An Open Mind, 077

For instance, in June 2002, there was a Ph.D. project at the Australian National University that achieved quantum teleportation of a laser beam.^2.59 It was a successful quantum teleportation experiment involving the use of ‘entangled’ photons. A target photon was successfully 'scanned', its properties ‘copied’ onto a transition photon, and finally the photon was recreated at another location about a yard away, proving in essence theorems proposed by Einstein. The process takes a nanosecond – one billionth of one second – and some believe it will soon be used for teleporting matter.^2.60 A couple of years earlier, researchers at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, N.J. described experiments where a pulse of light passing through a transparent chamber filled with specially prepared cesium gas appears to be pushed to speeds of 300 times the normal speed of light. This is so fast that, under these peculiar circumstances, the main part of the pulse exits the chamber even before it enters. Einstein’s theory survives, but the results are mind bending.^2.61

We each live day by day. With atomic clocks, when we live has become more and more regulated. When sundials were the clocks, time would run ahead as much as 16 minutes and 33 seconds around October 31-November 1, or fall behind by as much as 14 minutes and 6 seconds around February 11-12. This difference is known as the equation of time, and results from an apparent irregular movement of the sun caused by a combination of the obliquity of the Earth’s rotation axis and the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit. Other planets have an equation of time too. On Mars the difference between sundial time and clock time can be as much as 50 minutes, due to different elliptical nature of its orbit.^2.62 Many of the details behind when we live are irrelevant to how and where we live. Certainly religion plays a bigger role in how we choose to interact with our neighbors than sundials or atomic clocks.

This accuracy and understanding of temporal and spatial relationships is a natural byproduct of physics. In fact, spacetime is a physics model combining the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time into the four dimensional space-time continuum.^2.63 This spacetime concept provides a mathematical basis for quantum physics. The word quantum refers to indivisible elementary entities, like a light quantum, or photon, or the energy of an electron bound to an atom at rest. This conceptual framework of quantum mechanics was developed during the first half of the 20th century, and, because it works, has become the fundamental framework for understanding and describing nature.^2.64 Quantum mechanics replaces Newtonian mechanics and classical electromagnetism at both the atomic and subatomic levels, and along with general relativity has become one of the pillars of modern physics.^2.65

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