Byline: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK -- Scientists have pulled off a startling trick that looks like the ``Beam-me-up-Scotty'' technology of science fiction.In an Austrian laboratory, scientists destroyed bits of light in one place and made perfect replicas appear about three feet away.
They did that by transferring information about a crucial physical characteristic of the original light bits, called photons. The information was picked up by other photons, which took on that characteristic and so became replicas of the originals.
The phenomenon that made it happen is so bizarre that even Albert Einstein didn't believe in it. He called it spooky.
In addition to raising the rather fantastic notion of a new means of transportation, the trick could lead to ultra-fast computers.
The experiment is reported in today's issue of the journal Nature by Anton Zeilinger and colleagues at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. Another research team, based in Rome, has done similar work and submitted its report to another journal.
The work is the first to demonstrate ``quantum teleportation,'' a bizarre shifting of physical characteristics between nature's tiniest particles, no matter how far apart they are. Scientists might be able to achieve teleportation between atoms within a few years and molecules within a decade or so, Zeilinger said.
The underlying principle is fundamentally different from the ``Star Trek'' process of beaming people around, but could teleportation be used on people? Could scientists extract information from every tiny particle in a person, transfer it to a bunch of particles elsewhere, and assemble those particles into an exact replica of the person? There's no theoretical problem with that, several experts said. But get real. ``It's quite clear that anything approximating teleportation of complex living beings, even bacteria, is so far away technologically that it's not really worth thinking about it,'' said IBM physicist Charles Bennett. He and other physicists proposed quantum teleportation in 1993.