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Quantum Teleportation
Should we buckle on our communicators and prepare to get sparkly?
If you’ve glanced at any of the popular science journals or the more aspirational daily rags over the last several years you may have noticed in the summer of 2017 several breathless reports stating that Chinese scientists successfully achieved quantum teleportation between a ground station and one of their satellites.
To the naïve, this inevitably conjured up visions of Star Trek. So are we about to enter a world of matter transporters and instantaneous communications over vast distances, unimpeded by the pesky limitation called lightspeed that General Relativity shows to be the universal speed limit?
Well, actually, no.
The first problem comes from the rather misleading term teleportation. For sci-fi fans this means disassembling the atoms of an object or person and automagically whizzing them across some significant distance and then re-assembling them with perfect fidelity at the destination. Originally invented as a script device because a TV show couldn’t afford to pay for the special effects necessary to show the Enterprise landing on whatever planet Captain Kirk and his merry men were visiting that week, the idea of matter transportation has had an irresistible appeal ever since.
