Name: How to Teleport Schrödinger's Cat
Uploaded: 2020-03-28T10:30:54.000Z
Duration: 14 min 13 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

There are basically three kinds of teleportation: the kind where the thing you want to teleport

is somehow instantly moved from one location to another perhaps by a loophole in the fabric

of spacetime or magic or something ; the kind where you disassemble the object and send

the pieces to the faraway location to be reassembled ; and the kind where you scan

the object in one place and just transmit the instructions for how to reassemble it

somewhere else using different molecules and atoms.

This last kind of teleportation kind of sounds like cloning, since couldn’t you just scan

the object and send instructions to reassemble a copy somewhere else without destroying the

original? But no, quantum mechanics prohibits exact copying of arbitrary objects , so any

method of teleportation governed by the physics in our universe will somehow alter or destroy

the original object. Which is kind of nice, because it bypasses those soul-searching,

paradox-inducing questions about which is the real "you" – the teleported you, or

the stuff that was left behind? – “no cloning” implies the teleported one is,

unequivocally, the real one. This isn't just science fiction – well,

human teleportation is, but physicists have successfully used this method to teleport

photons of light, electrons, even calcium atoms . In this video I'm going to show you

exactly how quantum teleportation works in the hopes of giving you a clearer picture

of what it can do, and what it can't. Physicists usually teleport small, quantum,

things in a superposition of several states, like an electron that's in a state of

spin up and spin down, or whatever. But we're going to use Schrödinger's cat, in a superposition

of alive and dead until you look inside the box, in which case the state collapses to

just one of the two options, alive, or dead – the math is the same, but c’mon, this

is the internet . Before we get into the details (and I promise,

there will be many), we need to talk for a second about quantum entanglement, because

it's the transmission mechanism that makes teleportation possible. Quantum particles,

as you may have heard, can be in multiple different states of existence at once, like

"spin up" and "spin down", or "alive" and "dead", or "exploded" and "not exploded."

Or if you have multiple particles, they can be in various different combinations of their

possible states of existence, like, heads and tails plus heads and heads. Saying two

or more particles are "entangled" just means that the states of the particles aren't independent

of each other. For example, if the gunpowder explodes, Schrödinger's cat will be dead,

and if the gunpowder doesn't explode, Schrödinger's cat will be alive, but the powder can't be

unexploded while killing the cat, and vice versa, so the alive or dead state of existence

of the cat is entangled with the exploded (or not) state of existence of the gunpowder.

Or two atoms can be entangled if the outer electron in one is always orbitingto the

left while the other is orbiting to the right, or vice versa, so even though either atom

could be in either state, they're always opposite, and if we know the state of one, we know the

state of the other. In general, if you have a set of fully entangled particles, you only need to know the states

of half of them to be able to infer the states of the other half. That's not the case with heads

and tails plus heads and heads – if the first coin turns out to be heads, we still

don't know what the second coin is, so they're not entangled.

Ok, so the reason we started talking about entangled pairs of objects is that , since

entanglement can be maintained over arbitrarily long distances, entangled particles are the

transmission mechanism for teleportation – send a pair

of entangled objects to two separate locations, and one of them is kind of like a mold or

scanner and "imprints" the state of the thing we want to teleport; the other object, because

it's entangled with the first, ends up as a kind of "negative" of that imprinted state.

That's basically it, but to see how teleportation works in detail, let's send Schrödinger’s

cat to the moon. Remember, Schrödinger's cat, hidden in its box, has some probability

of being alive , and some probability of being dead , so it's in a quantum superposition

of A times alive, plus B times dead, where we have no idea what the probabilities actually

are. In order to teleport the cat's state of existence

(A alive and B dead) to the moon, we need an entangled pair of particles, one here,

and one on the moon. Like, an entangled pair of fleas, each hidden in its own box, where

one flea is dead and one is alive, but we don't know which one, so they're in a superposition

of earth flea is alive and moon flea is dead, plus earth flea is dead and moon flea is alive.

Schrödinger's fleas! We're going to teleport the cat's state of existence to the flea on

the moon by putting the earth flea and the cat together in the same box, entangling them

in a particular way, and thus teleporting the cat’s state to the moon flea. And that’s

it! I know it sounds crazy, but if you replace cats and fleas with electrons or photons or

Here’s how teleportation works. The cat's initial life-or-death state is A

times alive plus B times dead. The entangled pair of fleas are initially in a state of

earth flea alive moon flea dead plus earth flea dead moon flea alive, in equal proportions.

So the cat together with the fleas is A times cat alive plus B times cat dead, times earth

flea alive times moon flea dead plus earth flea dead times moon flea alive. This seems

like a complicated situation, but it just means that if we were to look inside the boxes

, with probability A we'd see the cat alive and exactly one of the fleas dead (either

the moon flea or the earth flea), and with probability B we'd see the cat dead and still

exactly one of the fleas dead (either the moon flea or the earth flea). No teleportation,

just a cat and some fleas entangled with each other (but not with the cat). So we won't

look in the boxes like that. To start the teleportation process, we need

to get the cat also partially entangled with the fleas, and to do that we'll put the cat

and the earth flea inside the same box and look inside it in a sneaky, indirect way . What

I mean by indirect is that we can’t just open it up to see whether the cat and earth

flea are each alive or dead, since that would entirely collapse the superposition, either

killing or saving the cat (and flea), and resulting in a failed teleportation. Instead

we need a more subtle measurement that only partially collapses the superposition and

tells us just a little bit about both of them, but not everything. For example, we could

ask, "are they the same?”, which would mean that either both cat and earth flea are alive

or both are dead, but we don't know which. Or we could ask ”is only one of them dead?"

that is, one is dead while the other is alive, but we don't know which one. Or, “at least

one is dead”, which would mean either the cat is alive and the flea is dead, or the

cat is dead and the flea is alive, or both are dead, but we don’t know which. Or, "the

cat is not dead alone", which would mean either the cat is alive with the flea either alive

or dead, or the cat's dead and the flea is dead, too – but again, we don’t know

which. You’ll notice that none of these four questions

on its own allows us to determine the full life or death situation of the cat and its

earthbound flea. "At least one is dead" tells us something about the cat and earth flea,

but not everything. The four questions taken together, however, are an alternative way

of fully specifying the cat and flea situation that we can use instead of “dead and dead”,

“alive and alive”, “alive and dead”, and “dead and alive”. For example, if the

cat is alive and the flea is dead , then we could write that – boringly – as “alive

times dead”, or in our sneaky indirect way as “the cat isn't dead alone” minus “the

cat and the flea are the same” (you can check to see that it works out). The sneaky

way to write “cat and flea are both alive” is – well, you could pause the video now

to try to figure it out on your own – or, wait for me to tell you it's “they’re

both the same” plus “they’re both different” minus “at least one is dead”. And the

sneaky way to write “cat is dead and flea is alive” is – “they’re both the same”

plus “they’re both different” minus “the cat isn’t dead alone”. And the

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How to Teleport Schrödinger's Cat

multiple

situation

guarantee

method