teleportation vs time travel

April 26, 2023

Is Time Travel Possible?

The laws of physics allow time travel. So why haven’t people become chronological hoppers?

By Sarah Scoles

yuanyuan yan/Getty Images

In the movies, time travelers typically step inside a machine and—poof—disappear. They then reappear instantaneously among cowboys, knights or dinosaurs. What these films show is basically time teleportation .

Scientists don’t think this conception is likely in the real world, but they also don’t relegate time travel to the crackpot realm. In fact, the laws of physics might allow chronological hopping, but the devil is in the details.

Time traveling to the near future is easy: you’re doing it right now at a rate of one second per second, and physicists say that rate can change. According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, time’s flow depends on how fast you’re moving. The quicker you travel, the slower seconds pass. And according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity , gravity also affects clocks: the more forceful the gravity nearby, the slower time goes.

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“Near massive bodies—near the surface of neutron stars or even at the surface of the Earth, although it’s a tiny effect—time runs slower than it does far away,” says Dave Goldberg, a cosmologist at Drexel University.

If a person were to hang out near the edge of a black hole , where gravity is prodigious, Goldberg says, only a few hours might pass for them while 1,000 years went by for someone on Earth. If the person who was near the black hole returned to this planet, they would have effectively traveled to the future. “That is a real effect,” he says. “That is completely uncontroversial.”

Going backward in time gets thorny, though (thornier than getting ripped to shreds inside a black hole). Scientists have come up with a few ways it might be possible, and they have been aware of time travel paradoxes in general relativity for decades. Fabio Costa, a physicist at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, notes that an early solution with time travel began with a scenario written in the 1920s. That idea involved massive long cylinder that spun fast in the manner of straw rolled between your palms and that twisted spacetime along with it. The understanding that this object could act as a time machine allowing one to travel to the past only happened in the 1970s, a few decades after scientists had discovered a phenomenon called “closed timelike curves.”

“A closed timelike curve describes the trajectory of a hypothetical observer that, while always traveling forward in time from their own perspective, at some point finds themselves at the same place and time where they started, creating a loop,” Costa says. “This is possible in a region of spacetime that, warped by gravity, loops into itself.”

“Einstein read [about closed timelike curves] and was very disturbed by this idea,” he adds. The phenomenon nevertheless spurred later research.

Science began to take time travel seriously in the 1980s. In 1990, for instance, Russian physicist Igor Novikov and American physicist Kip Thorne collaborated on a research paper about closed time-like curves. “They started to study not only how one could try to build a time machine but also how it would work,” Costa says.

Just as importantly, though, they investigated the problems with time travel. What if, for instance, you tossed a billiard ball into a time machine, and it traveled to the past and then collided with its past self in a way that meant its present self could never enter the time machine? “That looks like a paradox,” Costa says.

Since the 1990s, he says, there’s been on-and-off interest in the topic yet no big breakthrough. The field isn’t very active today, in part because every proposed model of a time machine has problems. “It has some attractive features, possibly some potential, but then when one starts to sort of unravel the details, there ends up being some kind of a roadblock,” says Gaurav Khanna of the University of Rhode Island.

For instance, most time travel models require negative mass —and hence negative energy because, as Albert Einstein revealed when he discovered E = mc 2 , mass and energy are one and the same. In theory, at least, just as an electric charge can be positive or negative, so can mass—though no one’s ever found an example of negative mass. Why does time travel depend on such exotic matter? In many cases, it is needed to hold open a wormhole—a tunnel in spacetime predicted by general relativity that connects one point in the cosmos to another.

Without negative mass, gravity would cause this tunnel to collapse. “You can think of it as counteracting the positive mass or energy that wants to traverse the wormhole,” Goldberg says.

Khanna and Goldberg concur that it’s unlikely matter with negative mass even exists, although Khanna notes that some quantum phenomena show promise, for instance, for negative energy on very small scales. But that would be “nowhere close to the scale that would be needed” for a realistic time machine, he says.

These challenges explain why Khanna initially discouraged Caroline Mallary, then his graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, from doing a time travel project. Mallary and Khanna went forward anyway and came up with a theoretical time machine that didn’t require negative mass. In its simplistic form, Mallary’s idea involves two parallel cars, each made of regular matter. If you leave one parked and zoom the other with extreme acceleration, a closed timelike curve will form between them.

Easy, right? But while Mallary’s model gets rid of the need for negative matter, it adds another hurdle: it requires infinite density inside the cars for them to affect spacetime in a way that would be useful for time travel. Infinite density can be found inside a black hole, where gravity is so intense that it squishes matter into a mind-bogglingly small space called a singularity. In the model, each of the cars needs to contain such a singularity. “One of the reasons that there's not a lot of active research on this sort of thing is because of these constraints,” Mallary says.

Other researchers have created models of time travel that involve a wormhole, or a tunnel in spacetime from one point in the cosmos to another. “It's sort of a shortcut through the universe,” Goldberg says. Imagine accelerating one end of the wormhole to near the speed of light and then sending it back to where it came from. “Those two sides are no longer synced,” he says. “One is in the past; one is in the future.” Walk between them, and you’re time traveling.

You could accomplish something similar by moving one end of the wormhole near a big gravitational field—such as a black hole—while keeping the other end near a smaller gravitational force. In that way, time would slow down on the big gravity side, essentially allowing a particle or some other chunk of mass to reside in the past relative to the other side of the wormhole.

Making a wormhole requires pesky negative mass and energy, however. A wormhole created from normal mass would collapse because of gravity. “Most designs tend to have some similar sorts of issues,” Goldberg says. They’re theoretically possible, but there’s currently no feasible way to make them, kind of like a good-tasting pizza with no calories.

And maybe the problem is not just that we don’t know how to make time travel machines but also that it’s not possible to do so except on microscopic scales—a belief held by the late physicist Stephen Hawking. He proposed the chronology protection conjecture: The universe doesn’t allow time travel because it doesn’t allow alterations to the past. “It seems there is a chronology protection agency, which prevents the appearance of closed timelike curves and so makes the universe safe for historians,” Hawking wrote in a 1992 paper in Physical Review D .

