Skip to content

Star Trek's transporter: is teleportation real?

Movie · Star Trek (from 1966), and every story that borrows the word

Real seed. One true idea sits underneath. Everything built on it is invented.

What the scene or the claim says

A machine reads a person on one platform, dissolves them, and rebuilds them somewhere else.

What is real

Quantum teleportation is a real laboratory technique, proposed by Bennett and colleagues in 1993 and first demonstrated in 1997 and 1998. It moves the state of one qubit onto another qubit, using a shared entangled pair plus two ordinary classical bits. The original's state is destroyed in the process, because the no-cloning theorem forbids keeping a copy. The distance record is a photon's state sent from a ground station in Tibet to the Micius satellite, at up to 1,400 km, in 2017.

What stops it working that way

• It moves no matter and no energy, only a state, and the receiving qubit has to be waiting at the far end.
• It cannot beat light. The receiver cannot decode anything until the two classical bits arrive by an ordinary channel.
• A person is about 7 × 10²⁷ atoms. What has been teleported so far is the state of a single particle or a handful of qubits.

If you wanted it to work

Suppose we could read out the full quantum state of a body. The no-cloning theorem would suit a transporter that destroys the original. What stays unsolved is that we have no way to define, let alone measure, the complete state of a living thing. The nearer payoff is a quantum internet: state transfer between distant quantum computers. That is useful, and much less cinematic.

Learn the physics

• Quantum teleportation, worked exactly (The Machinery, topic 05)

Sources

• Bennett et al. 1993, the original proposal
• Ren et al. 2017, ground-to-satellite teleportation (Nature)

See it in the swipe deck, with the other cards.