• Question: do you think someone will invent teleportation in the future?

    Asked by Amyyyyyy to Deborah, Euan, Maheen, Rob on 22 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Deborah Prunty

      Deborah Prunty answered on 22 Jun 2016:


      I think that is definitely possible. Maybe not for something as complicated as living creatures though…

      We’d have to think about the ethics of it too. Are we breaking a thing down, and sending it somewhere else where it is remade? Or are we breaking a thing down, seeing exactly what it is made of and in which order, then building an exact copy somewhere else?

    • Photo: Maheen Siddiqui

      Maheen Siddiqui answered on 22 Jun 2016:


      Possibly, but it is extremely complicated!

    • Photo: Euan Allen

      Euan Allen answered on 22 Jun 2016:


      Amyyyyyy, that’s a great question.

      You might be surprised to hear that we can already do a form of teleportation!!! In fact it was done all the way back in 1993, and is an effect that we use in the computer I am building to make it faster! The effect we call “Quantum Teleportation”.

      This works slightly differently to how you initially imagine teleportation to work. Instead of actually transporting a set of objects or particles from one place to another, what we can do is transfer the information contained by those particles from one place to another. So if the particles happen to be doing the chicken dance (for example), then we can teleport the “chicken dance” to similar particles in an instant.

      This sounds like it isn’t doing anything quite like the teleportation we initially think of. But if I have a ball, and I transfer to another ball some distance away all the information about the first ball (it’s shape, colour, size etc…), then it’s not too far from just teleporting the first ball itself to the new location.

      We’ve only managed to do this with a very small number of particles though, and we’re not sure we will ever be able to do this with a living creature because of how complex they are. But it’s cool to know that future computers will rely on this quantum teleportation in order to work!

      There is a great video by minute physics if you want to hear a bit more about this:

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