• Question: is it true that we know how to teleport atoms?

    Asked by anon-181562 on 7 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Donna MacCallum

      Donna MacCallum answered on 7 Jun 2018:

      Good question… depends where you live really… most scientists I know aren’t really very religious at all

    • Photo: Daniel Rhodes

      Daniel Rhodes answered on 7 Jun 2018:

      so this really requires a physicist – so until one answers I’ll give the super simple answer. No – we can’t do this, it isn’t possible to transfer information (or in this case, your atom) faster than the speed of light. However, there is this thing called quantum entanglement, which allows for the near instantaneous change of quantum state between two entangled particles. So when in the news a couple of years ago, headlines were talking about teleportation, what they were actually describing was a change in state occurring between two entangled particles very far away from each other.
      This is something that always makes my brain hurt.

    • Photo: Ashley Akbari

      Ashley Akbari answered on 7 Jun 2018:

      I am not a physicist but i do not think we have solved this one yet, but I am sure there are people working on this linked to the word being completed at The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN.

    • Photo: Lauren Burns

      Lauren Burns answered on 11 Jun 2018:

      Not yet! As far as science can determine, you can’t send any object from one place to another quicker than the speed of light, however scientists have achieved something called quantum teleportation. This isn’t the teleportation of a thing, but of information. This made the news (as Daniel mentioned), when scientists used quantum entanglement to immediately determine the magnetic spin of a particle that was a great distance from a particle they were looking at. In scientific terms, the spin was ‘teleported’ to the far away particle through a as-yet-unexplored-feature that is (awesomely) called ‘Spooky Action At A Distance’. Particle physicists aren’t sure how quick this is yet, but it is at least 10,000xs faster than light.

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