TELEPORTATION: A DREAM THAT COULD COME TRUE?

Who hasn't thought about having superpowers to be like their favorite superhero, save the world, or make random life tasks easier? Be it to hide from unwanted attention, know what your relatives are thinking or get to school on time, I am certain that at one point or another, you caught yourself wishing you could be invisible, a mind reader, or able to teleport.

But are those just wishful dreams, or could they one day become our reality?

At least regarding teleportation, scientists and Hollywood have already been on the case for many years now.

From a theoretical point of view, three main teleportation techniques could be found.

The first one is solely limited to fiction: we could teleport by using magic like in Harry Potter or technological devices that have not yet come about.

 

Sadly, those are not techniques that we can get our hands on at the moment. But who knows, maybe one day we will be able to go from place to place just by the snap of our fingers or a button. Or is that too far fetched? One can only dream...

Secondly, we could imagine a way to remove all of the particles of our body, make them travel at a very high speed to a different location, and then reassemble them. However, this would require physical properties that our cells and molecules simply don't possess. Disappointing, I know!

Last but not least, as shown in the movie Star Trek is a technique following the basic method of copy-pasting using quantum physics. Scientists have been digging deeper in that direction as it is the only possible way that teleportation could happen.

 

In summer 2017, Chinese and Austrian scientists succeeded in teleporting the quantum states of a photon across space for the first time! How long before we can be teleported to space too? Well… probably never. First of all, quantum teleportation is nothing like physical teleportation. It is all about the transfer of data through entangled photons. See, Einstein had found out that two particles (usually photons) that were created together (kind of like twins) have some sort of mysterious bond. Any change of state of one of the particles immediately results in the same change of state in the other.

 

 

This way, information is transferred immediately from one place to the other without any trace, wave, or signal. So how would it be applied to actual teleportation?

The method is pretty simple: a "tardis" would read the state of each particle of our body, transfer the information through "spooky action" and recreate you in another place. Just imagine a duck made out of playdough standing on one end of a table. On the other side is laying a formless batch of the same kind of clay. "Teleporting" the duck would mean that it would lose its form while the second batch would take the shape of that the first one used to have. That's it; now your duck is on the other end of the table!

 

 

What's important to understand is that the material in itself did not move at all. It is only the structure that went from one place to another. Teleportation would, therefore, require all of your physical matter to already be at the place you want to travel to.

This raises a pretty important question. If it is not really you that teleports but only a copy of yourself that is created somewhere else, what happens to your conscience, your memories, your mind? A clone would look precisely like you, yet it would not have access to all the psychological data that you have amassed over the years. Would this be the same case here or not?

Let's hope it is not because teleporting without remembering who you were and bragging about it to your friends would be no fun at all.

Despite the intense research they have been putting into it, scientists still have a long way to go before discovering the key to the teleportation that we dream of. In fact, quantic teleportation is significant progress for quantum computers and the internet since it would allow an instantaneous and completely secure transmission of data. But the recent breakthrough in the field does not bring us any closer to Star Trek's Transporter.