Science fiction has no imagination, part 1

Every so often I come across something that makes me think that the supposedly imaginative field of science fiction can't hold a candle to reality for weirdness. Today's installment is an arxiv paper in which the authors are seriously discussing quantum teleportation as a way to combine signals from telescopes to form an interferometer:


Longer-Baseline Telescopes Using Quantum Repeaters

Daniel Gottesman, Thomas Jennewein, Sarah Croke

We present an approach to building interferometric telescopes using ideas of quantum information. Current optical interferometers have limited baseline lengths, and thus limited resolution, because of noise and loss of signal due to the transmission of photons between the telescopes. The technology of quantum repeaters has the potential to eliminate this limit, allowing in principle interferometers with arbitrarily long baselines.

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