Communication without particle transmission.          Quantum communication   is a strange beast, but one of the weirdest proposed forms of it is  called counterfactual communication - a type of quantum communication  where no particles travel between two recipients.   Theoretical physicists have long proposed   that such a form of communication would be possible, but now, for the  first time, researchers have been able to experimentally achieve it -  transferring a black and white bitmap image from one location to another  without sending any physical particles.  If that sounds a little too out-there for you, don't worry, this is  quantum mechanics, after all. It's meant to be complicated. But once you  break it down, counterfactual quantum communication actually isn't as  bizarre as it sounds.   First up, let's talk about how this differs from regular quantum communication, also known as quantum teleportation , because isn't that also a form of particle-les...