The concept of teleportation goes back several centuries when writers of science fiction imagined characters magically be able to travel from one location to another, in the blink of an eye. But the century old concept remains, is this just limited to pages of fiction?
Much to our amazement, teleportation is as real as gravity, and is guided by a less known principle of quantum physics, as the entanglement. An experiment conducted in 1998 by physicists at the California Institute of Technology, along with two European groups, made IBM’s teleportation theory a reality by successfully teleporting a photon. The team read the atomic structure of a photon, sent this information across a meter of coaxial cable, creating a replica of the photon on the other side. As predicted, the original photon no longer existed once the replica appeared.
The world at the quantum level, don't follow the laws of classical physics. The definitive nature of the classical world that are governed strictly by equation vanishes once we step into the quantum zone. Classical physics dictates that, if we threw a ball up in the sky with a known velocity, we could calculate the maximum height and time it would take. However, when it comes to electrons, we can't say for sure where it will at one point in time. We can only make an estimate based on probability. Everything, at the smallest level is in fact governed by probability. At the smallest level known, everything we see is an arrangement of something know as spins(positive or negative).
Just like computers that store information as 0s and 1s, everything that's real can be resolved as spins, This means, you, me and everything around us is in essence are long string's of binary. If we could somehow replicate that information and program it in, we would in essence, be creating a clone.
But these things are easier said than done. The principle of entanglement, as mentioned earlier states that quantum particles exist as pair. Using our computer bit analogy, for every 0, there is a 1 somewhere. However, unlike computer bits, reality is even more bizarre. Every spinning quantum particle is actually both 0 and 1 simultaneously(positive and negative) and it holds a single value only when measured. It means the act of measuring forces the particle to collapse into one value. Coming back to the entanglement principle, if one of the pair of entangled particles produce 0 as its result, the other produces 1 unfailingly and vice versa. But wait a minute. Didn't we just say that particles hold one value, only when measured? So how does the other, know the result.
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It is as if the moment we determine the state of one particle, it sends a message to the other instantaneously. Even today, we cannot explain this "spooky action at a distant"(as said by Einstein) using the known principles of physics, which only reveals the truth that the known theories of quantum physics are incomplete at best, and we have miles to go before we can use them in our daily lives. The idea of transporting large objects(arrangement of million spins), and much less living organisms is still extremely far-fetched as of today. That being said, applications of quantum physics such as in the invention of quantum computers, which gives us a hint as to what the future holds for us in future. Who knows, what might happen a century from now. What we have discussed only as as a concept, could perhaps someday be grade school material or even a dusty old machine lying in the basement of those who regularly travel dark corners of the the space and beyond.