Part of his reasoning involved the paradoxes time travel would create such as the aforementioned situation with a billiard ball and its more famous counterpart, the grandfather paradox : If you go back in time and kill your grandfather before he has children, you can’t be born, and therefore you can’t time travel, and therefore you couldn’t have killed your grandfather. And yet there you are.

Those complications are what interests Massachusetts Institute of Technology philosopher Agustin Rayo, however, because the paradoxes don’t just call causality and chronology into question. They also make free will seem suspect. If physics says you can go back in time, then why can’t you kill your grandfather? “What stops you?” he says. Are you not free?

Rayo suspects that time travel is consistent with free will, though. “What’s past is past,” he says. “So if, in fact, my grandfather survived long enough to have children, traveling back in time isn’t going to change that. Why will I fail if I try? I don’t know because I don’t have enough information about the past. What I do know is that I’ll fail somehow.”

If you went to kill your grandfather, in other words, you’d perhaps slip on a banana en route or miss the bus. “It's not like you would find some special force compelling you not to do it,” Costa says. “You would fail to do it for perfectly mundane reasons.”

In 2020 Costa worked with Germain Tobar, then his undergraduate student at the University of Queensland in Australia, on the math that would underlie a similar idea: that time travel is possible without paradoxes and with freedom of choice.

Goldberg agrees with them in a way. “I definitely fall into the category of [thinking that] if there is time travel, it will be constructed in such a way that it produces one self-consistent view of history,” he says. “Because that seems to be the way that all the rest of our physical laws are constructed.”

No one knows what the future of time travel to the past will hold. And so far, no time travelers have come to tell us about it.

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Jorge Cham Daniel Whiteson

Why Can’t People Teleport?

Let’s face it: Nobody likes to travel.

Whether they’re traveling to get to an exotic location for vacation or traveling to work on a daily commute, nobody actually likes the part where they have to travel. The people who say they like to travel probably mean they like to arrive . That’s because being somewhere can be really fun: seeing new things, meeting new people, getting to work sooner so you can go home early and read physics books. The actual traveling part is usually a drag: getting ready, rushing, waiting, rushing some more. Whoever said “it’s the journey, not the destination” clearly never had to sit in traffic every day and never got stuck in a middle seat on a transatlantic flight.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a better way to get to places? What if you could just appear where you want to go, without going through all the places in between?

Teleportation has been a fixture in science fiction for well over 100 years. And who hasn’t fantasized about closing their eyes or hopping into a machine and suddenly finding themselves where they want to be? Think of the time you’d save! Your vacation could start now, and not after a 14-hour flight. We could get to other planets more easily, too. Imagine sending colonists to the nearest habitable planet (Proxima Centauri b, four light-years away) without having to spend decades in transit.

But is teleportation possible? And if it is, why is it taking scientists so long to make it a reality? Will it take hundreds of years to develop, or can I expect it as an app on my phone sometime soon? Set your phasers on stun, because we are going to beam you up on the physics of teleportation.

If your dream of teleportation is to be here in one moment and then be in a totally different place the next moment, then we are sad to tell you right off the bat that this is impossible. 

Unfortunately, physics has some pretty hard rules about anything happening instantaneously. Anything that happens (an effect) has to have a cause, which in turn requires the transmission of information. Think about it: In order for two things to be causally related to each other (like you disappearing here and you appearing somewhere else), they have to somehow talk to each other. And in this universe, everything, including information, has a speed limit.

Information has to travel through space just like everything else, and the fastest anything can travel in this universe is the speed of light. Really, the speed of light should have been called the “speed of information” or “the universe’s speed limit.” It’s baked into relativity and the very idea of cause and effect, which are at the heart of physics.

Even gravity can’t move faster than light. Earth doesn’t feel gravity from where the Sun is right now ; it feels gravity from where the Sun was eight minutes ago. That’s how long it takes information to travel the 93 million miles between here and there. If the Sun disappeared (teleporting off for its own vacation), Earth would continue in its normal orbit for eight minutes before realizing that the Sun was gone.

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So the idea that you can disappear in one place and reappear in another place instantly is pretty much out of the question. Something has to happen in between, and that something can’t move faster than light. Fortunately, most of us aren’t such sticklers when it comes to the definition of “teleportation.” Most of us will take “almost instantly” or “in the blink of an eye” or even “as fast as the laws of physics will allow” for our teleportation needs. If that’s the case, then there are two options for making a teleportation machine work:

• Your teleportation machine could transmit you to your destination at the speed of light.
• Your teleportation machine could somehow shorten the distance between where you are and where you want to go.

Option No. 2 is what you might call the “portal” type of teleportation. In movies, it would be the kind of teleportation that opens up a doorway, usually through a wormhole or some kind of extradimensional subspace, that you step through to find yourself somewhere else. Wormholes are theoretical tunnels that connect points in space that are far away, and physicists have definitely proposed the existence of multiple dimensions beyond the three we are familiar with.

Sadly, both of these concepts are still very much theoretical. We haven’t actually seen a wormhole, nor do we have any idea how to open one or control where it leads. And extra dimensions aren’t really something you can move into. They only represent extra ways in which your particles might be able to wiggle.

Much more interesting to talk about is Option No. 1, which, as it turns out, might actually be something we can do in the near future.

If we can’t appear in other places instantly, or take shortcuts through space, can we at least get there as fast as possible? The top speed of the universe, 300 million meters per second, is plenty fast to cut your commute down to a fraction of a second and make trips to the stars take years instead of decades or millennia. Speed‑of‑light teleportation would still be awesome.

To do that, you might imagine a machine that somehow takes your body and then pushes it at the speed of light to your destination. Unfortunately, there’s a big problem with this idea, and it’s that you’re too heavy. The truth is that you’re too massive to ever travel at the speed of light. First, it would take an enormous amount of time and energy just to accelerate all the particles in your body (whether assembled or broken up somehow) to speeds that are close to the speed of light. And second, you would never get to the speed of light. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve been dieting or working on your CrossFit; nothing that has any mass can ever travel at the speed of light.

