Wow!
I seriously didn't want to stick my nose into this one, but holy cow! After seeing the responses, I think I have to say something before this goes off the deep end, until others such ad Dr. Chinese can come in and provide a more detailed explanation.
iRaid said:
Can anyone explain to me how quantum teleportation can be achieved through quantum entanglement? I read a few days ago that scientists finally "teleported" light and I read up on it and it said something about quantum entanglement. A quick wiki search brings up something I really don't understand, so a simpler, yet in depth answer would be very appreciated. Btw, this just really seems impossible to destroy something in one place and make it reappear in another..
Article: http://www.postchronicle.com/news/original/article_212360585.shtml
Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement
Thank you.
I will start with something very simple that we already know from classical physics that does not cause any mystery. It should provide you with a naive picture of quantum entanglement.
Say you have an object, and it isn't spinning. So its initial angular momentum is zero, and that is known. Say at some point, it explodes into two objects, A and B, and both of them move in opposite directions to each other. At some distance away, a person decides to measure Object A to see if it has acquired an angular momentum of some kind. As soon as he knows the angular momentum of A, he IMMEDIATELY knows the angular momentum of B, because of conservation of angular momentum.
So far so good, and there's nothing weird or strange about this one.
So how is this different in QM? In QM, what makes this "strange" is a concept that is inherently built-in -
superposition. It says that before a measurement is made, a quantum system can be in a simultaneous state of all the possible outcome. This is important, because this is well-established as one of the principles in QM.
So if we go back to our original example, for a QM system, when the original object splinters into two quantum particles, each of the particle, depending on the system, can be in a superposition of states. For an electron, it may be in a +/- 1/2 spin state, for example. So both A and B are in a superposition of states as they shoot off in opposite direction, their spin states consisting of both outcomes, and not determined, before a measurement is made.
But when a measurement is made on A, and we now have caused A to be in a particular state, somehow B "knows" what was measured and it assumes the appropriate state so that both the measurements of A and B preserve the conservation laws of the original particle. This is what makes it "weird" and what makes it different than the classical situation.
This is one example where one cannot learn physics in bits and pieces. One cannot understand quantum entanglement without an understanding of quantum superposition. And one cannot understand quantum superposition without understanding quantum operators (First Quantization), etc.. etc. They are all related. And of course, one won't know that this is "weird" without understanding classical mechanics first.
Zz.