into the Past?	p. 144
Alice, Bob, and the Speed of Light Limit	p. 149
Loopholes	p. 155
In the Tyrolean Mountains	p. 160
The Quantum Lottery	p. 172
Quantum Lottery with Two Photons	p. 179
Quantum Lottery with Entangled Photons	p. 184
Quantum Money-The End to All Forgery	p. 189
From Classical Bits to Quantum Bits	p. 192
A Quantum Truck Can Transport More Than It Can Carry	p. 195
Atomic Sources of Entanglement and Early Experiments	p. 200
The Super-Source and Closing the Communication Loophole	p. 204
Quantum Teleportation at the River Danube	p. 208
The Multiphoton Surprise and, Along the Road, Quantum Teleportation	p. 218
Teleporting Entanglement	p. 224
A Ghostly Idea	p. 227
Connecting Quantum Computers	p. 232
Reality vs. Information	p. 234
Further Experiments	p. 237
Quantum Information Technology	p. 243
The Future of Quantum Teleportation	p. 247
Teleportation as a Means of Travel?	p. 249
Signals Out of the Sky Above Tenerife	p. 253
Recent Developments and Some Open Questions	p. 258
What Does It All Mean?	p. 264
Appendix: Entanglement-A Quantum Puzzle for Everybody	p. 271
Glossary	p. 289
Index	p. 291
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Excerpts

DANCE OF THE PHOTONS

SPACE TRAVEL

When we hear of teleportation, we often think it would be an ideal means of traveling. We would simply disappear from wherever we happened to be and reappear immediately at our destination. The tantalizing part is that this would be the fastest possible way of traveling. Yet, a warning might be in order here: teleportation as a means of travel is still science fiction rather than science.

Thus far, people have only been able to travel to the Moon, which on a cosmic scale is extremely close, the equivalent of our backyard. Within our solar system, the closest planets, Venus and Mars, are already roughly a thousand times more distant than the Moon, to say nothing of the planets farther out in the solar system.

It is interesting to consider how long it would take to go to other stars. As we all remember from the Apollo program, which put the first men on the Moon, it takes about four days to go from Earth to the Moon. Traveling by spaceship from Earth to the planet Mars would take on the order of 260 days, one way. It is evident that our space travelers would get quite bored during that time, so they might make good use of their time by performing experiments involving quantum teleportation.

In order to get even farther out, we might use the accelerating force of other planets or even of Earth itself, as has been done with some of the unmanned spacecraft exploring outer planets. The idea is simply to have the spaceship pass close by a planet so that, by means of a sort of slingshot action, it can be accelerated into a new orbit that carries it much farther outward. For example, using these methods, the spacecraftPioneer 10took about eleven years to travel past the outermost planets of the solar system on its probably unending journey into thespace between the stars. We can thus estimate that it will, for example, takePioneer 10about 100,000 years to get to Proxima Centauri, the closest star except for the Sun, at its current speed.

Perhaps, therefore, it would be good to have some other way to get around, to cover large distances. What we want is to travel anywhere instantly, without any limitation on how far we can go. Is that possible, at least in principle? This is why science-fiction writers invented teleportation. Magically, you disappear from one place, and, magically, you reappear at another place, just an instant later.

Copyright © 2010 by Anton Zeilinger

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