Word: atomically
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...very cool one (see: Star Trek). For scientists, it's just very, very complex, so much so that at this point, teleportation is not a matter of moving matter but one of transporting information. Already, physicists have been able to exchange information between light particles - or photons - or between atoms, so long as they were right next to each other. The current experiment marks the first in which information has traveled a significant distance - 1 m, or a little more than 3 ft. - between two isolated atoms. It's also the first time the powers of a photon, which...
Using a pair of ions, or charged particles, group leader Christopher Monroe and his team place each in a vacuum and keep them in position with electric fields. An ultra-fast laser pulse triggers the atoms to emit photons simultaneously. If the photons interact in just the right way, their parent atoms enter a quantum state known as entanglement, in which atom B adopts the properties of atom A even though they're in separate chambers a meter apart. When A is measured, the information that had been previously encoded on it disappears in accordance with the quirky rules...
Without the unerring measurement provided by atomic clocks, we couldn't have landed a rover on Mars, the Internet wouldn't be able to process data superfast and GPS navigation would be a fantasy. These clocks are so precise that they literally redefined time: Once tied to the mean solar day, the official measure of a second was changed in 1967 to refer to the duration of more than nine billion periods of radiation between two levels of the cesium 133 atom...
...Furman, the "biggest miracle" of the past 63 years was that no other atom bombs had been used. His fervent hope was for that to remain so. My last memory of Robert, a barbershop-quartet member, was of him standing in the snow on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, singing peacefully...
...strategy is often compared to that of the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atom bomb, or the Apollo program, which put astronauts on the moon. Some worry that it oversimplifies things. "This isn't an engineering problem," says the NIH's Harris. "It's a problem in which we know only parts of the solution...