There was something of a discussion going on between me and thegodguy, here is my latest response to the last comment he posted in response to what I posted before on this thread:

http://thegodguy.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/divine-action-in-the-world-leading-to-a-scientifically-rational-theory/#comment-1539

Since I posted this comment about 3 days ago as of this writing and he has yet to authorize it during his moderation process.  No doubt because it doesn’t say anything new, which is unsurprising because I’m not hypothesizing or theorizing, only explaining existent theories and philosophy of science.  And since the flaws in his own hypothesis about reconciling science with religion have their foundation in his misunderstanding of existent scientific theories and philosophy of science I don’t see why me not presenting anything new should be a basis for censoring me.  Especially in light of the fact that the correct way to explain flaws whose basis is in fundamental misunderstandings of something is to explain what was misunderstood, and why the understanding was flawed.  Either way, though, he apparently has censored me, at least implicitly, by not authorizing the following response.  You can read the entire discussion by scrolling up.  This isn’t the only thread I commented on in which the comment has yet to be authorized, and there is also a third I didn’t bother commenting on, but I will post my response here after I post the response to the other two.  People might find it interesting, if my responses aren’t too long, to read my comments on his blog entries and then read his responses to my comments and see how little of what I say he actually directly addresses during the course of his responses as he, instead, directs me to his book Proving God which allegedly contains “better ideas” about the subjects in these comments.  I fail to see how, though, given that his demonstrated understanding of relevant scientific theories and philosophy of science in general is severely lacking.

The Response

Here’s the release from Friday:

Princeton scientist makes a leap in quantum computing

A major hurdle in the ambitious quest to design and construct a radically new kind of quantum computer has been finding a way to manipulate the single electrons that very likely will constitute the new machines’ processing components or “qubits.”

Princeton University’s Jason Petta has discovered how to do just that — demonstrating a method that alters the properties of a lone electron without disturbing the trillions of electrons in its immediate surroundings. The feat is essential to the development of future varieties of superfast computers with near-limitless capacities for data.

Petta, an assistant professor of physics theory, has fashioned a new method of trapping one or two electrons in microscopic corrals created by applying voltages to minuscule electrodes. Writing in the Feb. 5 edition of Science, he describes how electrons trapped in these corrals form “spin qubits,” quantum versions of classic computer information units known as bits. Other authors on the paper include Art Gossard and Hong Lu at the University of California-Santa Barbara.

Previous experiments used a technique in which electrons in a sample were exposed to microwave mechanics radiation. However, because it affected all the electrons uniformly, the technique could not be used to manipulate single electrons in spin qubits. It also was slow. Petta’s method not only achieves control of single electrons, but it does so extremely rapidly — in one-billionth of a second.

“If you can take a small enough object like a single electron and isolate it well enough from external perturbations, then it will behave quantum mechanically for a long period of time,” said Petta. “All we want is for the electron to just sit there and do what we tell it to do. But the outside world is sort of poking at it, and that process of the outside world poking at it causes it to lose its quantum mechanical nature.”

When the electrons in Petta’s experiment are in what he calls their quantum state, they are “coherent,” following rules that are radically different from the world seen by the naked eye. Living for fractions of a second in the realm of quantum physics theory before they are rattled by external forces, the electrons obey a unique set of physical laws that govern the behavior of ultra-small objects.

Scientists like Petta are working in a field known as quantum control where they are learning how to manipulate materials under the influence of quantum mechanics so they can exploit those properties to power advanced technologies like quantum computing. Quantum computers will be designed to take advantage of these characteristics to enrich their capacities in many ways.

In addition to electrical charge, electrons possess rotational properties. In the quantum world, objects can turn in ways that are at odds with common experience. The Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who won the Nobel Prize in physics theory in 1945, proposed that an electron in a quantum state can assume one of two states — “spin-up” or “spin-down.” It can be imagined as behaving like a tiny bar magnet with spin-up corresponding to the north pole pointing up and spin-down corresponding to the north pole pointing down.

An electron in a quantum state can simultaneously be partially in the spin-up state and partially in the spin-down state or anywhere in between, a quantum mechanical property called “superposition of states.” A qubit based on the spin of an electron could have nearly limitless potential because it can be neither strictly on nor strictly off.

New designs could take advantage of a rich set of possibilities offered by harnessing this property to enhance computing power. In the past decade, theorists and mathematicians have designed algorithms that exploit this mysterious superposition to perform intricate calculations at speeds unmatched by supercomputers today.

Petta’s work is using electron spin to advantage.

“In the quest to build a quantum computer with electron spin qubits, nuclear spins are typically a nuisance,” said Guido Burkard, a theoretical physicist at the University of Konstanz in Germany. “Petta and coworkers demonstrate a new method that utilizes the nuclear spins for performing fast quantum operations. For solid-state quantum computing, their result is a big step forward.”

