Few people know it but quantum encryption has already been demonstrated in Austria. It was done across a 1.2 km separation in a tunnel across a river. Also quantum encryption of a bank transmission was also done to demonstrate its practicality. Plans are being made to demo satellite mediated quantum transmission. I am not sure how round the world sat quant trans would work, as both receiver and sender must be in line of sight of the quantum code generator. Due to the nature of "quantrans", the code MUST be random and made up on the fly. Thus the code is symmetrical and must be sent to the receiver and the sender at the same instant.
The code is randomly polarity-rotated bits rotated by a quantum light prism, split beam generator. This effect has long been demonstrated as proof of quantum at-a-distance duplication or entanglement. The virtue of the code which is a scrambled image, (usable for global image xoring or line by line encoding) is the randomness of the physical process that rotates the bits.
It is not so different in concept as magnetic field at-a-distance entanglement,(which also cannot be explained by any physical model, necessitating the invention of the "field" concept by Faraday. If you want to tie a University sophomore into knots ask him to describe "what" a field is .. ) but it is thot to be instantaneous at a distance. Any reading of the random 'image' or bit stream, which is 'xored' with the plain text message for sending, will rotate the bits and render it unreadable. A simple model for the machine is an unpredictable randomness generator that delivers always two bit streams that are physically twinned with a binary variance and can be sent to two parties, one who wishes to encode or wrap a message and the other who wishes to read the same message. Quantum theory says that the randomness of this system under quantum control so to speak is perfect, so there is no way to predict the pattern of the bit stream. It is as if a cosmic wobbler was introduced into a stream of light, some kind of aberrant mirror that wobbles at teraherz speed and changes light polarity photon by photon. But magically it splits a beam -and- independent physically of the wobbling mirror, it matches the wobble of its previously-split 'cousin' photons.
Impossible you say? Well it is shown to happen. An image in a mirror is sent thru a prism that splits the image into two beamed images, one image is 'scrambled' in a physical scrambler, and the other twinned beam *not* sent thru the scrambler, follows suit and is scrambled in the same way. It is entangled by a magic hand, called Mr. Quantum Sniggler. This way, two beams, which cannot be read without rotating the photons in some way to rescramble the image bit by bit, are thus created. It is fine to rotate the photons by reading them on by one and making a record of it, but so far no machinery can be constructed to do this, theoretically or actually.
Personally I cannot see why a repeater could not be built to read the photons in the code and resend them, but they say that is impossible. (I think the reason is that the a rotator to precisely repolarize the photons is not easy to make. The polarity may be random in orientation as well as randomly so changed. As well, you have to intercept the very narrow beam code which is only sent to one party and the message and re process both of them.
(Thish)It happens. The object is to make your mind wobble in the same way and accept the concept.
At least that is the story. I wonder how the code is stored for decoding use by the receiving party since any operation on the bits changes them in this case?
Various US government institutions rejected all entreaties on the part of the University in Austria to participate in this project. This would probably mean that they intend to secretly implement it, if it can be found to have practical application. One problem perhaps is weather. It would seem that if the communication cannot be read, it also cannot be easily sent on noisy lines or in noisy space.
I guess we have to accept infinite instantaneous quantum fields. Not pretty and making the universe pretty strange but it is strange already. You just aren't looking at it right if you don't think so. The object is to embrace the strange and the challenge is to make the most wonderful application of the strangest concept. Then you win the bag of magic Jelly Beans buried at the top of Mt. Annapurna.
EC<:-} |
