CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE: PHYSICISTS MAKE QUANTUM LEAP IN ENTANGLING OPPOSITES

Scientists in Austria may have made an important first step toward inventing the beloved transporter effect of the Star Trek universe.

Unfortunately, before they can beam anybody anywhere, they have to figure out how not to kill them in the process.

Isn't science wonderful? And this has been a banner year for science. Sheep have been cloned and proper manipulation of magnetic fields has allowed frogs to be floated.

But back to the transporter beam wanna-be.

Quantum teleportation lets scientists replicate teeny little light particles called photons hither and thither and yon.

But the original photon is destroyed in the process. You'll remember this almost never happened on Star Trek, at least not to the regular cast members.

So as one Ohio scientist put it, to send a real person, quantum teleportation would "kill you atom by atom so you could be reassembled at the other end, one hopes."

One hopes?

At this point, researchers say, the process will probably be best used for moving bits of information -- not people or livestock or luggage -- back and forth.

Sending a living organism would require taking apart and then reassembling (one hopes) too much information.

Too many photons. That's the trouble with the world today. All those subatomic particles flitting around like tiny little chickens with their heads cut off and causing trouble.

Actually, scientists say, the real problem is that no one quite understands how the photons being zapped back and forth keep shifting polarization so that they remain the opposite of the other photons used in the process.

The process of the photons pairing off and shifting characteristics is called entanglement.

As in most paired entanglements, one party undergoes a radical change of polarization and the other is destroyed.

This sounds familiar. I still don't understand quantum teleportation, but the entanglement phenomenon may explain every relationship I've ever had.

You fall in love with Lord Greystoke and by the time the whole thing's over, me Jane and he Tarzan, without the social patina and cool loincloth.

Never mind the fact that he's an Aquarius and I'm a Taurus and astrologically we should not be in the same room together, let alone the same relationship house; we're doomed at a subatomic level. Our photons are out of sync.

So essentially, even if opposites do attract, entanglements will result in destruction.

Lots of people who've never heard of quantum physics already knew that.

As I've said before, science is wonderful. No one quite understands how entanglements work (subatomic or not), but there's great potential in the whole thing.

On the bright side, at least we've figured out cloning.

Peggy O'Farrell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.