I also wondered if there is some catch like A knows that B knows new information faster than light, but both essentially just observed the same random phenomenon and there was no input from A reaching B.
You can't control the data being transmitted. The analogous process in the macro-world is:
I take a red ball and a green ball and put them into identical looking boxes. I hand one to you and send you to Mars. Then I open my box and see a red ball. I instantly know that you have a green ball in your box, even though it would take 20 minutes for light to travel between Mars and Earth.
The difference is that in the quantum world, each ball is in a superposition of red and green. Once I open my box and collapse the superposition to red, your ball is green, and I know information about your ball that we didn't know when we were together (since at the time we were together, the balls were in superposition).
seeing as how being able to transmit information faster than light would be a discovery on par with turning a voltage difference into a rotational motion. can someone with relevant experience comment on how accurate the statements in this article is? I desperately want it to be true but I also am skeptical considering how often science reporting gets the facts wrong.
The actual PDF doesn't mention the word "speed" once, so I can't decipher how someone came to any such "faster than the speed of light" conclusion unless it's due to jumping to some conclusion from "quantum" and "teleportation" appearing https://journals.aps.org/prxquantum/abstract/10.1103/PRXQuan...
I have a feeling the conclusion in the article are a bit sensational. In my laymen understanding quantum teleportation is great for sharing secrets fast (you can't send specific data, but you can ensure that whatever random data I just generated is the exact inverse of what you have). This is still great for key exchanges I assume, but I don't think faster than light transfer of information is violated here. Here is the paper in any case https://journals.aps.org/prxquantum/abstract/10.1103/PRXQuan...
I have a tenuous grasp of the subject matter at best. But my first reaction to the headline "NASA Quantum-Teleported Data Faster Than the Speed of Light" was, "No they didn't". My reading of the abstract is that this is an incremental improvement, maybe only duplication of previous experiments and doesn't practically transmit information faster than the photons themselves. I would be delighted if someone knowledgeable could correct me though.
The title is wrong. Each sentence of the article has one or two errors. It would be nice if they hire someone with a technical background to write technical articles.
In particular, this can not be used to download information faster than light as the article describe 4 or 5 times.
> NASA Just Quantum-Teleported Data Faster Than the Speed of Light
Checks paper - a single mention of NASA in the acknowledgments for a research fellowship.
> Imagine downloading the entire library of Marvel films in a snap.
It doesn't mean that at all. It means the latency (ping) is less (but not zero), but it would still take the same time to transfer the data.
Something seems really off anyway, if this really was possible then we need to throw out a lot of stuff. The paper doesn't even seem to make the claim of faster-than-light information exchange [1].
PRX QUANTUM is a brand new journal, perhaps their review process is not so great.
Don't worry. It's impossible that everybody in an expert in every topic.
The good part of HN is that if the article is interesting you can probably get an expert here to add more insight, and if the article is wrong you can probably get an expert here to explain the errors.
18 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 85.1 ms ] threadIsn't that a violation of the No-communication theorem?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem
I take a red ball and a green ball and put them into identical looking boxes. I hand one to you and send you to Mars. Then I open my box and see a red ball. I instantly know that you have a green ball in your box, even though it would take 20 minutes for light to travel between Mars and Earth.
The difference is that in the quantum world, each ball is in a superposition of red and green. Once I open my box and collapse the superposition to red, your ball is green, and I know information about your ball that we didn't know when we were together (since at the time we were together, the balls were in superposition).
Exactly. This is just bad journalism.
Seen no claim of ftl communication
This is bs
Link to the actual paper. https://journals.aps.org/prxquantum/abstract/10.1103/PRXQuan...
In particular, this can not be used to download information faster than light as the article describe 4 or 5 times.
More details in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation
Checks paper - a single mention of NASA in the acknowledgments for a research fellowship.
> Imagine downloading the entire library of Marvel films in a snap.
It doesn't mean that at all. It means the latency (ping) is less (but not zero), but it would still take the same time to transfer the data.
Something seems really off anyway, if this really was possible then we need to throw out a lot of stuff. The paper doesn't even seem to make the claim of faster-than-light information exchange [1].
PRX QUANTUM is a brand new journal, perhaps their review process is not so great.
[1] https://journals.aps.org/prxquantum/pdf/10.1103/PRXQuantum.1...
The good part of HN is that if the article is interesting you can probably get an expert here to add more insight, and if the article is wrong you can probably get an expert here to explain the errors.