The Trouble With Teleportation

For a long time, physicists assumed quantum teleportation wasn’t possible. In order to teleport an object, like our pig lizard, we must scan it to obtain precise information about its atomic structure. However, the more accurately an object is scanned, the more it is disturbed by the process of being scanned. We can’t measure a particle without altering it in some way, never mind every single subatomic particle that makes up a full-sized pig lizard. So how could we extract all the information we would need to create an exact copy in another location via teleportation?

In 1993, an IBM physicist named Charles Bennett and his colleagues figured out a way to work around this fundamental limitation using quantum entanglement

Kudos to Jennifer for mentioning that quantum teleportation transmits information (rather than objects), and doing it several times.

Unfortunately, there is one omission.

Ah, but there is a catch: The original object must be destroyed in the process. When B scans A, that interaction alters the latter’s properties. A no longer exists in the exact same state as it did. C is now the only particle in that original state.

No! The information about the original object must be destroyed. When, in the experiments she mentions, teleportation succeeded between clouds of atomic vapor, the atoms themselves were not destroyed. That would have certain implications, making a million or so atoms just go poof — it would violate a bunch of conservation laws, not the least of which is conservation of energy. The atoms did not simply disappear and then appear in the adjacent space — this is not Star Trek. There were two clouds, and the information was teleported from one to the other.