• Question: Theoretically, if you could invent a teleportation device, how would it work (disassemble the atoms and reassemble on the other end or....?)?

    Asked by Th3N3rdy0n3 to Alex, Ali, Kerry, Philip, Theo on 17 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Alison Thomson

      Alison Thomson answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      If it was theoretically possible then it would probably have been invented by now! Afraid I don’t think I have a theory on how it could potentially work!

    • Photo: Alex Pool

      Alex Pool answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Hey,

      So teleportation is in theory possible, but it would require more energy than there is in the entire universe!

      How you describe it is exactly right, so you’d be an exact copy at the other end, but it’d be a brand new you. It’d have everything in the same place but wouldn’t be the original – kind of creepy and cool at the same time.

      Alex

    • Photo: Philip Ratcliffe

      Philip Ratcliffe answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Well, if I knew how it would work, I would have already built one, won a Nobel prize and become a millionaire selling them!
      Well, we can actually do it for single photons and even (I think) pairs of photons. But your body is made up of around 10^25 (1 followed by 25 zeros) atoms – that’s one huge jigsaw puzzle – and they’d all have to be reassembled perfectly at the other end – one slight hiccough in the procedure and you wouldn’t survive.
      It’s really something that is not simply hard to imagine but that we can essentially prove is not possible – unless that is someone comes up with a completely different theory of how things work. But that’s something we can’t even guess at.

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