Teleportation has long been a cultural fascination and has been mainly relegated to the realm of science fiction. In our modern global society, transportation of people, goods and information is often a limiting factor in any transaction. While non-stop flights, next-day delivery and the Internet have gone a long way in aiding these costs, anyone who has ever had a flight delay might yearn for a machine that could instantaneously drop you halfway around the world without long security lines, extra baggage fees or snoring seatmates. It may come as a surprise to many that teleportation not only exists, but has been around for over a decade now. To clarify, at present researchers have teleported particles, but are a long way off from the technology to teleport people. This is probably the most technical subject I’ve written about so far, so I am going to do my best to explain the abstruse procedure using simple metaphors, but bear with me.

The entire process of teleportation depends on a related concept called entanglement, an idea that puzzled Einstein, which he ultimately wrote off as “spooky action at a distance”. The idea behind entanglement is simple: that two objects that are far apart can affect each other. As an example, imagine you have a green and a red ball, and you put each one in an identical box. You then give the box to a friend who rides her bike across campus. If you open your box, you can instantly infer the color of your friend’s ball based on your own, regardless of how far away she traveled. Additionally, until either box is opened, you can consider each ball to be half-red and half-green at the same time, as it is unclear which one is which. Once either box is opened, the color of both balls will be known, and the balls are no longer considered entangled.

Now comes the tricky part, and the metaphor starts to break down a bit. Imagine you have a box containing a ball with a 70 percent chance of being red, which you’d like to send to your friend on the other side of campus. You and your friend also each have a pair of entangled boxes, containing balls of different colors (so there are three boxes total). You then shuffle your boxes and open them, and call up your friend to report your findings. With a few complex calculations and transformations, your friend now has a box with a 70 percent chance of containing a red ball, exactly the box you started with.

The procedure described above is quite difficult, and requires extensive, carefully controlled arrays to be successful, and even then, success is not always guaranteed. Researchers at Caltech were the first to successfully teleport photons in 1998, and in 2004, researchers at the NIST and the University of Innsbruck were successful in teleporting beryllium and calcium ions. Just last January researchers at the University of Maryland teleported the information from a Ytterbium ion with 90 percent accuracy over a meter away. From our earlier metaphor, the colors of the balls represent the quantum states of photons and atoms, essentially pieces of information that determine the makeup of a particle. As complicated as it is to send one atom, even sending small molecules would require a complexity that may be years off.

Some would argue that this procedure is not really teleportation, as it doesn’t physically move material from one place to another, but merely recreates the material at the target location. This question is particularly interesting to ethicists interested in the eventual possibility of human teleportation. Some would have qualms with the idea that using the procedure defined above would effectively kill a person, while making a new person with the same characteristics elsewhere. However, in light of the fact that every atom in the human body is replaced over the course of a decade or two, perhaps this idea is not so outrageous.

Teleportation of simple atoms and photons could provide huge benefits for society. As teleportation is essentially instantaneous, teleportation has already been demonstrated to be a faster method of transmitting information than conventional methods, and could be incorporated into computer processors. Additionally, using teleportation to send information is 100 percent secure; if a ne’er-do-well in our analogy were to steal your friend’s box and open it, the entanglement would decohere and the box would be useless. Using entanglement could also help refine and improve the sensitivity of radar, telescopes and microscopes by more than six orders of magnitude.

While teleporting yourself may not be a reality for a while, in the near future, teleportation may very well play a huge role in your computers, phones and bank account. I’ve tried to illuminate some of the theory behind teleportation, though the brevity The Daily affords me has been a limiting factor. As Stanford has a long history of Nobel Prizes in physics, I look forward to the day where one of you helps beam us into the future.

Jack still offers cookies to anyone finding a mistake in a column, though at present he can’t teleport them to you. Contact him at [email protected].