Quantum Physics & Teleportation

Now here’s something interesting to ponder… Researchers at the University of Maryland’s Joing Quantum Institute have succeeded in teleporting information between two atoms that are separated by a distance of one meter. More on this completely baffling process here and here.

“It must certainly be allowed, that nature has kept us at a great distance from all her secrets, and has afforded us only the knowledge of a few superficial qualities of objects; while she conceals from us those powers and principles on which the influence of those objects entirely depends.” — David Hume

Atom: The Illusion of Reality

I took a break from politics, current affairs, and ceaseless news programs last night (isn’t everyone just a little fed up with it at the moment?) and instead watched this excellent BBC4 documentary about the atom.

This is the final part of Professor Jim Al-Khalili’s series about the basic building block of our universe, the atom. He explores how studying the atom forced us to rethink the nature of reality itself, discovers how there might be parallel universes in which different versions of us exist and finds out that “empty” space isn’t empty at all. I’ve heard this theory many times before but it became a more vivid concept when it was described by Dawkins in one of his lectures discussing quantum physics and cosmology.

Al-Khalili shows how the world we think we know turns out to be a tiny sliver of an infinitely weirder universe than which we could have conceived.

I can’t say that you’ll come away from this with any more knowledge than when you started, but it does perhaps pose some interesting new questions.