Quantum Teleportation (XKCD)
by Shah
Alt. text: Science should be exactly as cool as the headlines sound. Like the ‘RUSSIANS CUT APART AND REASSEMBLE DOGS’ thing.
Ha ha! Brilliant! Many sci-fi addicts/geeks that the quantum entanglement allows information to travel faster than light itself and allows one to be at the same place and in the same time while teleporting. They are wrong! It’s impossible. Any reputable sci-fi geek/addict would know of the Shrodinger Cat. Come on! Who hasn’t watched Enigma (episode of SG1)?
One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.
It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a “blurred model” for representing reality. In itself it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.
In real world, there’s NO such thing as quantum teleportation! But it’s part of our fantasy world - same world in which Cameron Philips terminates everybody! Ha!
