It looks like the "Beam-me-up-Scotty" magic of "Star Trek." But a startling laboratory result might help scientists build more powerful computers.
In an Austrian lab, scientists destroyed bits of light in one place and made perfect replicas appear about 3 feet away.They did that by transferring information about a crucial physical characteristic of the original light bits, called photons. The information was picked up by other photons, which took on that characteristic and so became replicas of the originals.
The phenomenon that made it happen is so bizarre that even Albert Einstein didn't believe in it. He called it spooky.
The work is the first to demonstrate "quantum teleportation," a bizarre shifting of physical characteristics between nature's tiniest particles, no matter how far apart they are.
The experiment is reported in Wednesday's issue of the journal Nature by Anton Zeilinger and colleagues at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. A research team based in Rome has done similar work and submitted its report to another journal.
Scientists might be able to achieve teleportation between atoms within a few years and molecules within a decade or so, Zeilinger said.
The process is fundamentally different from the "Star Trek" notion of "beaming" people from one place to another. But could teleportation be done with people? Could scientists extract information from every tiny particle in a person, transfer it to a bunch of particles elsewhere and assemble those particles into an exact replica of the person?
There's no theoretical problem with that, several experts said. But get real.
"I think it's quite clear that anything approximating teleportation of complex living beings, even bacteria, is so far away technologically that it's not really worth thinking about it," said IBM physicist Charles H. Bennett. He and other physicists proposed quantum teleportation in 1993.
There would just be too much information to assemble and transmit, he and others said. Even if it were possible someday, it would be so expensive that "probably it's just as cheap to send the real person," said Benjamin Schumacher of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.
Besides, Schumacher said, teleportation would "kill you and take you apart atom by atom so you could be reassembled at the other end, one hopes. It doesn't seem like a good idea to me."
Much more likely, experts said, is using teleportation between tiny particles to set up quantum computers. These devices would use teleportation to sling data around, and they could solve certain complex problems much faster than today's machines.
In the new work, scientists transferred the trait of "polarization" between photons. Light behaves like both a photon particle and as a wave. A light wave has peaks and troughs like an ocean wave, and polarization refers to the directions in which these peaks and troughs point. Photons retain this trait.
To transfer the polarization between photons, the researchers used a phenomenon called entanglement, which Einstein rejected. Since then, however, it's been shown to be real.
When two photons are entangled, "they have opposite luck," said IBM's Bennett. Whatever happens to one is the opposite of what happens to the other. In particular, their polarizations are the opposite of each other.
If the notion of entanglement leaves your head spinning, don't feel bad. Zeilinger said he doesn't understand how it works either.
"And you can quote me on that," he said.