Is this progress on Quantum teleportation as significant as it sounds?
Scientists Report Finding Reliable Way to Teleport Data
In particular, the following seems very interesting…
If the information is being transferred instantaneously (article does not say unless I missed it), then that is huge news. We’d get a live feed from say a distant space probe without having to wait at the speed of light…
It’s very cool as a possible communications breakthroughs, but in terms of teleporting everyday physical objects, or even people, this is a single step in a what will necessarily be a very long journey of discovery.
IMHO this discovery is to the eventual goal of teleportation, what the discovery of fire was to the lunar landings, and that may even be far too optimistic.
However I did not mean to diminish the implications this could potentially have for communications, they could be game changing if we can harness it.
Ansibles aren’t, maybe, just SF . . . but more times than not, you just get a busy signal!
CMC fnord!
I’m particularly curious about what this says about quantum entanglement and “spooky action at a distance”. Is that considered resolved already or is this 3m distance the final nail in Einstein’s EPR coffin?
Since I’ve forgotten what little I used to know about the subject, I eagerly await our theoretical physicists.
Or just a beep, but, really, that is more useful. 
It’s a remarkable technical achievement, but it doesn’t tell us anything about physics that we haven’t known for decades. It has nothing whatsoever to do with beam-me-up Scotty teleportation, or at least no more to do with it than a telephone call. It also has nothing to do with communicating information faster than the speed of light. That is disallowed by relativity and quantum mechanics.
It is a clear demonstration of spooky action at a distance, as shown to be a consequence of quantum theory for the first time in the brilliant paper by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR).
But doesn’t spooky action at a distance communicate information instantaneously, thus working at a speed faster than light? Or am I totally misreading this action at a distance stuff? (Eminently probable because I suspect I’d need a doctorate in higher math to even begin to grasp it).
I’m under the same impression. Isn’t that the whole luster behind quantum entanglement?
IIRC, no. Somebody who pays more attention can correct me if I’m wrong, but as I understand it, an analogy for quantum teleportation is that it’s like encrypting your data and producing the encryption key at the same time. The data is communicated instantly, but it’s useless if you don’t carry the key over there the slow way to decrypt it.
Unless you can break the encryption faster then it takes for the key to arrive.
Unless our understanding of quantum mechanics is wrong, it is literally physically impossible to do so.
So the advantage being, communication wouldn’t wholly rely on classic means of data transfer, like wires or wireless EM broadcasting? We could send a message around the world without satellites or even across space without need for antenna?
…and you demonstrably can’t do that. 
An analogy is two guys a light year apart. At the same prearranged time time you and a friend of yours a light year away tell the two guys “say a random word”, and they both say “Ouagadougou”, but of course neither you nor your friend know that both words were the same until you meet up and discuss. A year later (after some space travel) you meet up with your friend and compare notes and find out the two guys both said they same word and you think, “they must have communicated faster than light to have coordinated that”. But if you and your friend never meet up, you never realize this.
What you want to do instead is have your friend go up to his guy and say “say ‘Flounder’ or I’ll punch you”, and imagine that your guy will also say “Flounder” a light year away. That would allow you to transmit a message across whatever FTL back channel they were using to coordinate the first experiment. But that experiment doesn’t work at all.
So you can do an experiment that makes it seem that some FTL communication has taken place, but can’t actually do FTL communication yourself.
The ‘advantage’ of quantum teleportation is that it allows you to transfer the state of a system (e.g. a particle or system of particles) to another system. It does rely on a classical communication channel so any limitations on classical communication (e.g. no FTL) apply to quantum teleportation.
Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen correctly reasoned that quantum mechanics predicts the existence of experiments in which measurements at two distant points are random and unpredictable, but that correlations between those measurements occur and are predictable.
If the correlations were any stronger, you could use them to communicate faster than the speed of light. They are not any stronger. Quantum mechanics is consistent with Special Relativity in saying that it is impossible to communicate information faster than the speed of light.
In order to transmit any useful information at all, you still need a classical communication channel. While experiments like this might have some use in communication, it’ll mostly be in information security, not the communication itself.
Actually, there are theories that feature stronger correlations which nevertheless are non-signalling, i.e. in which information can’t be instantaneously transmitted. What distinguishes quantum theory from these ‘superquantum theories’, and why nature chose QM as opposed to these other theories, is a big open problem in quantum foundations. Several different principles have been proposed to physically distinguish between the different possibilities, but none quite seems to do the job so far.
As for why quantum teleportation doesn’t work to transport information instantaneously, the standard protocol works as follows: first, Alice and Bob must share an entangled pair of particles—call them A and B. Then, Alice has a particle X, which is in a state she wants to transmit to Bob. To this end, she performs a joint measurement on particle X and her part of the entangled pair A. This yields one of four possible outcomes, entangles X and A, and breaks the entanglement between A and B, leaving Bob’s B in one of four possible states with equal probability.
These four possibilities for Bob’s particle are now, in a sense, images of the original state of X; for each of the four, there exists a transformation that Bob can perform that leaves his particle in a state identical to the original X. However, Bob doesn’t know which transformation to perform, nor is there any way for him to obtain that information locally; he needs to know the outcome of Alice’s measurement for this. But this is classical data (two bits, to be precise), and thus, can be transmitted—say, via phone call—at most at the speed of light. Thus, the whole protocol can’t transmit information faster than the speed of light.