Why teleportation isnt possible

It should arrive within a few days to weeks. In real life, teleportation uses quantum entanglement to transfer a physical state from one particle to another. The idea is that if you already have two entangled particles, one in let us say Los Angeles and the other in New York, you can use them to transmit information about a third particle.

Basically, we scan the particle in Los Angeles and then reconstruct an exact copy in New York using its quantum state information. Without teleportation, there would be no way to send a qubit a unit of quantum information analogous to a bit in a classical computer from one place to another without physically moving the object that stores the qubit.

However, these applications must work within some major physical limitations imposed by quantum mechanics. If you want to move a large object, your best bet is to use your favorite shipping service. This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. A primary reason to go down this path is security. Working with entangled particles requires incredible delicacy, but that also makes it incredibly private.

If anyone tries to eavesdrop on an entangled message, the very act of unwanted listening disrupts the whole teleportation process. Any message sent over a quantum Internet is therefore perfectly secure — or as perfect as anything known to humanity. Heartbleed bug? No problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you are anything like me, you want to know about the unlimited form of teleportation, the kind that beams people from place to place. Let me temper your enthusiasm with two considerations, one philosophical and one technological.

Each time Kirk steps into the transporter, then, he is committing suicide and then getting reborn at the other end. Second, the amount of information required to re-create him is staggering — about 4. Nobody knows how to collect and transmit that much information. And remember how the slightest disturbance ruins quantum entanglement? The process of reassembling your atoms would inherently scramble the information. Kirk might as well put on a red shirt first.

The teleportation situation becomes much less bleak if you bend the definition a bit, however. As many a video game player has noticed, the human brain has a remarkable ability to project itself outside the body and into other objects or virtual spaces.

A mechanical astronaut will soon be strolling outside the International Space Station. In the near future, you might be able to experience space exploration vicariously through a Mars rover or mechanical arms poking at a distant asteroid. Biotech guru J. Craig Venter proposes that if we find microbial life on Mars, we could sequence its genome locally, transmit the information and rebuild the organism here on Earth.

In principle, Venter notes, the process could go the other way: It would be possible to send human DNA, along with an appropriate incubator, to distant planets and synthesize people at the other end. Then your clone could start setting up shop on a world orbiting Alpha Centauri B. In quantum teleportation, one of the more amazing quirks of quantum mechanics, an exact copy of a photon appears in a different location the record distance is miles just as the old photon is destroyed.

Scientists disembody the information about a particle, such as a photon, from that particle. They then apply it to another photon some distance away, creating a copy and destroying the original. If you've seen The Prestige spoiler alert if you have not , think of the final twist in which we learn that Hugh Jackman's "transported man" magic trick was really a cloning trick: When the "original" magician is transported, he is actually drowned.

A clone appears in his place, leaving only one "Hugh Jackman. In the case of quantum teleportation, scientists direct the photon transport through fiberoptics or with lasers or satellites aimed at "detectors" that decode the info, but so far the technique only works at night because sunlight destroys the information carried in the photon. I'm skeptical that it'll ever be practical to teleport people, but there's no fundamental reason why we couldn't do so.

It's just mind-bendingly complex. If you want to know why scientists can't teleport humans yet, just look at the numbers.