by Jack Lee
If atoms and electrons can exist in two places at once why not you? This is the big question that scientist are asking as they try to unravel a mystery in quantum physics. One theory that may lead us to Star Trek like transporters one day is the possibility that we can separate molecules ever so slightly and a solid will suddenly disappear into thin air, but the solid is not gone, it’s just spread out to the point it has become more like individual
molecules held in suspension. All it takes is a fractional separation of the most miniscule amount and “poof”, object gone. On the sub-atomic level the former solid can potentially move through time and space like a ghost through walls.
Before you dismiss this as nonsense you should know that nothing is truly a solid, it is only the illusion of a solid. This is a scientific fact. Let’s say you had the power to look at an object close enough to see the individual atoms then you would also see a gap between each one. For some reason atoms don’t touch each other, instead they are held in a state of suspension with a precise gap between each one. Spread that gap ever so slightly and whatever it was appears to vanish, but it is still present, just not visible to our sight. Weird, eh?
Some day this theory of dematerializing objects will become the ultimate transportation machine from point A to point B, across town or across the universe in the blink of an eye. Some scientists believe that all that is needed is to have a sender in one location and a receiver in another. No shipping damage, no handling, no theft or loss, just flip the switch in one place and receive it in another! Well, that’s the theory, but obviously don’t expect UPS to have this any time soon. We’re a long way from understanding even the most elemental parts of how this might be possible, we only know that it IS theoretically possible to move matter this way.
One study believes it is possible to combine two totally different technologies to act as the carrier wave between the receiver and sender thus bridging the problem of making shat you dematerialize gets to where it is suppose to go. This ultimate escalator would involve the combination of both radio and light waves into a super radio wave that moves molecules at the speed of light yet it is neither radio nor light. Pretty mind boggling stuff and just trying to wrap your brain around the theory is almost impossible. Now read this…
By MALCOLM W. BROWNE
MANY a suspect has escaped the noose by arguing that he could not have been in two places at the same time. But no such grounds for an alibi exist for the tiny inhabitants of the realm of quantum mechanics: a team of physicists has proved that an entire atom can simultaneously exist in two widely separated places.
The achievement not only sheds light on a famous scientific paradox but could also have important consequences for cryptography, a science that creates codes to safeguard the electronic transfer of money, state secrets and other valuable things.
Quantum mechanics is a natural system of stepwise interactions that governs very small things: molecules, atoms and the components of atoms. It does not noticeably affect the “classical” or “macro scale” world, the environment familiar to human beings.
In the quantum “micro scale” world, objects can tunnel almost magically through impenetrable barriers. A single object can exist in a multiplicity of forms and places. In principle, two quantum-mechanically “entangled” objects can respond instantly to each other’s experiences, even when the two objects are at opposite ends of the universe.
Bizarre though such effects seem to nonphysicists, they underlie countless practical applications, including the ubiquitous transistor. They might eventually lead to a quantum computer, in which a single atom switching between different quantum states could simultaneously perform different operations, thereby speeding up computations to the point at which currently unbreakable electronic codes could be readily broken.
That could have a devastating effect on current banking transfer procedures. Many coding systems used for the electronic transfer of money depend on the fact that it is virtually impossible, using even the fastest of today’s computers, to factor very large numbers that are the products of pairs of large prime numbers. A quantum computer, however, might be able to do the factoring in a reasonable period of time, thereby putting a powerful tool in the hands of thieves.
In a paper published in the current issue of the journal Science, Dr. Christopher Monroe and his colleagues at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., described how they had divided a single beryllium atom into two distinct states of existence and had then separated the two states in space.
To readers of science fiction, the idea of a single atom existing simultaneously in two states or places is reminiscent of the supernatural “doppelganger” — a flesh-and-blood duplicate of one’s self encountered while walking along a street.
The real significance of the institute’s feat, Dr. Monroe said in an interview, is that the two states of the same atom were not only pulled apart but were separated by a relatively enormous distance — a distance large enough to represent a transition from the domain of quantum mechanics to the everyday world, where things behave in “normal” ways. The beryllium atom, as divided by the scientists into two separate manifestations, may therefore have represented a kind of bridge between the microscale and macroscale levels of existence, and it therefore occupies an intermediate “mesoscale” region. The study of such a region could help define the fuzzy boundary between the quantum world and the everyday world.
The main object of the institute’s experiments was to create the atomic equivalent of “Schrodinger’s cat” — the hypothetical victim of a whimsical “thought experiment” devised in 1935 by the German quantum theorist Erwin Schrodinger to illustrate one paradox of quantum theory.
Schrodinger suggested that a box might be built and a live cat and a capsule of poison gas put inside. The capsule could be broken, and the lethal poison released, by a trigger mechanism actuated by the decay of a radioactive atom. The experiment would be conducted during a specified period of time in which there would be a precisely 50-50 chance that the atom would decay, killing the cat, or would not decay, leaving the cat alive.