Teleportation

             Ever since the invention of wheel more than 5000 years ago, human desire to reach a place faster has lead to numerous inventions. From chariot to bicycle to automobile to airplane and rocket, all have been created with a single motive to travel faster. But all these inventions share the same flaw; it requires us to travel the physical distance. With development in the field of paranormal physics, scientists have been trying to combine the properties of telecommunication and transportation to achieve “teleportation”.

         Teleportation involves transfer of matter from one place to another without physical traversing the space between them. It deals with dematerializing an object at one point, sending the details of the precise atomic configuration at another location where it will be reconstructed. With the tremendous potential being embedded on this invention it would explore the possibilities of travelling without physically crossing the space. The idea of teleportation moved out of the realm of science fiction into the world of theoretical possibility in 1933. Physicist Charles Bennett with a team of researchers at IBM confirmed that quantum teleportation is possible, but only if the object being transported was destroyed. Since then, experiments using photons has proven that quantum teleportation is in fact possible.

          In 1998, physicists at Caltech successfully teleported a photon by reading its exact atomic structure, sending the information across 1 meter of coaxial cable and creating a replica of photon.  As predicted, the original photon was destroyed once the replica was made. In the event of teleporting objects larger than photon the main hurdle in the path is “Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle”. The principle states that determining the momentum and location of a particle simultaneously is not possible. If you cannot determine the location of a particle then how can you teleport it? The photon experiment was carried out by using a phenomenon called entanglement. For a person to be transported, a machine would have to be built that can pinpoint and analyze all of the  atoms that make up the human body. That's more than a trillion trillion atoms. The machine would then have to send this information to another location, where the person's body would be reconstructed with exact precision. Molecules couldn't be even a millimeter out of place, lest the person arrive with some severe neurological or physiological defect. The laws of physics may even make it impossible to create a transporter that enables a person to be sent instantaneously to another location, which would require travel at the speed of light. The availability of this technology tough looks bleak in the near future.

           But like all technologies, scientists are sure to continue to improve upon the ideas of teleportation to the point that we may one day be able to avoid such harsh methods. One day, one of your descendants could finish up a work day at a space office above some far away planet in a galaxy many light years from Earth, tell his or her wristwatch that it's time to beam home for dinner on planet X below and sit down at the dinner table as soon as the words leave his mouth.


By: Ankit Jain