Understanding the Mechanics of Teleportation

Tired of those hectic school morning drop-offs? Dreaming of a commute where you can avoid highway congestion and the unpleasant odors of public transit?

Fortunately, science has a potential solution, and it might involve scanning your body down to its subatomic particles, destroying your form at point A, and transmitting the data to point B, where a computer reassembles you almost instantly.

Sure, it might feel a little like sending your child through a subatomic shredder each morning, but just imagine how much time you'd save!

Teleportation, a concept that has captured the imagination for decades, is most famously showcased in iconic works like 'Star Trek' and 'The Fly.' If it were to become a reality for humans, it would revolutionize travel by allowing us to traverse vast distances without physically moving through space. This breakthrough would make global transportation instantaneous, and the dream of interplanetary travel would be as easy as taking a small step for mankind.

Still skeptical? Consider this: teleportation isn't purely a science fiction dream anymore. In 1993, the idea shifted from fantasy to a theoretical possibility. Physicist Charles Bennett, along with a team from IBM, demonstrated that quantum teleportation could occur, but only under the condition that the original object being teleported is destroyed. This happens because scanning the object disrupts it, leaving only the 'copy' as the original.

This breakthrough, which Bennett first revealed at the American Physical Society's annual meeting in March 1993, was later published in the March 29, 1993 issue of Physical Review Letters. Following this announcement, numerous experiments involving photons have confirmed that quantum teleportation is indeed achievable.

Research into teleportation is ongoing, as scientists continue to merge elements from telecommunications, transportation, and quantum physics, pushing the boundaries of what we thought possible.

Teleportation: Recent Experiments

Teleportation experiments have long been a chaotic feature in science fiction, where they often result in bizarre creatures like 'inside-out baboons,' genetically engineered monsters, and disintegrated madmen running amok.

In the real world, however, these experiments have been far from nightmarish, showing great potential and offering a hopeful outlook for the future.

In 1998, physicists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), alongside two European teams, turned IBM's teleportation theory into reality by successfully teleporting a photon—an energy particle that carries light.

The Caltech team analyzed the atomic structure of a photon, transmitted this data over 3.28 feet (about 1 meter) of coaxial cable, and replicated the photon on the other end. True to predictions, the original photon ceased to exist once the replica materialized.

To conduct this experiment, the Caltech team had to bypass a major obstacle known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. As any cat in a quantum state might tell you, this principle states that it's impossible to know both the exact location and momentum of a particle at the same time. It's also the primary challenge to teleporting larger objects than a photon.

If the position of a particle cannot be known, then how can quantum teleportation even work? To achieve photon teleportation without breaching the Heisenberg Principle, the Caltech physicists turned to a concept called entanglement. This phenomenon requires at least three photons to perform quantum teleportation:

If researchers attempted to observe photon A directly without using entanglement, they'd interfere with it, altering its state. By entangling photons B and C, they could extract some information about photon A, which would then transfer to photon B through entanglement, and then to photon C. Applying the information from photon A to photon C would generate an exact replica of photon A, but photon A would cease to exist in its original form once the data was transferred to photon C.

In simpler terms, when Captain Kirk beams down to a distant planet, his atomic structure is analyzed in the transporter room, then transmitted to the desired location where a replica of Kirk is created. Meanwhile, the original Kirk vanishes.

Since 1998, scientists haven't quite reached the stage of teleporting baboons, as transporting living matter is incredibly complex. Nevertheless, their advancements are remarkable. In 2002, researchers from the Australian National University managed to teleport a laser beam, and in 2006, a team from Denmark's Niels Bohr Institute teleported information from a laser beam into a cloud of atoms about 1.6 feet (half a meter) away.

"This represents a significant step forward, as it is the first time we are witnessing teleportation between two distinct entities: light and matter," said Dr. Eugene Polzik, the team leader. "One serves as the carrier of information, while the other acts as the storage medium" [source: CBC].

In 2012, researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China set a new teleportation milestone, sending a photon 60.3 miles (97 kilometers)—a remarkable 50.3 miles (81 kilometers) beyond the previous record. Just two years later, physicists in Europe achieved the teleportation of quantum information through a standard optical fiber used in telecommunications [source: Emerging Technology from the arXiv].

These remarkable achievements show how quantum teleportation will transform the realm of quantum computing long before it impacts the speed of your daily commute. These experiments are pivotal for the development of networks capable of transmitting quantum information at rates far beyond the power of today's most advanced computers.

At its core, the process is about transferring information from one point to another. But the real question is: will humans ever be able to make that quantum leap themselves?

Human Teleportation

Unfortunately, the teleportation devices seen in 'Star Trek' and 'The Fly' aren't just distant futuristic dreams; they might be fundamentally impossible according to current scientific understanding.

A transporter, which would allow instant travel from one place to another, would likely need to transmit a person’s entire information at the speed of light -- something that violates Einstein's special relativity theory.

For teleportation to work, the teleporter would need to scan and analyze all 10 atoms that make up the human body. This involves trillions upon trillions of atoms. Then, the machine must transmit the data and another machine must reconstruct the body with utmost accuracy at the destination.

What room for error is there in such a system? While concerns about DNA mixing with a housefly’s genes are valid, even a slight misplacement of molecules could result in severe physical or neurological harm upon arrival at the destination.

The meaning of 'arrive' is likely to spark disagreement. The person being transported wouldn't actually reach a destination in the traditional sense. It would be more akin to how a fax machine works — a duplicate of the individual would appear at the destination, but what happens to the original? What do you typically do with the original after sending a fax?

Therefore, every successful bio-digital teleportation could be considered both a murder and an act of creation. Each instance would involve digitalizing your body's intricate details and generating a genetic duplicate, complete with all the original's memories, feelings, aspirations, and desires.

The original would inevitably have to perish, unless we accept the idea of duplicating ourselves every time we travel, effectively committing infanticide each time young Jimmy heads off to school.

As with all technological advancements, scientists are bound to refine the foundational ideas of teleportation. In the future, this grim perspective on life, death, and teleportation may seem primitive and misinformed. Our descendants might witness their bodies dissolve on one planet, only to awaken on another, light-years away.