The Dalai Lama Connection To This Year's Physics Nobel

On 16 August 2016, China launched Micius – a satellite which can generate quantum entangled photons. It can send the entangled photons to land stations in Austria and China. Placed at sun-synchronous orbit 500 kilometres above the earth, (1,400 km at horizon), Micius also has ultra-sensitive light detectors, which can detect the quantum states of the photons it gets from the Earth.

With the land station established at 4,000 metres above the altitude at the occupied territory of Tibet (thus reducing the distance of atmospheric interference with the photons), Chinese teams have been creating entangled photon pairs from the base at the rate of 4,000 per second.

Thirty two days and millions of photons later 911 cases turned triumphant. The Chinese team has announced ‘the first quantum teleportation of independent single-photon qubits from a ground observatory to a low Earth orbit satellite — through an up-link channel — with a distance up to 1,400 km’. They have further announced that their achievement ‘establishes the first ground-to-satellite up-link for faithful and ultra-long-distance quantum teleportation, an essential step toward global-scale quantum internet’.

The socio-political paradox of totalitarian Chinese government announcing a major technological breakthrough in the formation of quantum internet is too obvious to ignore. A country, where internet censorship is very high, is moving towards the realisation of quantum internet that provides the highest standards of web-based privacy.

Quantum internet communications based on q-cryptography are theoretically impossible to crack. There are other fundamental ironies as well. Marxist governments have traditionally run inquisition against quantum mechanics. Often their theoreticians denounced the new physics as ‘bourgeois science’ and ‘decadent fall into mysticism’

Sure enough, even in the path to quantum computing and teleportation of the scientists we saw, Bohm was almost a mystic and his conversations with philosopher J Krishnamurthy are legendary. Anton Zeilinger, the man who made the first quantum teleportation over the distance of more than 100 km, had invited the Dalai Lama to his laboratory. He and his colleagues had visited Dharamshala and discussed quantum physics and cosmology with the Dalai Lama.

The presentation of a religious symbol with a controversial political agenda may cause unnecessary controversies, unwanted press, and significant divisions among SFN members from multiple geographic locations, and with conflicting religious beliefs and political leanings.