• Question: Is Teleportation possible?

    Asked by 579spcn52 to Andrew, Hina, Ian, Kathryn, Leah-Nani, Xu on 12 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Kathryn Burrows

      Kathryn Burrows answered on 12 Jun 2018:

      No currently as far as I am aware

    • Photo: Andrew Margetts-Kelly

      Andrew Margetts-Kelly answered on 12 Jun 2018:

      Yes, but not as popular sci-fi culture would have you believe. It’s complicated, but very simplistically:
      …
      You cannot teleport a thing as in physically move it (like “beaming” a person in star trek), you can however do what teleportation actually means, and that is to transmit information about the thing’s state so that you can make an exact copy (really it is a new thing). The current record for this feat stands as a couple of atoms; so there is a long way to go before you can “beam a person”.
      …so “beaming” sounds possible then?…
      Well, no, not really. Remember what I said about it’s actually making a copy, not moving something. If you teleported yourself, a whole person, you’d be constructing a copy of yourself; there’d be two of you. What teleportation is useful for is the transmission of information, not things. So it will find a place one day, if we can perfect it, in secure data transmission.

    • Photo: Leah-Nani Alconcel

      Leah-Nani Alconcel answered on 12 Jun 2018:

      Not right now, no.

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