How Teleportation Will Work

Teleportation experiments cause quite the mess in science fiction, producing inside-out baboons, gene-spliced monsters and dematerialized madmen like nobody's business.

In reality, however, the experiments are thus far abomination-free and overall quite promising.

In 1998, physicists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), along with two European groups, made IBM's teleportation theory a reality by successfully teleporting a photon -- a particle of energy that carries light.

The Caltech team read the atomic structure of a photon, sent this information across 3.28 feet (about 1 meter) of coaxial cable and created a replica of the photon on the other side. As predicted, the original photon no longer existed once the replica appeared.

In order to carry out the experiment, the Caltech group had to skirt a little something called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. As any boxed, quantum-state feline will tell you, this principle states that you cannot simultaneously know the location and the momentum of a particle. It's also the main barrier for teleportation of objects larger than a photon.

But if you can't know the position of a particle, then how can you engage in a bit of quantum teleportation? In order to teleport a photon without violating the Heisenberg Principle, the Caltech physicists used a phenomenon known as entanglement. In entanglement, you need at least three photons to achieve quantum teleportation:

If researchers tried to look too closely at photon A without entanglement, they'd bump it, and thereby change it. By entangling photons B and C, researchers can extract some information about photon A, and the remaining information would pass on to B by way of entanglement, and then on to photon C. When researchers apply the information from photon A to photon C, they create an exact replica of photon A. However, photon A no longer exists as it did before the information was sent to photon C.

In other words, when Captain Kirk beams down to an alien planet, an analysis of his atomic structure passes through the transporter room to his desired location, where it builds a Kirk replica. Meanwhile, the original dematerializes.

Since 1998, scientists haven't quite worked their way up to teleporting baboons, as teleporting living matter is infinitely tricky. Still, their progress is quite impressive. In 2002, researchers at the Australian National University successfully teleported a laser beam, and in 2006, a team at Denmark's Niels Bohr Institute teleported information stored in a laser beam into a cloud of atoms about 1.6 feet (half a meter) away.

"It is one step further because for the first time it involves teleportation between light and matter, two different objects," explained team leader Dr. Eugene Polzik. "One is the carrier of information and the other one is the storage medium" [source: CBC].

In 2012, researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China made a new teleportation record. They teleported a photon 60.3 miles (97 kilometers), 50.3 miles (81 kilometers) farther than the previous record [source: Slezak]. Just two years later, European physicists were able to teleport quantum information through an ordinary optical fiber used for telecommunications [source: Emerging Technology from the arXiv].

Given these advancements, you can see how quantum teleportation will affect the world of quantum computing far before it helps your morning commute time. These experiments are important in developing networks that can distribute quantum information at transmission rates far faster than today's most powerful computers.

It all comes down to moving information from point A to point B. But will humans ever make that quantum jaunt as well?

Sadly, the transporters of "Star Trek" and the telepods of "The Fly" are not only a far-future possibility, but also perhaps a physical impossibility.

After all, a transporter that enables a person to travel instantaneously to another location might also require that person's information to travel at the speed of light -- and that's a big no-no according to Einstein's theory of special relativity.

Also, for a person to teleport, the teleporter's computer would have to pinpoint and analyze all of the 10²⁸ atoms that make up the human body. That's more than a trillion trillion atoms. This wonder machine would then have to send the information to another location, where another amazing machine would reconstruct the person's body with exact precision.

How much room for error would there be? Forget your fears of splicing DNA with a housefly, because if your molecules reconstituted even a millimeter out of place, you'd "arrive" at your destination with severe neurological or physiological damage.

And the definition of "arrive" would certainly be a point of contention. The transported individual wouldn't actually "arrive" anywhere. The whole process would work far more like a fax machine -- a duplicate of the person would emerge at the receiving end, but what would happen to the original? What do YOU do with your originals after each fax?

It stands to reason, then, that every successful bio-digital teleportation would be an act of murder and creation. Each use would see the digitalization of your body's every detail, the creation of a genetic clone complete with all the travelers' memories, emotions, hopes and dreams.

The original copy would have to die; that is, unless we're cool with the notion of duplicating ourselves every time we need to travel cross-country and committing infanticide each time little Jimmy heads to school.

As with all technologies, scientists will surely continue to improve upon the underlying concepts of teleportation. One day, such a harsh vision of life, death and teleportation may well seem barbaric and uninformed. Our ancestors may feel their bodies fade and dematerialize on one world, even as their eyes open on a planet untold light-years away.

Explore the links on the next page to learn even more about quantum physics and teleportation.