Star Trek has a lot to answer for. Not content to tease us with unreasonable expectations of phasers and warp drive, it also thrust into the popular imagination the idea of teleportation, in which we step into a giant scanner of some sort and instantaneously find ourselves somewhere else, mind, body and soul intact (and hopefully, unlike Jeff Goldblum, untainted).
Theoretically, there are really only two ways this can(’t) be done – physical deconstruction at x and reconstitution at y, or the translation of one’s person into data to be transmitted, then reconverted into matter, like some organic fax machine.
Impossible? In 1993 an international group of six scientists, showed that perfect teleportation is possible in principle, or at least not against the laws of physics. More recently scientists both in the US and China have been trying. Just last year, Chinese scientists were able to “teleport” photons to a satellite 300 miles away, using a phenomenon called “quantum entanglement”. Simply put this “spooky action at a distance” (as Einstein dubbed it) is where a pair of photons are able to simultaneously share the same state, even when separated by vast distances. Change the state of one particle, and weirdly, the other changes too, with no detectable connection.
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