Is Teleportation Possible?

Teleportation is real. It exists theoretically and has also been done practically on a microscopic scale in science labs. But the truth is, what we have gotten to till now is still too far from the fictional teleportation.

All across the fiction world, you will have the concepts of teleportation like in Star Trek or the 2008 movie, Jumper. What reality dictates, however, is concerned with only atoms and molecules and their 'information'. Confused? Let us explore some realms of Quantum Physics.

Just like the movie Jumper, where teleportation means ripping a small portal of sorts through the dimension to travel through it and back to our dimension, at some other place.

Classical Teleportation faces several problems theoretically. Teleportation deals with the transfer of information from point A to point B, that are pretty close to each other (compared to two continents or planets). An experiment in 1998 showed the teleportation of a Photon across two terminals at a distance of 3.28 feet (or 1 meter).

The distance was increased in 2004 to 600 meters using Optical fibers. The experiment in April of 2011, teleported packets of light over 9.9 miles (or 16 kilometers) with previously unknown precision.

This fell under another aspect of teleportation, known as 'Quantum Teleportation' which leads to the possibility of constructing quantum computers and quantum satellites.

In 2013, using hybrid techniques, Quantum Teleportation was achieved that was claimed to be fully-deterministic, meaning that the state of particle at the other end of the system would be known with precision.

On 29th May 2015 data was claimed to be transferred in a reliable way through Quantum Teleportation. In 2018, scientists have been able to transfer Logical Operations between Qubits, or Quantum Bits, which are the basic unit of Quantum Information.

In the classic way, the object would simply be taken from point A to B really fast, so giving the idea of teleportation. The evolution of science and technology point to the fact that it indeed might be possible some day. Now, teleportation takes a look at that old method, tries to do it the same way, but hits this one snag called the Uncertainty Principle.

This prompts the new scientists to come up with a rudimentary concept of copying an object and sending it's information across to a receiving station. The whole idea revolves around the information the object carries.

It works like a simple fax machine, like 2-D teleportation. Put paper with something on it on one end, send it to other end where the receiver gets your message. Note that the latter gets the 'message' and not the original paper.

And that, is what Classic teleportation is; it suggests the duplication of an object by measuring it, sending over the information over to receiving end, where the object gets reconstructed according to the data and the material that the data 'wraps' itself around.

This means that if human teleportation were to exist, it would mean that a person stepping on the sending platform should have a similar organism on the receiving platform. He presses the button, the data carried by the person's structure is copied and transmitted over to the receiving station, where it is fed to the organic blob and turned into the person.

Now this obviously raises ethical questions like:

● What happens to the guy at the sending end?
● How similar are the two guys (in terms of physical reconstruction)?
● If the first one is 'destroyed', will that be killing and would it matter to the second guy created?

In simple terms, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that it is not possible to simultaneously measure the position as well as the momentum of an object in the perfect sense. More knowledge of one means lesser of the other.

This has been one of the biggest obstacles of classic teleportation. Since you cannot measure both, you cannot possibly teleport the object across, without botching it up.

The whole thing is all about the quantum entanglement. Simply put, matter can be considered as an entangled quantum state. The idea is like this - gather the data as you unravel this entanglement, send data to receiver. Since the object is unraveled at the sending port, it no longer exists there.

The concept is probably the only way to take a detour from the Heisenberg principle and still gather object data successfully. This teleportation of basic quantum data bits, or Qubits, is what teleportation is all about today. It has already been used to teleport atoms and light packets across small and great distances.

The idea of quantum entanglement as a useful method for teleportation comes from the result of the interaction between the entangled objects. In most cases, object A (that is being teleported) will interact indirectly with object B (placed where A is meant to travel to) through two additional entangled objects C and D.

It is ironic that this was originally derived from the EPR paradox papers that aimed at arguing against quantum mechanics. The thing with quantum teleportation and humans is that it's just very, very, very unbelievably hard to do.

You would need to gather the data at a blazing speed and if not a light speed, then at something just slower than it. The problem is, even that just might not be enough. If you get 'disentangled' too slow at point A, you may even sense it. For a more graphic feel, refer to 'splinching' from the Harry Potter series.

Case in point, the movie "Jumper", where they open dimensional 'rips' and jump through them. A part of the science world says that the formulation of wormholes may be possible, while the other half laughs. Still, if we don't dream, we don't progress.

Whatever the future holds, we will not know accurately. It will keep changing as things advance, develop and deviate. Maybe there is another way we haven't looked at yet, maybe it's the wormholes. Whatever it is, we hope we will be able to teleport cheesecakes with perfection in the near future.