“Quantum Teleportation” is NOT Teleportation

As you may have read in various articles that have come out over the last year or so, scientists have been successful at using “Quantum Teleportation” to move an object over a distance of a few feet or possible even up to a few metres away.

Now this sounds quite impressive. It makes people think of Star Trek and their teleportation devices that can pick up someone from a planet and place him into a spaceship that is circling that planet unharmed in the matter of a few seconds. However, that is not what Quantum Teleportation is all about.

Quantum Teleportation is actually closer to a fax machine. One teleportation device scans the object, then sends the information about the object to another device and the second device recreates the original object with materials it has at hand. Like a fax machine, you now have two objects that are identical but one is a copy. One must be destroyed in order to maintain “balance” in the universe (we can’t have two of the exact same object going about in the universe can we) and since the copy is now where we want the object to be, the original is destroyed.

This is fine with pieces of paper but if you do this type of “teleportation” with people (and scientist, futurists and science fiction writers have already imagined this happening and what they would do), you end up killing the original person. The theory from scientists who came up with this brilliant idea is that the copy is identical in every way to the original, so somehow the consciousness is transferred from the original to the copy so the copy is essentially the original. There is one extra version of you and we don’t need two of the exact same thing in the universe. Too bad for the original person!

The main thing here is that Quantum Teleportation does not, in fact, teleport a thing. Teleportation takes an object and moves that object to another location. Quantum Teleportation just sends information about an object from one place to another. The copy is already at the new location, it just hasn’t been put together yet. It “teleports” objects just as much as Lego “teleports” new Lego creations by selling you a box of Lego blocks. You take that box of Lego blocks follow the instructions in putting together the creation and now you have the creation in front of you, just like the one that was created by Lego. That’s what Quantum Teleportation is all about. True teleportation would have the people at Lego put their creation into a teleporter which would quickly pull the creation apart into its separate blocks, send those blocks through space to your home and as they reach your home they are assembled by a second teleportation device that puts the blocks back in the same order they were before. Each block is put back to where it was originally but now the creation is in your home and not at Lego headquarters.

The big deal about Quantum Teleportation is that scientist were able to scan a quantum sized object, find information about it, all without disturbing it too greatly. They were able to find a way around what scientists thought impossible and “observe” an object without disturbing it so much that it acted differently. What this proves is that what scientists thought about Quantum Mechanics is not completely true. It also supports my theory that Quantum Physics’ Uncertainty Principle is not true and needs to be scrapped.

So the next time you follow instructions to create something else, like a model airplane or a Lego creation or even putting together a house, you can say that you managed to “Quantum Teleport” an object!