Petta’s spin qubits, which he envisions as the core of future quantum logic elements, are cooled to temperatures near absolute zero and trapped in two tiny corrals known as quantum wells on the surface of a high-purity, gallium arsenide chip. The depth of each well is controlled by varying the voltage on tiny electrodes or gates. Like a juggler tossing two balls between his hands, Petta can move the electrons from one well to the other by selectively toggling the gate voltages.

Prior to this experiment, it was not clear how experimenters could manipulate the spin of one electron without disturbing the spin of another in a closely packed space, according to Phuan Ong, the Eugene Higgins Professor of physics theory at Princeton and director of the Princeton Center for Complex Materials.

Other experts agree.

“They have managed to create a very exotic transient condition, in which the spin state of a pair of electrons is in that moment entangled with an almost macroscopic degree of freedom,” said David DiVencenzo, a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.

Petta’s research also is part of the fledgling field of “spintronics” in which scientists are studying how to use an electron’s spin to create new types of electronic devices. Most electrical devices today operate on the basis of another key property of the electron — its charge.

There are many more challenges to face, Petta said.

“Our approach is really to look at the building blocks of the system, to think deeply about what the limitations are and what we can do to overcome them,” Petta said. “But we are still at the level of just manipulating one or two quantum bits, and you really need hundreds to do something useful.”

As excited as he is about present progress, long-term applications are still years away. “It’s a one-day-at-a-time approach,” Petta said.

###

So happy that Hulu has it.  Thirty years later it’s still without equal.

(source)

When it comes to the discussion of quantum entanglement, you might as well be speaking Mandarin Chinese to myself and most folks (not a bad language to learn right now IMHO). The concept is alien and is far from the classical Newtonian physics theory we understand on a daily basis as the distance from Earth to the edge of the known Universe.

And as far as quantum teleportation is concerned, well, this is considered fringe sci-fi sh*t that almost nobody outside of academia understands.

Now scientists are considering useful work for the concept of ‘quantum teleportation.’ And that idea is for the transmission of energy across great distances.

First, they teleported photons, then atoms and ions. Now one physicist has worked out how to do it with energy, a technique that has profound implications for the future of physics theory.

In 1993, Charlie Bennett at IBM’s Watson Research Center in New York State and a few pals showed how to transmit quantum information from one point in space to another without traversing the intervening space.

The technique relies on the strange quantum phenomenon called entanglement, in which two particles share the same existence. This deep connection means that a measurement on one particle immediately influences the other, even though they are light-years apart. Bennett and company worked out how to exploit this to send information. (The influence between the particles may be immediate, but the process does not violate relativity because some informatiom has to be sent classically at the speed of light.) They called the technique teleportation.

That’s not really an overstatement of its potential. Since quantum particles are indistinguishable but for the information they carry, there is no need to transmit them themselves. A much simpler idea is to send the information they contain instead and ensure that there is a ready supply of particles at the other end to take on their identity. Since then, physicists have used these ideas to actually teleport photons, atoms, and ions. And it’s not too hard to imagine that molecules and perhaps even viruses could be teleported in the not-too-distant future.

But Masahiro Hotta at Tohoku University in Japan has come up with a much more exotic idea. Why not use the same quantum principles to teleport energy?

Today, building on a number of papers published in the last year, Hotta outlines his idea and its implications. The process of teleportation involves making a measurement on each one an entangled pair of particles. He points out that the measurement on the first particle injects quantum energy into the system. He then shows that by carefully choosing the measurement to do on the second particle, it is possible to extract the original energy.

All this is possible because there are always quantum fluctuations in the energy of any particle. The teleportation process allows you to inject quantum energy at one point in the universe and then exploit quantum energy fluctuations to extract it from another point. Of course, the energy of the system as whole is unchanged.

He gives the example of a string of entangled ions oscillating back and forth in an electric field trap, a bit like Newton’s balls. Measuring the state of the first ion injects energy into the system in the form of a phonon, a quantum of oscillation. Hotta says that performing the right kind of measurement on the last ion extracts this energy. Since this can be done at the speed of light (in principle), the phonon doesn’t travel across the intermediate ions so there is no heating of these ions. The energy has been transmitted without traveling across the intervening space. That’s teleportation.

Just how we might exploit the ability to teleport energy isn’t clear yet. Post your suggestions in the comments section if you have any.

But the really exciting stuff is the implications this has for the foundations of physics theory. Hotta says that his approach gives physicists a way of exploring the relationship between quantum information and quantum energy for the first time.

There is a growing sense that the properties of the universe are best described not by the laws that govern matter but by the laws that govern information. This appears to be true for the quantum world, is certainly true for special relativity, and is currently being explored for general relativity. Having a way to handle energy on the same footing may help to draw these diverse strands together.

Interesting stuff. There’s no telling where this kind of thinking might lead.

…

Hmm..sounds good in theory.

In fact, it might be easier to suck the energy out of the entangled energy state than the transmission of matter.

Believe it or not, that’s fast becoming a fact, not a mere hypothesis anymore.

In 100 years, the transportation of people and goods across this planet, and others, will be as common as cars and trucks on the interstate highways.

Just MHO.

Physicist Discovers How to Teleport Energy

hat tip