I ran across this twaddle at NPR: Scientists Take Quantum Steps Toward Teleportation, thinking perhaps there was some new result being described. There wasn’t, and furthermore, it’s a giant turd of a story, hitting all the “highlights” of teleportation reporting, along with the misendorsement of Michio Kaku. This isn’t the first time that Kaku has spouted nonsense about teleportation; it left a bad taste in Chad’s mouth not too long ago.
From the NPR story:
“Quantum entanglement” may sound like an awful sci-fi romance flick, but it’s actually a phenomenon that physicists say may someday lead to the ability to teleport an object all the way across the galaxy instantly.
It’s not exactly the Star Trek version of teleportation, where an object disappears then reappears somewhere else. Rather, it “entangles” two different atoms so that one atom inherits the properties of another.
To use an epithet I learned in the navy: Not only no, but f#@k no. Quantum teleportation does not teleport objects, it teleports information. It is not exactly the Star Trek version of teleportation in the sense that it’s nothing at all like Star Trek. Mentioning Star Trek (or just Scotty, and this story does both) is greatest hit #1 in any teleportation story.
And: Physicists say? Which ones? I want names!
“An invisible umbilical cord emerges connecting these two electrons. And you can separate them by as much as a galaxy if you want. Then, if you vibrate one of them, somehow on the other end of the galaxy the other electron knows that its partner is being jiggled.”
This is what Kaku has gotten wrong before, and is hit #2. Entanglement does not tell you this — it tells you that when you measure particle 1, you will instantly know what state particle 2 is in. You haven’t changed the state of 1, because is wasn’t in an eigenstate to begin with — you’ve collapsed the wavefunction, and gotten all of the information about the state of the system in doing so. Wiggling the electron at that point does absolutely nothing to its formerly-entangled partner.
Kaku’s getting it wrong, and needs to STFU about it.
Hit #3 takes us into crackpotopia
It could one day lead to new types of computers, and some even think entanglement may explain things like telepathy.
What is there to explain about telepathy? That it’s nonsense? You have to confirm that a phenomenon actually, objectively exists before you could even think about trotting entanglement out as an explanation for it. This is a slimy tactic — don’t even address that the phenomenon in question is on decidedly shaky footing, and instead propose that you have an explanation for it. The reader gets the impression, though, that the phenomenon is real and has the endorsement of mainstream science, and that we are merely looking for the mechanism of how it works. And you also used the “some think” schtick. Are you using anonymous sources?
NPR, you got hoodwinked by someone who didn’t know what he was talking about and got really lazy about checking up on he facts.