Yet it is entanglement that opens the door to teleportation. In 1993 scientists at IBM, led by Charles Bennett, showed that it was physically possible to teleport objects, at least at the atomic level, using the EPR experiment. Precisely speaking, they showed that you could teleport all the information contained within a particle. Two particles with the same information are identical, so teleporting the information is essentially the same as teleporting the particle itself. Since then, physicists have been able to teleport photons and entire cesium atoms. Within a few decades, scientists may be able to teleport a DNA molecule or even a virus.
If we ever do create them, wormholes could open the door to traveling not just in space but in time as well.
In these teleportation experiments, physicists start with, say, two atoms, A and C. Suppose we wish to teleport information from atom A to atom C. We begin by having a third atom, B, that starts out entangled with C. Now atom A comes in contact with atom B, so that the information content of atom A is transferred to atom B. Because B and C were originally entangled, A’s information has now been transferred to atom C; someone examining atom C would be unable to tell any difference between it and the original atom A.
The entanglement destroys the information within atom A (so we don’t have two copies after teleportation). This means that anyone being teleported in this way would die in the process. But the information content of his body would instantly appear somewhere else. In other words, he would die in one place but be reborn in another.
In 2007 Ashton Bradley of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Quantum-Atom Optics in Brisbane proposed another teleportation method, tapping another Einstein insight, a state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate, or BEC, which is one of the coldest substances in the entire universe. A BEC is one-millionth to one-billionth of a degree above absolute zero, a temperature found only in the laboratory. When certain forms of matter are cooled to near absolute zero, their atoms all tumble down to the lowest energy state, so all of them vibrate in unison. The quantum waves of all the atoms overlap so that, in some sense, a BEC is like a gigantic superatom. Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose predicted this bizarre state of matter in 1925, but not until 1995 was it finally created in the lab.
Here’s how the Australian teleportation device works. Start with a collection of supercold rubidium atoms in a BEC state. Apply a beam of matter, also made of rubidium atoms, to the BEC. These atoms also want to tumble down to the lowest energy state, shedding their excess energy in the form of a pulse of light. This light beam is then sent down a fiber-optic cable. Remarkably, it contains all the quantum information necessary to describe the original matter beam (for instance, the location and velocity of all its atoms). The light beam hits another BEC, which converts it into the original matter beam.
Given this progress, when might we be able to teleport ourselves? Physicists hope to teleport complex molecules in the coming years. After that, perhaps a DNA molecule or even a virus could be teleported within decades. There is nothing in principle to prevent us from teleporting an actual person (assuming we accept the risks), but the technical problems are staggering. It takes some of the finest physics laboratories in the world to create coherence between tiny photons of light and individual atoms. In fact, it could be centuries or longer before everyday objects are teleported, if it’s possible at all.
