If you are a fan of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, you will know what I am talking about. Gene’s Star Trek first showed the world what teleportation was all about by beaming Captain Kirk, Spock, Bones and others from one place to another. What seemed like a sci-fi thing in Star Trek may soon become a reality and in this march to teleportation, China has stolen the glory. Chinese scientists successfully “teleported” data from one elementary particle to another. In plain English, the Chinese researchers have teleported a ‘Photon’ from China roughly 500 km into space. China, which already has a quantum computer and hack-proof communications satellite, now has a significant edge over the United States and Japan in developing unbreakable codes in the cutting edge field of quantum cryptography. Teleportation
What is teleportation?
In layman English, teleportation means sending a person or an object from one place to another without physically changing shape. In more serious terms, Teleportation or teletransportation is the theoretical transfer of matter or energy from one point to another without traversing the physical space between them. While it was easy for filmmakers to portray teleportation in their movies, physically it was though impossible feat till a few years ago. Teleportation has become a standard operation in quantum optics labs around the world. The technique relies on the strange phenomenon of entanglement. This occurs when two quantum objects, such as photons form at the same instant and point in space and so share the same existence. In technical terms, they are described by the same wave function. Chinese teleportation
