The Concept of Teleportation
Uploaded by barkhaamonkar on Sep 20, 2005
The fans of ‘Harry Potter’ may find it easier to relate to the concepts of teleportation than most of the other people. In the Harry Potter terminology, teleportation is likened to the ‘port key’ medium of travel. For that matter even movie buffs, who have watched ‘Matrix’ will be able to relate to teleportation. Teleportation is the name given by science fiction writers to the feat of making an object or person disintegrate in one place while a perfect replica appears somewhere else.
Till late the exact theoretical process of teleportation was not known. Of late however theories are beginning to surface based on extensive research. The general idea seems to be that the original object is scanned in such a way as to extract all the information from it, then this information is transmitted to the receiving location and used to construct the replica, not necessarily from the actual material of the original, but perhaps from atoms of the same kinds, arranged in exactly the same pattern as the original. The only hitch is that in the experiments demonstrated so far the original copy has to be destroyed.
In science fiction stories like in ‘Matrix’ and the likes of it, there is generally a complex plot created by allowing both the original and the replicated copy to exist and then they are made to meet each other thus creating confusion onscreen. Thankfully science has so far proved that such a thing is not really possible. For that matter even human teleportation is a distant dream. What has been achieved so far is the transportation of single atoms. In 1993 an international group of six scientists, including IBM Fellow Charles H. Bennett, confirmed the intuitions of the majority of science fiction writers by showing that perfect teleportation is indeed possible in principle, but only if the original is destroyed.
Until recently, teleportation was not taken seriously by scientists, because it was thought to violate the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, which forbids any measuring or scanning process from extracting all the information in an atom or other object. According to the uncertainty principle, the more accurately an object is scanned, the more it is disturbed by the scanning process, until one reaches a point where the object's original state has been completely disrupted, still without having extracted enough information to make a perfect replica.
But the six scientists found a way to make an...