Teleportation: A Cooler Word than "Quantum Entanglement," it Seems

"Teleportation Milestone Achieved"
LiveScience (January 23, 2009)

"Scientists have come a bit closer to achieving the 'Star Trek' feat of teleportation. No one is galaxy-hopping, or even beaming people around, but for the first time, information has been teleported between two separate atoms across a distance of a meter — about a yard.

"This is a significant milestone in a field known as quantum information processing, said Christopher Monroe of the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland, who led the effort.

"Teleportation is one of nature's most mysterious forms of transport: Quantum information, such as the spin of a particle or the polarization of a photon, is transferred from one place to another, without traveling through any physical medium...."

This 'teleportation' is a "quantum phenomenon called entanglement which only occurs on the atomic and subatomic scale...." Which is just about the right size, I gather, for a next-generation information technology.

It's about time, too. I gather that chips we use for information processors now are getting about as small as the nature of matter and energy will let them go.

And, if we want faster, more powerful, computers: there's going to have to be a new technology. This could be it.

Exciting times, these that we live in.