Spooky Action at a Distance

An enjoyable interview with some cheerful Austrian physicist on spooky action at a distance, and current forms of teleportation of properties of matter.

Last year we teleported light particles across a distance of 600 metres under the Danube – that's the current world record. In theory the range is limitless.....

You said that you only transfer properties, not particles. Would "copying" not be a more accurate expression than "teleportation"?

No. Firstly it differs from simple copying in that the original loses all its properties. That is something so crazy that it could only exist in the quantum world. You can actually remove all the properties of a particle and give them to another particle.

Nice touch: spooky action at a distance under the Danube. It's involves a damn nice pop science idea- information itself as a primary property of objects - that I've often used as a metaphor for "good"* art: Whether simple or complex in form, a necessary but not sufficient characteristic of good art is that has lots of properties, and continually offers a rich stream of information.

But you defend the thesis that there is an "original matter of the universe": information.

Yes. For me the concept of "information" is at the basis of everything we call "nature". The moon, the chair, the equation of states, anything and everything, because we can't talk about anything without de facto speaking about the information we have of these things. In this sense the information is the basic building block of our world.

*Good now always used in quotes as part of the Post-Modern Art Language Sarcasticization** Act of 1987.

**Having just, I think, invented it, I like "Sarcasticization" so much I may now actually start using it.