Particles like electrons and quarks, the building blocks of your atoms, have mass. That means that it takes energy to get them moving, a lot of energy to get them moving fast, and infinite energy to reach the speed of light. They can travel at very high speeds, but they can never achieve light speed.

That means that you, and the molecules and particles that make up who you are right now, would never actually be able to teleport. Not instantaneously, and not at the speed of light. Transporting your body somewhere that quickly is never going to happen. It’s just not possible to move all the particles in your body fast enough.

But does that mean teleportation is impossible? Not quite! There is one way it can still happen, and that’s if we relax what “you” means. What if we didn’t transport you, your molecules, or your particles? What if we just transmitted the idea of you?

One possible way to achieve speed‑of‑light teleportation is to scan you and send you as a beam of photons. Photons don’t have any mass, which means they can go as fast as the universe will allow. In fact, photons can only travel at the speed of light (there’s no such thing as a slow-​moving photon—in a vacuum).

Here’s a basic recipe for speed‑of‑light teleportation:

• Step 1: Scan your body and record where all your molecules and particles are.
• Step 2: Transmit this information to your destination via a beam of photons.
• Step 3: Receive this information and rebuild your body using new particles.

Is this possible? Humans have made incredible progress in both scanning and 3D printing technologies. These days, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can scan your body down to a resolution of 0.1 millimeters, which is about the size of a brain cell. And scientists have used 3D printers to print increasingly more complicated clusters of living cells (known as “organoids”) for testing cancer drugs. We’ve even made machines (using scanning tunneling microscopes) that can grab and move individual atoms. So it’s not hard to imagine that one day we might be able to scan and then print whole bodies.

The real limitation, though, might not be technological but philosophical . After all, if someone made a copy of you, would it actually be you?

Remember, there’s nothing particularly special about the particles that make up your body right now. All particles of a given type are the same. Every electron is perfectly identical to every other electron, and the same is true for quarks. Particles don’t come out of the universe factory with personalities or any sort of distinguishing features. The only difference between any two electrons or any two quarks is where each of them is and what other particles they’re hanging out with.*

But how much would a copy of you still be you? Well, it depends on two things. The first is the resolution of the technology that scans and prints you. Can it read and print your cells? Your molecules? Your atoms, or even your individual particles?

The even bigger question is how much your “you-​ness” depends on the tiny details. What level of detail does it take for the copy to still be considered you ? It turns out that this is an open question, and the answer might depend on how quantum your sense of self is.

How much information would have to be recorded in order to create a faithful copy of you? Is knowing the location and type of every cell and connection in your body enough? Or do you also need to know the position and orientation of every molecule in your body? Or if you drill down deeper, do you also need to record the quantum state of every particle?

Every particle in your body has a quantum state. That quantum state tells you where the particle is likely to be, what it’s likely to be doing, and how connected it is to other particles. Because you can only say what each particle is likely to be doing, there’s always some uncertainty. But is that quantum uncertainty an important part of what makes you you? Or does it happen at such a small level that it doesn’t really influence important things, like your memories or how you react to things?

At first glance, it seems unlikely that the quantum information in each of your particles would make a difference in making you who you are. For example, your memories and your reflexes are stored in your neurons and their connections, which are pretty big compared to particles. At that scale, quantum fluctuations and uncertainty tend to average out. If you were to subtly scramble the quantum values of a few of the particles in your body, would you be able to tell the difference?

Debating the answer to this question might be more appropriate for a philosophy book, not a physics book, but here we can at least consider the possibilities.

If it turns out that the quantum state of your particles doesn’t play a role in making you who you are, and that simply recreating how your cells or molecules are arranged is enough to make a copy that thinks and acts like you, then this is good news for your next vacation because teleportation gets a lot easier. This means that you just have to record the location of all your small bits and pieces and then put them together in the exact same way elsewhere. This is like taking a LEGO house apart, writing out the instructions, and then sending those instructions to another person to build. Modern technology seems to be well on its way to someday achieving this.

Of course, it wouldn’t be an exact copy of you, which might make you wonder if you’re losing something in the translation.

Would it be like sending a JPEG version of an image instead of the full picture? Would you come out the other end a bit fuzzy around the edges, or not feeling quite like yourself? The loss of fidelity you’re willing to put up with depends on how badly you want to get to the next star system in as short a time as possible.

But what if your you-​ness does depend on quantum information? What if the magic, or the indelibleness of you, lies in the quantum uncertainty of every particle in your body? This sounds like a bit of New Age hocus-​pocus, but if you really want to be certain that the copy coming out the other end of this teleportation machine is exactly the same as you, then you have to go quantum all the way.

The bad news is that this makes the problem of teleportation much harder. Really, anything quantum is hard, but the idea of copying quantum information is doubly hard.

This is because, from a physics point of view, it’s technically impossible to know everything about a particle all at once. The uncertainly principle tells us that when you measure the position of a particle very accurately, you can’t know the velocity, and when you measure the velocity, you can’t know the position. And it’s not just that you can’t know it. It’s much deeper: Information about position and velocity doesn’t simultaneously exist ! There’s an inherent uncertainty in every particle.

The only thing you can know about a particle is the probability that it’s here or there. How, then, do you make a quantum copy with the same probabilities as the original?

Let’s consider the problem of making a quantum copy of a single particle. If you insist that your light-​speed teleportation machine make a copy of you that is absolutely identical to your current self, then this is pretty much your only option.

To copy a particle down to the quantum level means that you want to copy its quantum state. The quantum state of a particle includes the uncertainty about its position and velocity, or about its quantum spin, or any other quantum property. It’s not really a number but more a set of probabilities.

The problem is that to extract quantum information from a single particle, you have to probe that particle somehow, which means perturbing it. Even just looking at something involves bouncing photons off of it. If you shoot photons at an electron, you might learn about its quantum state, but you will also scramble it. This isn’t because we aren’t clever enough or because we haven’t developed a fine enough probe. The quantum “no‑cloning” theorem tells us that it’s impossible to read quantum information without destroying the original.

