Lately it seems like the research world has launched into a full-throttle game of “what superpower would you choose?” For those who desire invisibility, engineers are developing exotic materials that can bend an object’s light completely out of view. For would-be telepaths, neurobiologists are working on ways to read one person’s brain wave patterns and transmit them into another person’s head.
My personal favorite, though, is perhaps the most outrageous fantasy power of all: teleportation, the ability to arrive without traveling. Imagine being able to dematerialize from your living room and show up the next moment in Venice or the Amazon rainforest or the rings of Saturn (wearing an appropriate space suit, of course). The idea is so seductive that it has been a mainstay of science fiction since the early days of Star Trek and Doctor Who, but it also seems an affront to common sense.
Fortunately, common sense doesn’t guide the rules of quantum physics, as evidenced by a brief 1993 paper with a mouthful of a title: “Teleporting an Unknown Quantum State Via Dual Classical and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Channels.” In it, a team led by Charles Bennett of IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center demonstrated how to link two particles together a certain way, and keep them linked even at great distances.
