Some years ago some papers were published claiming reliable quantum teleportation has finally been invented. This made me wonder if we are going to get microscopic pings over huge distances anytime soon.
Can you elaborate on this? As I understand quantum teleportation is not real teleportation as people popularly understand teleportation - no piece of matter is teleported, yet it is real in the way we need - information is teleported instantly. In case I'm wrong, kindly hint on what is actually meant under quantum teleportation when we encounter papers about it.
Quantum teleportation does not allow you to transfer an amount of information faster than speed of light. Say you have two labs with two entangled particles 300000km away such that when one particle is “up” the other will be “down”. When lab A observes the particle it has 1/2 probability of being “up” and 1/2 probability of being “down”. Same for lab B. But once both observations are known by someone C (could also be A or B), C will find that one of the particles is “up” and the other is “down”. Bell’s theorem further tells us that there are cases (probability distributions of A and B) where the distribution could not be explained by assuming that the probability distribution of A and B is determined before observation.
There are never ending debates on what happened while observing A, but I dislike calling it “quantum teleportation” as it only further confuses people as if any information was teleported during observation. My theory is that A and B are totally independent until both observations reach a middleman C, and it’s at this point that the entanglement starts to matter.