New Quantum Camera Capable of Snapping Photos of 'Ghosts'

[Christopher O'Brien]

[Cool! My mind flits off in several directions when thinking about how this new tech can be utilized! Let's hope they keep the cost down... original paper from the journal Nature: —chris]

FULL Article HERE:

Spooky quantum cameras can capture images from photons that never encountered the objects pictured. By utilizing a process that Einstein famously called "spooky," scientists have successfully caught "ghosts" on film for the first time using quantum cameras.

The "ghosts" captured on camera weren't the kind you might first think; scientists didn't discover the wandering lost souls of our ancestors. Rather, they were able to capture images of objects from photons that never actually encountered the objects pictured. The technology has been dubbed "ghost imaging," reports National Geographic.

Normal cameras work by capturing light that bounces back from an object. That's how optics are supposed to work. So how can it be possible to capture an image of an object from light if the light never bounced off the object? The answer in short: quantum entanglement.

Entanglement is the weird instantaneous link that has been shown to exist between certain particles even if they are separated by vast distances. How exactly the phenomenon works remains a mystery, but the fact that it works has been proven.

Quantum cameras capture ghost images by making use of two separate laser beams that have their photons entangled. Only one beam encounters the object pictured, but the image can nevertheless be generated when either beam strikes the camera.

"What they've done is a very clever trick. In some ways it is magical," explained quantum optics expert Paul Lett of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland. "There is not new physics here, though, but a neat demonstration of physics."

For the experiment, researchers passed a beam of light through etched stencils and into cutouts of tiny cats and a trident that were about 0.12 inches tall. A second beam of light, at a different wavelength from the first beam but nevertheless entangled with it, traveled on a separate line and never hit the objects. Amazingly, the second beam of light revealed pictures of the objects when a camera was focused on it, even though this beam never encountered the objects. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature. (A similar, more preliminary experiment back in 2009 demonstrated the same trick in slightly less sophisticated fashion.)

Because the two beams were at different wavelengths, it could eventually lead to improved medical imaging or silicon chip lithography in hard-to-see situations. For instance, doctors might use this method for generating images in visible light even though the images were actually captured using a different kind of light, such as infrared.

"This is a long-standing, really neat experimental idea," said Lett. "Now we have to see whether or not it will lead to something practical, or will remain just a clever demonstration of quantum mechanics."

REST OF ARTICLE HERE:

 

[Goggs Mackay]

I simply cannot understand why any scientist who is happy to accept entanglement, but cannot accept phenomena for which we have no explanation. There are many things we can demonstrate but not prove, and what we call paranormal now, I think, will one day be explained. And I think entanglement may have a large part in things such as remote viewing, a universal consciousness etc.

 

[Randall]

[Cool! My mind flits off in several directions when thinking about how this new tech can be utilized! ... REST OF ARTICLE HERE:

An interesting article, but as usual, what's going on isn't quite what the attention grabbing headline says is going on.

It's not really a camera in the sense we think of a camera, e.g. nobody will ever get to have this technology on their iPhone because it requires a special configuration of independent lasers and mirrors. Also, nobody is taking pictures of ghosts, and it's also not quite the way it's being explained in terms of quantum entanglement.

This is because, although they say that the image comes from a stream of photons that has never been through the cat shaped target, implying that somehow the photons that form the image have magically been imparted with the cat shape ( via entanglement ) at the point when they encounter the cat shaped target, what is really happening is that the stream that has been through the cat shape is actually re-combined with the stream that didn't and is then filtered out from that stream before it reaches the target where the picture is formed.

So what is actually happening is analogous to noise cancelling, where the wave of particles that has encountered the cat shaped image cancels out parts of the stream that hasn't, and is then filtered out, leaving gaps in the other stream that goes on to form the picture from the missing parts, creating a sort of negative image. So unfortunately this will never get used for FTL communications or anything like that either. It's still a cool experiment though.

 

[Odinic-wanderer]

Goggs,i must say that i think you are dead on with your comment.
I have been looking into these more fringe topics over the past 10 years or so and always thought it was odd that something like Quantum Entaglement was totally accepted in mainstream science but something like Non Local Conciousness, telepathy or the general paranormal is seen as totally crackpot.

I think your right that Entaglement will explain alot of the phenomna we come across. I tend to think of our brain as a quantum processor and maybe some peoples brains are able to process more/wider range of quantum or 'entangled' information, and maybe that goes a long way to explaining things like seeing ghosts and telepathy.

 

[Burnt State]

I think our brains have evolved to perceive reality as best as we need to for survival of the fittest purposes. That makes our experience of reality entirely limited, as our brains combine with our sensory system to create a virtual reality interface that suits our needs and not reality as it is. The paranormal, by definition, is just outside the periphery of our limited experience of reality.

Whether or not our brains will ever be able to conceive of ways to experience reality as it is remains to be seen. What's very inerestng is how those pesky UFO's are able to navigate in & out of our sensory experience, and seemingly by design. That's where Goggs has it bang on, as there is a mystery at work that challenges many of our paradigms of reality as we think we know it. Why that's not given more time to solve can only speak to how the approach to solving this phenomena requires perhaps more irrational, creative, non-linear and unideological approaches if we are to get any closer to understanding such phenomena.

But yeah, these cats, them just ephemeral Xmas decorations captured by a human technique. It does speak to our creative capacity to see the unseen. We do need to continue in that direction.