So how do you copy something that you can’t see or touch? It’s not easy, but one way to do it is using “quantum entanglement.” Quantum entanglement is a strange quantum effect where the probabilities of two particles get linked together. For example, if two particles interact with each other so that you don’t know what their spins are, but you do know that they are the opposite of each other, then the two particles are said to be entangled. If you find that one is spinning up, you know the other one must be spinning down, and vice versa.

Quantum teleportation works by taking two particles, entangling them, and then using them like two ends of a telephone fax line. For example, you can take two electrons, entangle them, and then send one of them to Proxima Centauri. Those two electrons would sit there, still entangled, until you are ready to start the copy process.

From there, it gets a little complicated, but essentially you use the entangled electron you have here to probe the particle you want to copy, and that interaction gives you the information you need to make the electron at Proxima Centauri be an exact quantum copy of the particle you wanted to duplicate.

Amazingly, humans have done this for single particles and even for small groups of particles.* The record so far is making a quantum copy between two points that are 1,400 kilometers apart. That won’t get you to Proxima Centauri yet, but it’s a start.

Scaling this quantum copy machine to more than just a few particles won’t be easy. There are 10 26 particles in your body, so it gets very complicated, very fast. But the point is that it’s possible . 

Is that quantum reassembled person actually you? Well, it would be the most faithful reproduction of you that can possibly be made.

If that’s not you, then who are you?

One potentially sticky part about this idea of teleportation is that it can end up making multiple copies of you. In the case of the low-​fidelity teleportation machine that doesn’t copy quantum information, you might imagine using it to make clones of you. You could scan your body and then beam that information to Proxima Centauri, and then to Ross 128 b (another nearby habitable planet), and then to any number of other planets. In fact, you could start printing copies right here. They might not be exact quantum copies of the original, but they would be similar enough to create all kinds of moral and ethical issues.

Fortunately, there is one saving grace about the quantum copying version of the teleportation machine. The same principles of quantum theory that allow you to copy quantum information also require that the original information be destroyed when it’s copied. Whichever way the technology ends up working, the scanning process would inevitably destroy the original by scrambling all of its quantum information. This means that the copy you send over is the only copy that remains.

To recap, the idea of transporting ourselves somewhere in a proverbial blink of an eye is definitely possible. If you can tolerate a speed‑of‑light transmission delay, and if you accept that a scanned and reassembled version of you is really you, then teleportation just might be in your future.

Of course, we forgot one important caveat: In order to teleport somewhere as described in this chapter, there needs to be a machine on the other side to receive your signal and reconstruct you.

That means that if you want to one day beam yourself to another planet, someone has to first get there the old-​fashioned way: by traveling.

Any volunteers?

Excerpted from Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson. Copyright © 2021 by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Could quantum physics unlock teleportation?

Physicists are making leaps in quantum teleportation, but it's still a long ways from 'Star Trek.'

By Bill Gourgey | Published Oct 20, 2022 11:30 AM EDT

From cities in the sky to robot butlers, futuristic visions fill the history of  PopSci . In the  Are we there yet?  column we check in on progress towards our most ambitious promises. Read more from the series  here .

Jetpacks , flying cars , hoverboards , bullet trains —inventors have dreamt up all kinds of creative ways, from science fiction to science fact, to get from point A to point B. But when it comes to transportation nirvana, nothing beats teleportation—vehicle-free, instantaneous travel. If beam-me-up-Scotty technology has gotten less attention than other transportation tropes— Popular Science ran short explainers in November 1993 and September 2004 —it’s not because the idea isn’t appealing. Regrettably, over the decades there just hasn’t been much progress in teleportation science to report. However, since the 2010s, new discoveries on the subatomic level are shaking up the playing field: specifically, quantum teleportation.

Just this month, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists “for experiments with entangled photons,” according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences , which selects the winners. The recipients’ work demonstrated that teleportation is possible—well, at least between photons (and with some serious caveats on what could be teleported). The physicists— Alain Aspect , John Clauser , and Anton Zeilinger —had independent breakthroughs over the last several decades . The result of their work not only demonstrated quantum entanglement in action but also showed how the arcane property could be a channel to teleport quantum information from one photon to another. While their findings are not anywhere close to transforming airports and train stations into Star Trek -style transporters, they have been making their way into promising applications, including quantum computing, quantum networks, and quantum encryption . 

“Teleportation is a very inspiring word,” says Maria Spiropulu, the Shang-Yi Ch’en professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology , and director of the INQNET quantum network program. “It evokes our senses and suggests that a weird phenomenon is taking place. But nothing weird is taking place in quantum teleportation.”

When quantum mechanics was being hashed out in the early 20th century between physicists like Max Planck , Albert Einstein , Niels Bohr , and Erwin Schrödinger , it was becoming clear that at the subatomic particle level, nature appeared to have its own hidden communication channel, called quantum entanglement. Einstein described the phenomenon scientifically in a paper published in 1935 , but famously called it “spooky action at a distance” because it appeared to defy the normal rules of physics. At the time, it seemed as fantastical as teleportation, a phrase first coined by writer Charles Fort just four years earlier to describe unexplainable spectacles like UFOs and poltergeists.

“Fifty years ago, when scientists started doing [quantum] experiments,” says Spiropulu, “it was still considered quite esoteric.” As if in tribute to those scientists, Spiropulu has  a print honoring physicist Richard Feynman in her office. Feynman won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his Feynman diagrams, a graphical interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Spiropulu equates quantum entanglement with shared memories. “Once you marry, it doesn’t matter how many divorces you may have,” she explains. Because you’ve made memories together, “you are connected forever.” At a subatomic level, the “shared memories” between particles enables instantaneous transfer of information about quantum states—like atomic spin and photon polarization—between distant particles. These bits of information are called quantum bits, or qubits . Classical digital bits are binary, meaning that they can only hold the value of 1 or 0, but qubits can represent any range between 0 and 1 in a superposition, meaning there’s a certain probability of being 0 and certain probability of being 1 at the same time. Qubits’ ability to take on an infinite number of potential values simultaneously allows them to process information much faster—and that’s just what physicists are looking for in a system that leverages quantum teleportation. 

