Quantum leap

Citation

Rudall, B.H. (2001), "Quantum leap", Kybernetes, Vol. 30 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2001.06730caa.003

Quantum leap

Quantum leap

Transportation projects

This section has in the past included many reports of the application of quantum physics to a number of technology projects (see last reference: Kybernetes, Vol. 27 No. 4, pp. 339-41 and News sections[2]).

Research at the University of Wales at Bangor, UK, by Dr Sam Braunstein takes us to the realms of science fiction, but may in the future become a reality. Dr Braunstein was part of a team, we are told, of pioneering scientists that successfully teleported light from one place to another at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, some four years ago. In a recent report he outlines his work and says:

Teleportation is a form of "Disembodied transport" that allows one "thing" to be moved from one location to another without travelling. We already have lots of examples of teleportation around us every day: the telephone which transports sound waves as electricity; fax, which transports an image; and the World Wide Web. We are still a long long way off from teleporting an actual person because teleporting the amount of human bits approximately 100,000,000,000 would take a phenomenal amount of information and would take over one hundred million centuries to transmit or teleport a human being so in actual fact it would be quicker to walk.

Researchers working in this area now believe that they are on the right track and the process for teleporting atoms has been proved and the theory may well change the world as we know it.

Dr Braunstein confirms our previous reports on quantum computers and according to him:

We have already made small Quantum computers but are confident that it will be possible to build large scale Quantum computers within the next 20 years. It will revolutionise the working world and how we do business with each other.

Dr Braunstein is currently carrying out research on microchips at the University of Wales. His views on the future of quantum mechanics will be of much interest to fellow scientists and engineers. He believes that:

Quantum mechanics is still in its infancy. At the turn of the century the first inklings of Quantum physics were being looked into and Einstein's theories showed how quantum mechanics gives us a very different way about looking at the laws of physics. It's only in the last ten years that we have been able to experiment with quantum laws in the laboratory. So far we have scratched the surface and are now beginning to seriously engineer the Quantum world. We are discovering some very exciting sounding projects but whether they turnout to be a reality remains to be seen.