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NITTY-GRITTY: Learn about teleportation
MOST OF you may have seen the baffling visuals in Star Trek or Terminator. These astounding computer graphics, animations and spacecraft are kind of hard to forget, aren’t they?
It is perhaps for this reason that scientists, over the years, have extensively studied ideas presented in science fiction shows, one of them being teleportation, a popular field of research for many physicists, especially those who are interested in quantum physics. In fact, a great deal of work is being done to explore this concept.
Coined by Charles Fort, teleportation is the process, in which objects are moved from one place to another by programming information about them. It is actually related to the movement of elementary particles. The information is transmitted to another place, quite like a radio signal and then a copy of the original object is made in a new location. It can also be defined as the disembodied transport of people or inanimate objects across space by highly developed technology. Quantum physics, on the other hand, defines it as the movement of a quantum state of a system and its correlations across space to another system.
The term “system” here refers to single or collective particles of matter or energy, such as protons, neutrons, electrons, photons, atoms, ions, etc. This idea was previously limited to science fiction novels and was relatively unknown. However, thanks to Star Trek, many scientists as well as sci-fi lovers gained awareness. In the Star Trek series, transporter machines were used to teleport people from one ship to another or to a planet in an instant.
Both, living and non-living things would be placed on the transporter pad and were dismantled particle by particle from top to bottom. This was done with the help of a beam, with their atoms being patterned in a computer buffer and converted into another beam directed towards the destination. After that, the particles would reassemble into their original form.
Mechanism
The exact mechanism by which an object or person might disintegrate in one place and appear somewhere else is not explained in much detail. However, the general idea is that the original object is scanned in a way that takes out all information present in it. Then, the information is transmitted to the receiving location and used to generate a copy. The replica is not necessarily created from the original material, but perhaps from similarly arranged atoms. Teleportation machines are thought to be like fax machines, except that they supposedly perform their function on three-dimensional objects as well as documents.
A teleportation machine creates a similar copy instead of an approximate duplicate and destroys the original in the scanning process. In 1993, an international group of six scientists confirmed that perfect teleportation is indeed possible in principle, but only if the original is destroyed. In the following years, other scientists conducted experiments on teleportation in many different ways. This also included single photons, coherent light fields, nuclear spins and trapped ions. Teleportation is expected to be as useful as information processing and facilitating long range quantum communication. This may generate the “quantum internet,” which would help in building a working quantum computer.
Current scenario
Scientists from the US and Austria have teleported quantum states between separate atoms for the very first time without any physical link. Quantum states comprise of physical properties like energy, motion and magnetic field. They used an 800m long optical fiber fed through a public sewer system tunnel to connect labs on opposite sides of the River Danube. This link generated a communication link between the labs. This enables the properties or quantum states of light particles to be moved between the sender and the receiver. In future, this information would help to form the “qubits” (the quantum form of the digital bits 1 and 0) of data processing through the machines.
Scientists hope that this technology will be helpful for quantum computing and quantum cryptology and these are the fields expected to make computing faster and a hundred per cent safe. The Austrian team encoded their qubits using a property of light particles known as polarization.
This property describes the direction in which they oscillate. Quantum teleportation depends on a concept in physics known as “entanglement,” in which properties of two particles can be united together even when they are far apart. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.” Scientists at the Australian National University also teleported a laser beam of light from one spot to another in a split second. However, long distance teleportation is difficult and has its limitations.
Human teleportation
The use of teleportation as transportation for humans still poses many unanswered technical and philosophical questions. These questions are very complicated, such as how to record the human body adequately and correctly? How to reconstruct it and whether destroying a human in one place and recreating a duplicate elsewhere would provide enough experience of continuity of existence or not? And most importantly, the conflicting religious beliefs about recopying or destroying the human body and its soul. It’s also unclear if creating a human would need reproduction of the same quantum state, as required in quantum teleportation, which necessarily destroys the original, or whether macroscopic measurements would be sufficient.
Theoretically, in the non-destructive version, a new copy of the individual is created with each teleportation, in which only the copy subjectively experiences teleportation. Such technology is believed to provide other advantages, such as virtual medicine, which is the manipulating of stored data to formulate a duplicate much better than the original, traveling to the future, creating a copy many years after the information was stored or making backup copies, where a copy is formed from recently saved information. With its complexities and limitations, human teleportation is just a theory at the moment and many believe that will not change in the future as well.
With advancement in science and technology, teleportation may have become a reality. But still, scientists aren’t certain if they will see a Star Trek transporter in real life anytime soon. However, they remain undeterred and continue to conduct experiments, hoping to realize their dreams. Who knows? Perhaps one day they will be successful.
The writer
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