[Related: Quantum teleportation is real, but it’s not what you think ]

But for qubits to work as information processors, they need to share information the way classical computer chips share information. Enter entanglement and teleportation. By entangling subatomic particles, like photons or electrons—the qubits—and then separating them, operations can be performed on one that generates an instantaneous response in its entangled twin. 

The farthest distance to date that qubits have been separated was set by Chinese scientists , who used quantum entanglement to send information from Tibet to a satellite in orbit 870 miles away. On terra firma, the record is just tens of miles , traveling through fiber optic connections and through air (line of sight lasers).

Qubits’ strange behavior—acting like they’re still together no matter how far apart they’ve been separated—continues to puzzle but amaze physicists. “It does appear magical,” Spiropulu admits. “The effect appears very, ‘wow!’ But once you break it down, then it’s engineering.” And in just the past five years, great strides have been made in quantum engineering to apply the mysterious but predictable characteristics of qubits. Besides quantum computing advances made by tech giants like Google , IBM , and Microsoft , Spiropulu has been spearheading a government- and privately funded program to build out a quantum internet that leverages quantum teleportation.  With some guidance from Spiropulu’s postdoctoral researchers at Caltech, Venkata R. (Raju) Valivarthi and Neil Sinclair , this is how state-of-the-art quantum teleportation would work (you might want to strap yourself in):

Step 1: Entangle

Using a laser, a stream of photons shoots through a special optical crystal that can split photons into pairs. The pair of photons are now entangled, meaning they share information. When one changes, the other will, too.

Step 2: Open a quantum teleportation channel

Then, one of the two photons is sent over a fiber optic cable (or another medium capable of transmitting light, such as air or space) to a distant location.This opens a quantum channel for teleportation. The distant photon (labeled photon one above) becomes the receiver, while the photon that remains behind (labeled photon two) is the transmitter. This channel does not necessarily indicate the direction of information flow as the photons could be distributed in roundabout ways.

Step 3: Prepare a message for teleportation

A third photon is added to the mix, and is encoded with the information to be teleported. This third photon is the message carrier. The types of information transmitted could be encoded into what’s called the photon’s properties, or state, such as its position, polarization, and momenta. (This is where qubits come in, if you think of the encoded message in terms of 0s, 1s, and their superpositions.)

Step 4: Teleport the encoded message

One of the curious properties of quantum physics is that a particle’s state, or properties, such as its spin or position, cannot be known until it is measured. You can think of it like dice. A single die can hold up to six values, but its value isn’t known until it’s rolled. Measuring a particle is like rolling dice, it locks in a specific value. In teleportation, once the third photon is encoded, a joint measurement is taken of the second and third photons’ properties, which means their states are measured at the same time and their values are locked in (like viewing the value of a pair of dice). The act of measuring changes the state of the second photon to match the state of the third photon. As soon as the second photon changes, the first photon, on the receiving end of the quantum channel, snaps into a matching state.

Now the information lies with photon one—the receiver. However, even though the information has been teleported to the distant location, it’s still encoded, which means that like an unrolled die it’s indeterminate until it can be decoded, or measured. The measurement of photon one needs to match the joint measurement taken on photons two and three. So the outcome of the joint measurement taken on photons two and three is recorded and sent to photon one’s location so it can be repeated to unlock the information. At this point, photons two and three are gone because the act of measuring photons destroys them. Photons are absorbed by whatever is used to measure them, like our eyes. 

Step 5: Complete the teleportation

To decode the state of photon one and complete the teleportation, photon one must be manipulated based on the outcome of the joint measurement, also called rotating it, which is like rolling the dice the same way they were rolled before for photons one and two. This decodes the message—similar to how binary 1s and 0s are translated into text or numeric values. The teleportation may seem instantaneous on the surface, but because the decoding instructions from the joint measurement can only be sent using light (in this scenario over a fiber optic cable), the photons only transfer the information at the speed of light. That’s important because teleportation would otherwise violate Einstein’s relativity principle, which states that nothing travels faster than the speed of light—if it did, this would lead to all sorts of bizarre implications and possibly upend physics. Now, the encoded information in photon three (the messenger) has been teleported from photon two’s position (transmitter) to photon one’s position (receiver) and decoded.

Whew! Quantum teleportation complete. 

Since we transmit digital bits today using light, it might seem like quantum teleportation and quantum networks offer no inherent advantage. But the difference is significant. Qubits can convey much more information than bits. Plus, quantum networks are more secure, since attempts to interfere with quantum entanglement would destroy the open quantum channel.

Researchers have discovered many different ways to entangle, transmit, and measure subatomic information. Plus, they’re upgrading from teleporting information about photons, to teleporting information about larger-sized particles like electrons , and even atoms . 

[Related: Warp speed space travel just got a tiny bit more realistic ]

But it’s still just information being transmitted, not matter—the stuff that humans are made of. While the ultimate dream may be human teleportation, it actually might be a good thing we’re not there yet. 

The Star Trek television and film franchise not only helped popularize teleportation but also glamorized it with a glittery dissolve effect and catchy transporter-tone. The Fly , on the other hand, a movie about teleportation gone wrong, painted a much darker, but possibly scientifically truer picture of teleportation. That’s because teleportation is really an act of reincarnation. Teleportation of living matter is risky business: It would require scanning the traveler’s information at the point of departure, transmitting that information to the desired coordinates, and deconstructing them at the point of departure while simultaneously reconstructing the traveler at the point of arrival—we wouldn’t want errant copies of ourselves on the loose. Nor would we want to arrive as a lifeless copy of ourselves. We would have to arrive with all our beating, breathing, blinking systems intact in order for the process to be a success. Teleporting living beings, at its core, is a matter of life and death.

Formidable minds, such as Stephen Hawking, have proposed that the information, or vector state, that is teleported over quantum entanglement channels does not have to be confined to subatomic particle properties. In fact, entire blackholes’ worth of trapped information could be teleported, according to this theory. It gets weird, but by entangling two blackholes and connecting them with a wormhole (a space-time shortcut), information that disappears into one blackhole might emerge from the other as a hologram. Under this reasoning, the vector states of molecules, humans, and even entire planets could theoretically be teleported as holograms. 

