Far from being what you see on
Star Trek,
quantum teleportation is now reality. Although humans are far from "whizzing around" like the node above says, we are actually able to teleport a beam of light from one area to another.
History
- December 1997 : Professor Anton Zeilinger, University of Innsbruck, Austrich, claims to have teleported a photon.
- 1998, Jeff Kimble, Caltech, Pasadena, claims he has teleported a beam of light and it's properties.
Basic theories
The first thing you need to comprehend before understanding quantum teleportation is the EPR effect. Theory discovered by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen in the 1930's, this effect was only proven many years later buy a French team of scientists. In the 1960's John Bell showed that 2 entangled particles that were separated acted in too similar ways than described by normal statistics. This effect is an entanglement between two photons emitted by a nuclear fission. These two photons, no matter what, will always be opposites by direction, angle, quantum state and all. Even if you modify one of the two, the other will automatically be modified to be it's opposite. This theory directly contradicts Einstein's Relativity because it implies that there is something that interacts faster than the speed of light.
Teleportation made simple
The mathematics to this are mind-bending and I myself don't understand most of them but philosophically it's easy to understand with an example: Alice and Bob, two friends are separated, Alice on the Earth and Bob on the moon. Alice wants to send her photon to Bob. To do so they must each have one of two entangled photons. Alice will then make her photon react with the entangled one. This will modify the EPR photon and also modify Bob's by definition. This modification is unknown, so Alice will put the 2 photons through a Bell crystal, which will give her information on the pair's quantum state. Knowing this information she can send it to Bob by radio, television, telegraph or what ever means she likes, then Bob can rearrange his photon to be like the original one.
You can notice that quantum teleportation is not really teleportation, but the destruction of a photon in one area and the appearing of a photon with the same state in an other. Also it is limited to the speed of light since Alice must send additional information to Bob.
Applications
For now the applications are rather slim since teleportation is limited to photons at near range, but eventually it could be used for overseas communication by binary code or other sorts. Also this kind of communication would be uninterceptable unless the person has the other EPR photon. This would make security much easier. Quantum teleportation could also be used in futur quantum computers that use the Heisenberg principale, which makes information very unstable in wires, so if you can teleport the information, it doesn't need to go through wires.
Future
What this discovery holds for the futur is very uncertain. Some expect to be able to teleport atoms soon. Others say that we will stay at the photon point. But even then, we could have cities without wires, energy and information could be going through the air at instantly or almost.
References- WHITE, Ray. http://tecnovate.org/articles/quantumthought.html
- HEDSTORM, Anders, http://www.geocities.com/timessquare/zone/5267/quantum.htm
- CHANG, Kenneth, http://www.scitec.aukland.ac.nz/~king/preprints/book/quantcos/at/tele.htm
Also I read many books and magazines
I'll continue to get informed as the subject progresses and add on when I can