If there is a one thing in sci-fi that we can know for sure that won’t happen in our lifetime, it is teleportation – the ability to travel instantly from one point in the galaxy to the other, right?
Well, in fact, according to recent quantum mechanics studies, teleportation is not only theoretically possible, but has actually being demonstrated in a laboratory experiment. But before we get excited, there are some “fine prints” that have to be taken into account
Beam me up, Scotty
If you are a fan of science fiction, you are probably familiar with the catchphrase “beam me up, Scotty” under the command of Captain Kirk gives the chief engineer, Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, when he needs to be transported back to the Starship Enterprise. Interestingly, this exact phrase has never actually been said in any episode or TV movies of Star Trek. Nevertheless, this phrase has become so popular, mainly because it represents one of the revolutionary ideas that were presented in the series: the teleportation machine.
Star Track was not the first Sci-fi piece to offer scientific teleportation. The earliest recorded story of a "matter transmitter" was Edward Page Mitchell's "The Man Without a Body" in 1877. Originally, Star Trek creators actually planned to show the Enterprise landing on each planet, or using shuttlecrafts, however, these options were too expensive for TV production. The Transporter was simply a cheaper solution that was achieved by a simple fade-out/fade-in of the subject.
Over the years, with Star Track’s growing popularity and its sequels movies, the concept of teleportation has become so natural for many of us, so the question is – is it really possible?
Spooky action
Quantum entanglement is one of the strangest scientific phenomena known to man: when a pair of particles such as quacks or photons is formed together, they become entangled and interlink with each other in a complementary way, so if one particle spin into one direction, the other will spin in the exact opposite.
The strangest things about entangled particles happen when we try measuring their spin: Surprisingly, the way we measure one particle affects the way it spins, but moreover, it also affects the way the entangled particle spins. This effect occurs instantly – even if the particles are far apart. How far? There is no limitation – wherever the entangled particles will be in the galaxy, the connection between them will still exist, and the data will reach each other instantly. This phenomenon is referred as “quantum teleportation”.
The fact that quantum entanglement allows information to travel instantly from one particle to another contradicts Einstein’s famous low of relativity whereby nothing can move faster than the speed of light. This is why Einstein considered such behavior as impossible and referred it "spooky action at a distance”. However, over the years it turns out that Einstein was wrong and quantum teleportation actually works!
Actual lab experiments
Quantum teleportation was first demonstrated in 1998, when scientists successfully demonstrated a transformation of data between two particles that couldn’t be explained in terms of a classical channel alone. Since then, teleport distance has increased: 600 meters in 2004, 16 km in 2010 and 143 km in 2012.
However, improvement comes not only with the distance of the teleportation, but with the complexity of its content: Recently, scientists have successfully managed to use quantum teleportation to transfer qutrit – a unit of quantum information realized by a quantum system described by a superposition of three mutually orthogonal quantum states, which means – more data can be transfer in each teleportation.
A new frontier for communication
The first and most trivial implementations of the quantum teleportation are in communication. This technique allows us to transfer data instantly without geographical limitations. Take for example a spaceship traveling to Mars – while sending a radio transmission to earth may take up to 22 minutes, sending a message on quantum teleportation will be instant. If that doesn’t impress you, consider the fact that sending a radio transmission from Alpha Centauri nearest star-system would take more than four years…
Alongside communication, quantum teleportation may play an important role in cyber security: data can be sent decrypted only by the person intended to receive it because only he has the entangled particles. No hacker could break this encryption because basically there is no encryption at all. Scientists have already begun to implement cyber security through quantum research.
But with all the respect to communication and encryption – can this quantum teleportation be implied to actual physical teleportation? According the scientists, the answer is yes. Well, at least in theory.
The teleportation theory
According to modern particle physics, everything in our world is made out of fundamental particles like quarks and leptons, including us. This means that if we can arrange a set of these fundamental particles in the right order and the position, we can create anything. So, in theory, quantum teleportation can be used exactly for that.
What we need is a bunch of entangled particles, and some way to scan every particle of the object we want to teleport. Next, we can transfer the data of each particle to its destination using the entanglement mechanism, thus creating the object at its destination.
Interestingly, there is no concern that the object been sent will be duplicated, because whenever extracted the data required for this process from each of the original particles, they are destroyed. This is something called a no-cloning theorem.
The little details
Before running to sell your car, it is important to understand that, like in many other cases, there is a big gap between what can we do in theory and what we actually do in practice: Let’s start with the fact that the average person contains around 10^28 (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000!) atoms – the most advanced computers are not even close to being able to proses so much information.
Another issue is that producing even one pair of entangled particles can be a very complicated and expensive process. In order to set this theoretical teleportation device, we will need to produce at least 10^28 entangled particles, and that will only suffice for one person's teleportation.
But even if one day we will have a very sophisticated computers and some advanced technology that will allow us to produce a huge amount of entangled particles, there will still be one important limitation: we must physically transfer the entangled particles to the designated distention before we can actually teleport there. So maybe one day someone can boldly beam us up – but the destination won’t be where no one has gone before.
In conclusion
When Star Track creators introduced the idea of technological teleportation back in 1966, little did they know that 20 years later, quantum teleportation would be discovered and the scientists would seriously consider the possibility of teleportation – even if only in theory.
It’s important to remember that almost every time in history when man invented something that worked in theory, later on someone actually did it. Now all that is left is to wait and see exactly how teleportation will be implanted and what its limitations will be.