Kip Thorne , a Caltech physicist who won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for gravity wave detection, may have best explained the possibilities of teleportation and time travel as far back as 1988 : “One can imagine an advanced civilization pulling a wormhole out of the quantum foam and enlarging it to classical size. This might be analyzed by techniques now being developed for computation of spontaneous wormhole production by quantum tunneling.” 

For now, Spiropulu remains focused on the immediate promise of quantum teleportation. But it won’t look anything like Star Trek. “‘Beam me up, Scotty?’ No such things,” she says. “But yes, a lot of progress. And it’s transformative.”

Bill Gourgey is a Popular Science contributor and unofficial digital archeologist who enjoys excavating PopSci’s vast archives to update noteworthy stories (yes, merry-go-rounds are noteworthy).

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Teleportation? Very Possible. Next Up: Time Travel.

Some of the most far-out sci-fi is eminently do-able..

Any science fiction aficionado has seen it all before: beaming through walls, riding in starships that move faster than light, or traveling instantly to distant places in space and time. These ideas aren’t just creative fantasies, though; they emerge from theoretical physics, especially the work of Albert Einstein, whose vision included a universe that curves back on itself in three dimensions of space and a fourth, invisible dimension of time. If Einstein’s version of the universe is correct—and experiments done over the last century suggest that essentially it is—then the fictionalized feats based on his theories might be possible as well. The potential has become so tantalizing that serious physicists now regularly comment on Einstein-based technologies in the most august journals of their field.

One of the most insightful of such speculators is  Michio Kaku , a physicist at the City University of New York. Einstein’s scientific legacy, Kaku points out, has already formed the basis of many incredible inventions, including the laser and the global positioning system. But what would it take to reach the next level, developing such extrapolations of Einstein’s genius as the means to journey through  wormholes ,  teleport  through space, or travel  back and forth in time ? Scientists have already begun the work, and Kaku reports on their progress here.

ANOTHER LOOKING GLASS In science fiction movies like  Stargate  and  Contact , wormholes connect distant points in the universe, allowing people to travel from one spot to another in far less time than the hundreds or millions of years required to make the trip at the speed of light, the greatest conventional velocity. Einstein’s general theory of relativity suggests the possibility of wormholes—literal shortcuts through space-time caused by the curvature of the universe itself. But do wormholes really exist, or are they figments of mathematics?

There are several major problems to face. Many solutions result in “nontraversable wormholes.” As with a  black hole , once you pass the event horizon of such a wormhole, you can never leave it. In 1988, Kip Thorne and his colleagues at Caltech found a possible way out: a traversable wormhole, one through which you could pass freely back and forth. In fact, for one solution, the trip through a wormhole would be no worse than riding in a plane.

There was a catch, though, that made such a wormhole impractical. Gravity would crush the throat of the wormhole, destroying any travelers trying to reach the other side. To stabilize the throat of the wormhole, scientists would need the repulsive force of perhaps the most exotic and speculative entities in the universe: negative mass and negative energy. Conceivably, using either could keep the throat open sufficiently long to allow astronauts a clear passage.

Scientists have looked for negative matter in nature, so far without success. One should note here that  antimatter  and negative matter are two entirely different things. The first exists and has positive energy but reversed charge. Negative matter has not been proved to exist. Negative matter is quite peculiar because it is lighter than nothing. In fact, it floats. Unlike meteors that come crashing into planets, drawn by the planets’ gravity, negative matter would shun large bodies like stars and planets. It would be repelled, not attracted. Hence, although negative matter might exist, we’d expect to find it only in deep space, certainly not on Earth.

Even if we could locate or create negative energy or matter, there is still a big problem: getting and manipulating enough of the stuff. Matthew Visser of Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, estimates that the amount of negative energy needed to open up a one-meter-wide wormhole would be comparable to the mass of Jupiter, except that it would be negative. He says, “You need about minus-one Jupiter mass to do the job. Just manipulating a positive Jupiter mass of energy is already pretty freaky, well beyond our capabilities into the foreseeable future.” It might be millennia before we can even think about harnessing power on this scale.

Yet, if we ever do create them, wormholes could open the door to traveling not just in space but in time as well.

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How Teleportation Will Work

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Sick of those frenzied morning school drop-offs? Longing for a morning commute free of highway road rage and public transit bum stink?

Well, lucky for you, science is working on an answer, and it might just be as simple as scanning your body down to the subatomic level, annihilating all your favorite parts at point A and then sending all the scanned data to point B, where a computer builds you back up from nothing in a fraction of a second.

Sure, it kind of amounts to chunking your kid in a subatomic wood chipper every morning, but just think of all the time you'll save!

It's called teleportation , and you probably know it best from the likes of " Star Trek " and "The Fly." If realized for humans, this amazing technology would make it possible to travel vast distances without physically crossing the space between. Global transportation will become instantaneous, and interplanetary travel will literally become one small step for man.

Doubtful? Consider for a moment that teleportation hasn't been strictly sci-fi since 1993. That year, the concept moved from the realm of impossible fancy to theoretical reality. Physicist Charles Bennett and a team of IBM researchers confirmed that quantum teleportation was possible, but only if the original object being teleported was destroyed. Why? The act of scanning disrupts the original such that the copy becomes the only surviving original.

This revelation, first announced by Bennett at an annual meeting of the American Physical Society in March 1993, was followed by a report on his findings in the March 29, 1993, issue of Physical Review Letters. Since that time, experiments using photons have proven that quantum teleportation is, in fact, possible.

The work continues today, as researchers combine elements of telecommunications, transportation and quantum physics in astounding ways.

Teleportation: Recent Experiments

Human teleportation.

Teleportation experiments cause quite the mess in science fiction, producing inside-out baboons , gene-spliced monsters and dematerialized madmen like nobody's business.

In reality, however, the experiments are thus far abomination-free and overall quite promising.

In 1998, physicists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), along with two European groups, made IBM's teleportation theory a reality by successfully teleporting a photon -- a particle of energy that carries light.

The Caltech team read the atomic structure of a photon, sent this information across 3.28 feet (about 1 meter) of coaxial cable and created a replica of the photon on the other side. As predicted, the original photon no longer existed once the replica appeared.

