Beam Me Up, Scotty!

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Fans of the science fiction series 'Star Trek' are familiar with the transporter which enables the crew of the Enterprise to teleport to a different place.

Leaving aside whether consciousness or the soul could stay with the body in such a process, teleporting of large objects remains a figment of the imagination.

Nevertheless, a recent experiment seems to indicate that teleporting over long distances is at least a possibility.  Scientists reported an experiment, where matter seemingly disappears down a telephone line in one laboratory, only to instantly reappear in another laboratory.

The experiments involved only those mysterious particles that inhabit the quantum world called photons.  Scientists successfully transferred the characteristics carried by some photons to photons in another lab fifty-five metres away.

The transported structures never exist in the communication line on which they travel.  In this process the original is destroyed, and the information sent allows a duplicate to be assembled elsewhere by reorganizing matter.

None of this means that someday human beings could disappear and reappear in another place, using quantum teleportation.  In these experiments, the atoms themselves are not teleported, but rather the information which is encoded in the system.