Professor Brian Greene explains how teleportation works: “We can take a particle at point A and create an identical version at point B”
Teleportation has been one of the biggest dreams (nightmares?) of scientists, writers and travel enthusiasts for centuries. Moving from one place to another in seconds, as if by magic, seems impossible. In fact, there are many studies and academic research that support the opposite. What, then, is the truth? To clarify, we listened to the opinion of Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University and co-founder of the World Science Festival. “Teleportation – said the American scientist – is one of the strangest ideas that men have ever conceived. Yet there is a version of it that physicists use routinely. No one is teleporting people from one place to another in the world, let me be clear. What can be done is to teleport individual particles. We can take a particle at a point A and create an absolutely identical version of it – with exactly the same properties, exactly the same quantum state – at a point B. It means, in essence, that first there was a particle at one point and now there is an identical one at another. The process, in fact, destroys the first particle. So, the only version of the particle that exists when this process is over is the one that was created at the new location. And researchers do this routinely. There is a very smart physicist, Anton Zeilinger, who regularly teleports particle from Tenerife to La Palma. It’s an incredible thing but it can really be done.”
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Will we ever be able to use teleportation?
At this point, the question arises. Will we ever be able to use teleportation as in science fiction movies, or to move from one place to another in a few moments? Professor Brian Greene has obviously asked himself this question as well. And the answer is surprising. “The real question, of course, is, would you ever teleport things as big as people? The procedures used now for individual particles can’t be changed. I don’t think with current techniques you could teleport multiple particles at once. But who knows? In 500 or 1000 years, maybe, we’ll have some technique or some machine that we can try. If it happens when I’m alive, I can tell you one thing for sure: I won’t be the first person to get into that device!”
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