In order to carry out the experiment, the Caltech group had to skirt a little something called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle . As any boxed, quantum -state feline will tell you, this principle states that you cannot simultaneously know the location and the momentum of a particle. It's also the main barrier for teleportation of objects larger than a photon.

But if you can't know the position of a particle, then how can you engage in a bit of quantum teleportation? In order to teleport a photon without violating the Heisenberg Principle, the Caltech physicists used a phenomenon known as entanglement . In entanglement, you need at least three photons to achieve quantum teleportation:

• Photon A: The photon to be teleported
• Photon B: The transporting photon
• Photon C: The photon that is entangled with photon B

If researchers tried to look too closely at photon A without entanglement, they'd bump it, and thereby change it. By entangling photons B and C, researchers can extract some information about photon A, and the remaining information would pass on to B by way of entanglement, and then on to photon C. When researchers apply the information from photon A to photon C, they create an exact replica of photon A. However, photon A no longer exists as it did before the information was sent to photon C.

In other words, when Captain Kirk beams down to an alien planet, an analysis of his atomic structure passes through the transporter room to his desired location, where it builds a Kirk replica. Meanwhile, the original dematerializes.

Since 1998, scientists haven't quite worked their way up to teleporting baboons , as teleporting living matter is infinitely tricky. Still, their progress is quite impressive. In 2002, researchers at the Australian National University successfully teleported a laser beam, and in 2006, a team at Denmark's Niels Bohr Institute teleported information stored in a laser beam into a cloud of atoms about 1.6 feet (half a meter) away.

"It is one step further because for the first time it involves teleportation between light and matter, two different objects," explained team leader Dr. Eugene Polzik. "One is the carrier of information and the other one is the storage medium" [source: CBC ].

In 2012, researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China made a new teleportation record. They teleported a photon 60.3 miles (97 kilometers), 50.3 miles (81 kilometers) farther than the previous record [source: Slezak ]. Just two years later, European physicists were able to teleport quantum information through an ordinary optical fiber used for telecommunications [source: Emerging Technology from the arXiv].

Given these advancements, you can see how quantum teleportation will affect the world of quantum computing far before it helps your morning commute time. These experiments are important in developing networks that can distribute quantum information at transmission rates far faster than today's most powerful computers.

It all comes down to moving information from point A to point B. But will humans ever make that quantum jaunt as well?

Sadly, the transporters of "Star Trek" and the telepods of "The Fly" are not only a far-future possibility, but also perhaps a physical impossibility.

After all, a transporter that enables a person to travel instantaneously to another location might also require that person's information to travel at the speed of light -- and that's a big no-no according to Einstein's theory of special relativity .

Also, for a person to teleport, the teleporter's computer would have to pinpoint and analyze all of the 10 28 atoms that make up the human body. That's more than a trillion trillion atoms. This wonder machine would then have to send the information to another location, where another amazing machine would reconstruct the person's body with exact precision.

How much room for error would there be? Forget your fears of splicing DNA with a housefly , because if your molecules reconstituted even a millimeter out of place, you'd "arrive" at your destination with severe neurological or physiological damage.

And the definition of "arrive" would certainly be a point of contention. The transported individual wouldn't actually "arrive" anywhere. The whole process would work far more like a fax machine -- a duplicate of the person would emerge at the receiving end, but what would happen to the original? What do YOU do with your originals after each fax?

It stands to reason, then, that every successful bio-digital teleportation would be an act of murder and creation. Each use would see the digitalization of your body's every detail, the creation of a genetic clone complete with all the travelers' memories, emotions, hopes and dreams.

The original copy would have to die; that is, unless we're cool with the notion of duplicating ourselves every time we need to travel cross-country and committing infanticide each time little Jimmy heads to school.

As with all technologies, scientists will surely continue to improve upon the underlying concepts of teleportation. One day, such a harsh vision of life, death and teleportation may well seem barbaric and uninformed. Our ancestors may feel their bodies fade and dematerialize on one world, even as their eyes open on a planet untold light-years away.

Explore the links on the next page to learn even more about quantum physics and teleportation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will teleportation be possible, has teleportation ever been done, how long will it be until humans can teleport, what are the three types of teleportation, lots more information, author's note: how teleportation will work.

Teleportation is one of those "Frankenstein" technologies that terrify us even as they inspire us. Surely, the power to travel instantaneously from New York to Bangkok or from Earth to Alpha Centauri is certainly a power worth grasping after. It could ultimately guarantee the survival of the human race and its peripheral technologies could change fundamentally what it is to be human.

After all, if a machine can digitize everything that's you and rebuild it on the other side of the planet, then why bother with a perfect copy? How about an enhanced copy that's younger, smarter, stronger and happier? Why should you ever worry with getting old when you can simply pass through the teleporter and emerge renewed?

Bio-digital teleportation tempts and haunts us. It's why so many of our sci-fi visions of it involve inherent tragedy and dehumanizing horror. Because if we ever achieve it, we'll have mastered life, death, matter, space and time. Surely, some barrier should stand between humanity and such godhood, right? –- Robert Lamb

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• Emerging Technology From the arXiv. “Quantum Internet: First Teleportation to a Solid-state Quantum Memory.” Feb. 3, 2014. (March 4, 2014) http://www.technologyreview.com/view/524186/quantum-internet-first-teleportation-to-a-solid-state-quantum-memory/
• "First quantum teleportation between light and matter." Phys.Org. Oct. 5, 2006. (March 5, 2014) http://phys.org/news79265847.html
• IBM Research. "Quantum Teleportation." IBM. 1995. (Oct. 30, 2012) http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_project.php?id=2862
• Scientists teleport light to matter for 1st time." CBC News. Oct. 5, 2006. (March 5, 2014) http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2006/10/05/tech-teleport-061005.html
• Slezak, Michael. "Teleportation record heralds secure global network." New Scientist. May 15, 2012. (March 3, 2014) http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21811-teleportation-record-heralds-secure-global-network.html

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Is Time Travel Possible?

