Teleportation
Imagine a real life situation
One morning you get up and realize that you are very late to office. You had a very important meeting in the morning. Basically the day gets started in the mess! You’ll end up all the usual morning work in a hurry, escape the breakfast or and then rush up to the office, so that you can reach as fast as you can but by the time you reach to office its very late because of the traffic on roads during morning peak hours. As you enter the office everyone is looking at you with a sympathetic look and office boy comes to you and says “Boss, is calling you” and you know what he will say and whole day goes in a bad manner. This is the basic story in today’s time
Now the situation could be a bit changed
You are in the same situation but still there is no sign of worry on your face. Just before five minutes to your official most important meeting you are at home and still not worried. As you just get ready and go to a teleportation machine and stand in front of it and only in fractions of seconds you are at the office.
For a moment you will remember of your Star Track days when Captain Kirk and his most important confidant Spock use to get teleported across different planets. This use to be really cool! Your usual reaction will be “It can happen to one only in films or stories” but to your utter surprise YES this miracle can happen in future and researchers and scientist are working on this technique “TELEPORTATION”.
Teleportation is an abridged word made of two words, “Telecommunication” and “Transportation”. So it is a technology which takes place by combining the properties of telecommunication and transportation. In other terms transferring of matter from one point to another without traversing the physical space between them is known as teleportation.
In 1993, Charles Bennet from IBM projected the chances of quantum teleportation. Quantum teleportation is a method by which a qubit (basic unit of quantum information) can be transmitted precisely (in principle) from one spot to another, without the original qubit being transmit through the prime space. In such situation your movement across two different points from A to point B becomes independent of space between these two points. Hence this technique could eliminate the time and space from actual travelling the distance.
But it is not practically confirmed for the objects having physical mass till date. In 1998 a group of researchers at California Institute of Technology teleported a photon (basic constituent part of light) using the quantum teleportation. They made a copy of photon by teleporting a photon via a one meter extended cable. They have revealed by applying purpose of nanotechnology it is feasible to decrease the energy required for the process. This influence allowed scientists to send quantum information from one point in space to another without passing it through the actual space involving in between.
Yes the technique teleportation is complicated and complex but scientists are enhancing it. They’ve teleported quantum information from ions to photons, from one photon to another and even from a macroscopic group of the atoms to a photon.
Today, Xiao-Hui Bao at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei and a few buddies have teleported quantum information from group of rubidium atoms to another group of rubidium atoms over a distance of 150 meters using intertwined photons. This is the foremost time that anybody has performed teleportation from one macroscopic object to another.
This can further enhance the idea of “future quantum internet”. The aim in a quantum internet is that band of atoms will sit at the center of quantum routers, perceiving quantum information from incoming photons and then producing photons that get ahead of this information on to the next router. So the teleportation from one of these centers to another is another important progress.
The laws of physics say it is impossible to create a transporter that ensures a person to be sent instantaneously to any other locality as this would require traveling at the speed of light. It would work similar to a fax machine; a duplicate of the person would be made at the receiving end, but with much larger accuracy.
But then question arises what would happen to the original? One of the theories implies that teleportation would combine genetic cloning along with digitization. In accordance to this theory the bio-digital cloned tele-travelers would have to die, in a sense. Their original body and mind would no longer survive. Instead, their atomic structure would be recreated at another site, and the excellent digitization would recreate the travelers’ emotions, dreams memories, and hopes. So the travelers would still stay alive but they would do so in a fresh body, of the same atomic structure as the original body, programmed with the identical information. Looks interesting as there will be a death and the birth at the same time!!
But if we might be able to use teleportation to travel anywhere, at anytime we can save time and energy. All the more unwanted traffics on the road would be less. We are merely years far from the growth of a teleportation machine same as the transporter room on Star Trek’s Enterprise spaceship from famous TV series “Star Trek”. Sounds like the business model of all airlines, buses and railways will go for a toss!! There will be no need for videoconferencing or telephones if you can physically reach at the required place economically. Lot of business models will die instantly. If will be very difficult to give an excuse for not showing up in the office. Your boss can easily teleport to the hospital to help you if you are making the excuse of serious illness for not showing up in office!!
But alike all technologies, researchers are certain to continue to develop the ideas of teleportation, to such a point that one day, one of your future genre could finish up a work day at a office far away from home, may be other end of the globe, tell his or her wristwatch that it’s time to beam home for dinner at home and sit at the dining table as soon as he or she blinks his or her eye.