SCIENTISTS FIRST SHOWED TELEPORTATION WAS POSSIBLE back in 1993, when a team from IBM published a paper about teleporting a quantum state—rather than just an object—in the journal Physical Review Letters. Five years later, physicists from the California Institute of Technology and the University of Wales in the U.K. put the theory into practice, teleporting a photon (the particle that carries light) through a meter of coaxial cabling, which is a type of transmission line commonly used to connect satellite signals or broadband internet.
Like flying cars and time travel, this ability to instantly move something across physical space is deeply compelling—even if it seems impossible. But scientists are convinced that a breakthrough in quantum computing technology could make teleportation a reality.
So far, the most advanced teleportation experiments have relied on photons, but as recently as 2020, scientists discovered it might be possible to teleport electrons, instead, which can maintain their quantum states for longer periods of time.
So will the transport of more complex matter be next? If we can move light particles and electrons from Point A to Point B instantaneously, could we teleport whole atoms, molecules, living cells, and eventually some brave human test subject? And perhaps more importantly, even if we could find a way to teleport whole humans . . . should we?
After all, there’s no promise that all of the particles inside your body, once reassembled at its destination, will add up to one fully intact, fundamentally unchanged you.
Quantum computing is based on the weird science of quantum entanglement, which has nothing to do with our everyday experience of Newtonian mechanics, like masses, forces, and their related effects. Entanglement belongs in the realm of quantum mechanics, where matter and energy at the subatomic scale behave in outlandish ways. The state of physical properties between entangled particles—like position, momentum, spin, or polarization—transfers from one particle to the other, seemingly by magic and regardless of the distance between them.
That ghostly natural principle has a very exciting real-world application in quantum computing. Whereas today’s computers are based on electronic bits that have one of two states (1 or 0), quantum computing runs on qubits, or quantum bits, which exist in two states simultaneously. This is called coherent superposition.
A qubit can perform two computations at once, simply because it exists in both states of superposition. Link those qubits together using quantum entanglement, and it’ll increase calculating power exponentially; today’s quantum computers are able to handle massive loads much faster. In just one example, a 2019 study from Google said a particular calculation would be done by a quantum circuit in around 200 seconds, but would take 10,000 years with the fastest existing supercomputer.
That makes quantum computing the only line of practical entanglement research so far—and by extension, a tool for advancing the engineering of teleportation.
Among the many developments in teleportation technology since the 1990s, scientists at the University of Innsbruck in Austria and the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology teleported particles using quantum entanglement in 2002. This is the first time teleportation was done without any direct connection between the original and final particle. In 2016, University of Calgary physicists in Canada teleported a particle six kilometers (or just shy of four miles) through the city’s fiber-optic data cables. A year later, scientists in China teleported a photon from Earth to a satellite orbiting over 186 miles above.
Perhaps the most critical milestone was in 2012, when researchers from the University of Vienna in Austria and the Austrian Academy of Sciences teleported photons between two land masses in Spain’s Canary Islands—through open air. Rather than transport particles through a cable or other fixed medium from source to destination, this team skipped the carrier technology. Their accomplishment is closer to the way we imagine teleportation in science fiction.
However, scientists could instead base the science of teleportation on a mysterious force that keeps the physical states of disparate and distant particles in lockstep. This would allow two photons to form a single quantum state even though they may be widely separated, says cosmologist and theoretical physicist Paul Davies, Ph.D., the director of Arizona State University’s Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science.
“That means the outcomes of measurements performed independently on each photon are correlated in a manner that is impossible for classical pairs of objects, such as left- and right-handed gloves,” he explains.
Imagine three particles: A, B, and C. Suppose B and C are entangled, and Particle A has a physical property—such as motion or energy—which you want to teleport to Particle C. First, you entangle A with B, and then measure both. You send the measurement to C—and find that the property you established at Particle A now applies to Particle C. This occurred without A or C ever being in contact or affecting each other directly. In other words, A has been teleported to C, indicating a transfer of quantum states between particles. Einstein famously called such effects “spooky action at a distance.”
At this point, scientists haven’t determined the ideal mechanism to transmit a quantum state. So far, researchers have used both coaxial and fiber optic cabling, and even experimented with using no medium of transfer at all, as in the 2012 Canary Islands experiment. Could the best option be a pulse of light, or perhaps radio waves? Could teleportation work only in the vacuum of space?
The secret to communication between entangled particles could lie in the wave function between them, researchers think. Such particles have phases just like a wave through the ocean, with amplitude, wavelength, and frequency.
An even weirder effect of entangled quantum information that scientists need to work around is that, when the quantum state is applied to an entangled particle, the original particle’s quantum state is spontaneously destroyed. Davies says “the effect is to ‘collapse’ the wave function irreversibly into one specific outcome” from a set of probabilities. “There are many answers [for how to solve this problem], but no agreement,” he adds.
Could that mean the original copy of whatever it is you just transported is actually destroyed? That question is still on the table, and it makes the matter of teleporting humans undeniably fraught with ethical quandaries.
Right now, that holy grail of teleportation—beaming whole humans from one place to another—is not yet possible. There are around 10^27 atoms in the human body. Each is made up of electrons, protons, and neutrons. Every one of these subatomic units consists of smaller parts like quarks or muons, and each one has its own quantum state. Imagine the colossal number of quantum states we’d have to compute in order to send your entire physical being to Point B and reassemble you exactly as you exist at Point A.
Before we knew what quantum mechanics is capable of, most atomic age sci-fi writers assumed matter itself would be disintegrated, transported somewhere, and reassembled. However, quantum entanglement has shown us that you’re not literally transporting matter itself—instead, you’re transporting information about that thing that characterizes a quantum state, Davies says.
And as many scientists (including Davies) have argued, information—not matter—should define life. The atoms inside you are the same as those in a rock or a rubber ball—the only difference is in the number and arrangement of particles, which dictates how they interact chemically.
If we ever get over the hurdle of processing power—something that a leap in quantum computing technology could conceivably accomplish—might teleporting you be as simple as taking a quantum scan of your body and sending it, like an attachment on an email? The uncertainty principle forbids us from knowing both the velocity and the position of a particle simultaneously, so no matter how carefully you scan the quantum state of every particle in your body, you’d never reach 100 percent fidelity.
What might such signal errors mean for the quantum copy? Maybe your teleported self arrives without a scratch, only for you to discover the next time you sit down to dinner that you love broccoli, though you used to hate it. Or, the loss in fidelity of your teleported self might be more severe—to the point of catastrophe—during reconstruction of your body.
Even if we succeed in addressing all of these challenges, we must consider a philosophical question: do the atoms in your body and all their quantum states constitute the being you consider to be, well, you?
Experimental and theoretical physicist John Clauser—who, along with his colleagues won the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics for their work on quantum entanglement—has a take on this question that might give you pause.
“Imagine you’re told that if you step into this box, every atom in your body will be disassembled, effectively leaving your body totally destroyed, thereby killing you,” Clauser says. “Furthermore, you’re also told that afterwards, a replicant of you starts walking around . . . taking over your life as you once knew it . . . would you step into that box? I certainly wouldn’t!”
After growing up knowing he wanted to change the world, Drew Turney realized it was easier to write about other people changing it instead. He writes about everything from entertainment to technology, science to culture and everything in between, and has been published in media both on and offline all over the world.
