Scientists try to harness teleportation

By Leonard David

Senior space writer

updated 1:41 p.m. ET July 8, 2005

Think "Star Trek": You are here. You want to go there. It’s just a matter of teleportation.

Thanks to lab experiments, there is growth in the number of "beam me up" believers, but there is an equal amount of disbelief, too.

Over the last few years, however, researchers have successfully teleported beams of light across a laboratory bench. Also, the quantum state of a trapped calcium ion to another calcium ion has been teleported in a controlled way.

These and other experiments all make for heady and heavy reading in scientific journals. The reports would have surely found a spot on Einstein’s night table. For the most part, it’s an exotic amalgam of things like quantum this and quantum that, wave function, qubits and polarization, as well as uncertainty principle, excited states and entanglement.

Seemingly, milking all this highbrow physics to flesh out point-to-point human teleportation is a long, long way off.

Well, maybe … maybe not.

A trillion trillion atoms
In his new book, "Teleportation: The Impossible Leap," published by John Wiley & Sons, writer David Darling contends that "one way or another, teleportation is going to play a major role in all our futures. It will be a fundamental process at the heart of quantum computers, which will themselves radically change the world."

Darling suggests that some form of classical teleportation and replication for inanimate objects also seems inevitable. But whether humans can make the leap — well, that remains to be seen.

Teleporting a person would require a machine that isolates, appraises and keeps track of over a trillion trillion atoms that constitute the human body, then sends that data to another locale for reassembly — and hopefully without mussing up your physical and mental makeup.

"One thing is certain: if that impossible leap turns out to be merely difficult — a question of simply overcoming technical challenges — it will someday be accomplished," Darling predicts.

In this regard, Darling writes that the quantum computer "is the joker in the deck, the factor that changes the rules of what is and isn’t possible."

Just last month, in fact, scientists at Hewlett Packard announced that they’ve hammered out a new tactic for a creating a quantum computer — using switches of light beams rather than today’s run-of-the-mill, transistor-laden devices. What’s in the offing is hardware capable of making calculations billions of times faster than any silicon-based computer.

Given quantum computers and the networking of these devices, Darling senses the day may not be far off for routine teleportation of individual atoms and molecules. That would lead to teleportation of macromolecules and microbes — with, perhaps, human teleportation to follow.

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