China's Great (Quantum) Leap Forward

[Ellis]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599201668700

While China has been showing off its new hardware, a potentially more important military advancement has gone largely unnoticed: In May, Chinese scientists announced a demonstration of "quantum teleportation" over 16 kilometers (10 miles), creating what Matthew Luce, a researcher at the Defense Group Inc.'s Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, calls "secure communications guaranteed by the laws of physics." China is now at the cutting-edge of military communications, transforming the field of cryptography and spotlighting a growing communications arms race.

The process is called teleportation, but the information in the message is not actually moved. Instead, changes to one photon's quantum state will be adopted instantly by the other - something Einstein famously called "spooky action at a distance." The result is akin to having two pieces of paper 10 miles apart, and as a person writes on one paper the message simultaneously appears on the other.

Why is this superior to e-mail or radio? Because, theoretically, this method "cannot be cracked or intercepted," says Luce. If the photons in the laser beam are observed by a third party, the particles themselves will be altered due to a law of physics called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that measuring a particle alters it. As such, the sender and receiver would be immediately informed that someone was snooping.

[PokerPacker]

A friend of mine was telling me about this kind of thing about a year ago. He was studying quantum mechanics and explaining that they can have two quantum particles that have some bond that they always spin together or something, and by changing the direction of the spin you can make it a 1 or 0.

[Hubbs]

Further confirming my own scientific theory, which states that quantum mechanics are ****ing weird.

[JMS]

So China has developed a "quantum" messaging technology which works over about a 10 mile distance. No clue bandwidth. Requires some sort of conveance media but also uses lasers..... And it's claimed it's totally secure by the laws of physics...

Couple of thoughts.... The Germans thought Enigma was safe. Japan thought J-20 code was safe. History is full of folks who thought their encryption was totally secure.

Secondly, We likely spend 100 times as much on military communications as China spends. Off the top of my head, we currently operatate no fewer than 16 global networks like the internet for different types of military communications.. How many does China operater? Zero.

China as far as military technology goes is madly rushing into the 70's. They, like the Japanes in the 60's and 70's, are better at reverse engineering our technology than creating inovations of their own....

This article doesn't seem to be very well researched or very accurate. The idea China "competes" with the US in military communications technology is untrue. They copy what we were doing decades ago, and we are still accelerating our capabilities beyond those we had last year.