The universe is weird! Like, really weird. We live our daily lives moving around and mostly seeing things which we can hold and touch and see without a microscope. The smallest thing we can see with our eyes is maybe 1/10th of a mm in size. Which seems tiny to us, but compared to molecules and atoms, and even some living things like bacteria and viruses, this is huge!

So what? Well, it turns out that the rules of nature for really small things are very very different to the rules of nature for big things. We can talk, for instance about the nature of an electron, which is a tiny tiny particle that mostly lives in an atom.

The rules of how an electron lives its electron days are very different to how we live our days. For instance, you are always in one place, right? You’re either in your bedroom, or in the garden, or at school, or at the shops…or many other places, but you can’t be in your bedroom and at the shops at the same time, right?Well, electrons (and other microscopic things) don’t live by our rules. They CAN be in two places at once…or three…or an infinite number of places. 

Don’t try to understand this in the way we understand the world around us…we can’t wrap our heads around what this is like because we aren’t the size of an electron. We have beautiful mathematical theories which describe exactly what is happening with the electron, and when we test our theories…we find that they are right and the predictions that they make (ie. what will happen to an electron when you do X, Y or Z), turn out to be correct every time. So it’s weird, but it’s true…

There are other really odd properties of microscopic objects. If we look at a football, you can know where it is and how fast it’s going. ie. You kick the ball, and after 1 second it is 3m away from you and moving at 2.5 meters every second.
Again, electrons aren’t like this. You can only know where they are, or how fast they are going, but not both. In fact it’s not even that you can only know one of these properties at a time, it’s that when you know where it is, it is moving at many different speeds, and when you know how fast it’s going, it’s in many different places. These are just fundamental properties of the universe and they are WEIRD.

This microscopic world runs by a set of rules we call quantum mechanics. The quantum world is the world of the very small and the very strange.

Within this world we can do things which we can’t normally do in the macroscopic world…one of these is teleportation. In fact, we call it quantum teleportation. 

The way this works is that you have a system that you want to teleport from one place to another. You transfer some information using light, or a telephone if you want, and then when you perform a certain operation, called a quantum operation, the system instantaneously is destroyed in one place, and appears at the other. This can be across a huge distance. The problem is that this only works at the moment for small systems…and that the original version of the system is destroyed in the process.

If we could scale this up so that it worked with humans, and you wanted to teleport a person from say Oxford to London, then they would step into the device in Oxford and when you pressed the button, the Oxford version of themselves would be destroyed and a new version would appear in London. That person in London would feel exactly like they had in Oxford, with all their memories of life in Oxford and what happened just up to the teleportation. They wouldn’t feel like they had been destroyed.

So, would you allow yourself to be teleported, knowing that a version of you with all your memories would appear in a place far away, but the original version of you would be no more?

We are a very very long way off being able to do this and with current technologies the largest thing we can teleport is a few atoms in size, so it may be thousands of years until we can teleport something large….whether you would want to do that or not is another question.