The 2012 records of quantum teleportation on earth do not describe any kind of Stargate technology that would allow us to travel from one point in the universe to another at an instant. However, the effect leads to the discovery of at least one additional fifth dimension on top of Einstein's four space-time dimensions length, height, width and time.
Many renowned scientists around the world are eagerly expecting an imminent proof of the existence of one or even more additional dimensions of the universe. The forthcoming confirmation of additional dimensions will change everything in physics; quantum information and perhaps even some kind of exotic dark matter travels along additional dimensions at an instant. With such a proof, the speed of light turns out to be an invincible barrier of nothing more than a so far only incompletely described world with four dimensions.
Quantum teleportation is the transfer of quantum information units, so called qubits, from one point in our universe to another, without traversing the intervening space. The polarization of photons (horizontal or vertical) and the orientation of particle spins (up or down) are examples for such qubits. Quantum teleportation is based on the experimentally proven peculiarity of quantum entanglement.
Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon where two elementary particles become intertwined and behave as one single system, regardless if they are close to each other or light years apart. In case of entangled photons, the measurement of a horizontal polarization of one photon will cause the measurement of a vertical polarization of the other entangled photon.
Entangled photons can be simply generated by optical crystals or half-silvered mirrors: A photon with high energy is split into a pair of entangled photons, one transmitted through the medium and the other reflected. Both photons travel at the speed of light. Certain atoms can be stimulated by lasers in such a way that they emit pairs of entangled photons.
The following short and simple excursion through quantum mechanics is helpful to better understand the principle of quantum entanglement and quantum teleportation.
Classical physics describes the current state of motion of a particle by two independent data, namely its location and its speed. According to quantum mechanics, the situation is somewhat different: Location or velocity can be determined individually with nearly any degree of accuracy, as long as an evaluating person is only interested in the accurate measurement of one physical quantity. Both quantities cannot be measured with unlimited high accuracy at the same time. We cannot even assume that both have precise values at any instant.
Multiplying the uncertainty range ∆x of a particle's location with the impulse uncertainty range ∆p of the product (velocity x mass), the derived product (∆p x ∆x) will be never smaller than a fixed constant of nature, called the elementary quantum of action.
This means that the exact location of an electron, just for example, is not precisely readable along one complete centimeter, in case the velocity of the electron was measured extremely accurately as one centimeter per second.
Additionally, only the type of experimental measurement proves the electron either to be a particle or a wave. This is valid for any photon and any other elementary particle as well. Both evaluations are in complete contradiction. Scientists speak of the duality of particles and waves. That all sounds very strange but nature behaves exactly this way, so far without any plausible explanation. It is the biggest challenge of this 21st century to develop a model that combines classical physics and the uncertainties and probabilities of quantum physics without any contradiction.
Rotational symmetry of Einstein's space-time, introducing not only positive but also negative values for lengths, height and width, and even backward movement of time, is one of such models. The negative directions of time and space do not appear with negative values in our observation environment but show altered physical properties: time stagnation, functional inversion or extremely accelerated processes.
Such accelerated processes may appear for example as different kinds of particle spins or simultaneous appearances of one and the same particle in two different locations. Any extreme acceleration of processes in relation to our perception of time progress leads to a quantized superposition of a nearly infinite number of images that shape our registration of nature, space and masses within. The actual observations of these continuously repeated reduced four-dimensional images (three of space and one for time) cause interferences in our seeming space-time continuum, determining the outcome of each measurement individually, i.e. the observation of a particle, or a wave, or even double images of particles at completely different locations.
The extreme acceleration of processes in relation to our perceivable time progress can be considered as the contribution of a fifth dimension, on top of Einstein's four dimensions. Because of this extreme acceleration, any point in our universe can be reached at any instant. This way, everything across the universe is connected with each other until it is observed, thus making it an irretrievable event of the past.
All known types of masses can be considered to travel with the speed of light on this fifth dimension, because they acquired relative speed of light during their individual generation processes. Therefore, our time came nearly to a standstill in relation to the fifth dimension; Einstein's classical physics of relative time dilation for reduced four dimensions merely works the other way round. Therefore, introducing the fifth dimension, classical physics can be still used to grasp all peculiarities of quantum physics within the apparent continuum of space and time.
String theory is another attempt to bring the world of classical physics and quantum physics in line. Scientists spent already more than two decades without coming to feasible and unifying descriptions. The assumption of endless multiple universes are necessary to support the logic of string theory with respect to its leakage concept of gravity between innumerable parallel universes. The repetition sequences of a fifth dimension replace the parallel universes of the string theory by the innumerable superposition of only one and the same universe. Additional dimensions explain gravity in a very simple way by our inverted perception of negative space dimensions and relative backward movement of time. They even provide a feasible concept for hidden areas of the universe's expanding dark energy and the galaxies' stabilizing dark matter.
The research of the experimental entanglement of photons and the teleportation of quantum states has to answer the question, whether it is possible to send messages that arrive instantaneously at the receiver, regardless of the distance, or not.
The current method of quantum teleportation consists of the transmission of a quantum state that is not yet measured, e.g. the horizontal polarization of a photon from a laboratory anywhere to a second remote laboratory. If two photons were entangled, none of these photons has a horizontal or vertical polarization before an actual measurement of the polarization state. However, as soon as the state of one entangled photon is measured, and if it gets through this measurement a horizontal polarization, e.g. caused by the passage through a polarizing filter, the second photon will show a vertical polarization, regardless of how far the two photons are separated in space from each other. Strictly speaking, this only applies to 25% of all measured cases. In 75% of cases, the actual measuring direction of oscillation of the photon in the second laboratory has to be rotated by 180 degrees in order to complete the quantum teleportation successfully.
An information transfer is not possible with this property, because the quantum state has been only fixed by its actual measurement which simultaneously caused the teleportation of the orthogonal polarization state onto the entangled photon. The entanglement of the photons got lost during this procedure. A random sequence of binary numbers of "zeros", for example defining horizontal polarization, and "ones", accordingly defining vertical polarization, can be sent, but information cannot be transmitted and retrieved. Einstein's general theory of relativity for a four-dimensional world, strictly prohibiting information spreading faster than light, still remains valid, at least so far.
Nevertheless, in conjunction with a classical information channel this effect can be used for quantum cryptography: sender and receiver agree via a classical information channel on a data coding, incorporating the random sequences of quantum states into the classical information data. This random sequences of quantum states, horizontal polarizations or vertical polarizations of the photons, are well-known only to the sender and the receiver.
However, investigating the fifth dimension with an extreme acceleration and iterative framing of nature around us thoroughly, will lead to a completely different picture in the near future. At present, we cannot handle nearly infinite quantized repetition sequences that construct every single moment of our time. Innovative technical procedures, based on the well-known effect of relative time dilation, may succeed to stretch the repetition sequences of a fifth dimension in a way that we are able to influence and simultaneously evaluate only one single repetition frame across the complete universe, still before it became an irretrievable event of the past.
The discovery of the fifth dimension changes everything we thought to know about our universe and opens a completely new window for our views on our existence, including the two questions "how" and "why".