We all travel in time! We travel one year in time between birthdays, for example. And we are all traveling in time at approximately the same speed: 1 second per second.

We typically experience time at one second per second. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA's space telescopes also give us a way to look back in time. Telescopes help us see stars and galaxies that are very far away . It takes a long time for the light from faraway galaxies to reach us. So, when we look into the sky with a telescope, we are seeing what those stars and galaxies looked like a very long time ago.

However, when we think of the phrase "time travel," we are usually thinking of traveling faster than 1 second per second. That kind of time travel sounds like something you'd only see in movies or science fiction books. Could it be real? Science says yes!

This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows galaxies that are very far away as they existed a very long time ago. Credit: NASA, ESA and R. Thompson (Univ. Arizona)

How do we know that time travel is possible?

More than 100 years ago, a famous scientist named Albert Einstein came up with an idea about how time works. He called it relativity. This theory says that time and space are linked together. Einstein also said our universe has a speed limit: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light (186,000 miles per second).

Einstein's theory of relativity says that space and time are linked together. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

What does this mean for time travel? Well, according to this theory, the faster you travel, the slower you experience time. Scientists have done some experiments to show that this is true.

For example, there was an experiment that used two clocks set to the exact same time. One clock stayed on Earth, while the other flew in an airplane (going in the same direction Earth rotates).

After the airplane flew around the world, scientists compared the two clocks. The clock on the fast-moving airplane was slightly behind the clock on the ground. So, the clock on the airplane was traveling slightly slower in time than 1 second per second.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Can we use time travel in everyday life?

We can't use a time machine to travel hundreds of years into the past or future. That kind of time travel only happens in books and movies. But the math of time travel does affect the things we use every day.

For example, we use GPS satellites to help us figure out how to get to new places. (Check out our video about how GPS satellites work .) NASA scientists also use a high-accuracy version of GPS to keep track of where satellites are in space. But did you know that GPS relies on time-travel calculations to help you get around town?

GPS satellites orbit around Earth very quickly at about 8,700 miles (14,000 kilometers) per hour. This slows down GPS satellite clocks by a small fraction of a second (similar to the airplane example above).

GPS satellites orbit around Earth at about 8,700 miles (14,000 kilometers) per hour. Credit: GPS.gov

However, the satellites are also orbiting Earth about 12,550 miles (20,200 km) above the surface. This actually speeds up GPS satellite clocks by a slighter larger fraction of a second.

Here's how: Einstein's theory also says that gravity curves space and time, causing the passage of time to slow down. High up where the satellites orbit, Earth's gravity is much weaker. This causes the clocks on GPS satellites to run faster than clocks on the ground.

The combined result is that the clocks on GPS satellites experience time at a rate slightly faster than 1 second per second. Luckily, scientists can use math to correct these differences in time.

If scientists didn't correct the GPS clocks, there would be big problems. GPS satellites wouldn't be able to correctly calculate their position or yours. The errors would add up to a few miles each day, which is a big deal. GPS maps might think your home is nowhere near where it actually is!

In Summary:

Yes, time travel is indeed a real thing. But it's not quite what you've probably seen in the movies. Under certain conditions, it is possible to experience time passing at a different rate than 1 second per second. And there are important reasons why we need to understand this real-world form of time travel.

If you liked this, you may like:

Time Travel: Deutsch vs. Teleportation

• Published: 13 October 2011
• Volume 50 , pages 3903–3914, ( 2011 )

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The quantum teleportation protocol can be used to probabilistically simulate a quantum circuit with backward-in-time connections. This allows us to analyze some conceptual problems of time travel in the context of physically realizable situations free of paradoxes. As an example one can perform encrypted measurements of future states for which the decryption key becomes available in the future. Likewise, the gauge-like freedom of locally changing the direction of time flow in quantum circuits can lead to conceptual and computational simplifications. I contrast this situation with Deutsch’s treatment of quantum mechanics in the presence of closed time-like curves pointing out some of its deficiencies and problems.

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Teleportation, ESP & Time Travel: 10 Tales of Superpowers

Teleportation and Other Fantastic Claims

The idea of people with superpowers is one that has long captivated audiences. Modern-day movies, graphic novels, TV shows and video games are full of fictional stories involving people who have acquired extraordinary and seemingly impossible abilities. The real world has plenty of fantastic claims as well spurring on debate and study.

One person who made fantastic claims was Pedro Ruiz Calderón, a Catholic priest who was brought to trial in Mexico City in 1540. Calderón claimed that he could teleport between continents, make himself invisible, predict the future , make women fall in love with him, find buried treasure, summon and exorcise demons among other abilities. Research by John Chuchiak IV, a professor at Missouri State University, sheds light on his trial.

LiveScience takes a look at superpowers throughout history. Some of them appear impossible while scientists are working on others to make them a reality.

Psychokinesis

Psychokinesis (PK) is the ability to move or otherwise manipulate objects using the human mind . There are two types of psychokinesis , the "macro" and "micro" level. Many have claimed macro abilities — to be able to manipulate of large objects — throughout history. A 19th-century example was Eusapia Palladino who, in an 1892 photograph taken in Milan, and shown here, supposedly levitated a table while researcher Alexandr Aksakov checked for fraud. 

The micro level involves the manipulation of random events using the human mind. Between 1979 and 2007 the PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research) lab in New Jersey studied this phenomenon running detailed statistical analysis. Its researchers found that the human mind has a very slight ability to manipulate random events, a finding that is controversial and debated among scientists. 

Time Travel

Time Travel is an ability which is often featured in science fiction. Through time dilation it is theoretically possible to travel forward in time although the effect wouldn't be significant unless you traveled a vast distance on a very fast spacecraft.

Moving backwards in time is more difficult and scientists are still uncertain as to whether it is even theoretically possible.

There have been claims of people having encounters, of sorts, with the past. On August 4, 1951 two English women on holiday near Dieppe claimed to hear the sounds of the famous World War II battle throughout the night while in their hotel room. They took careful notes and an article describing their case was published in the May-June 1952 edition of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.

Reincarnation

Reincarnation is the belief that when someone dies they are reborn. It's featured in several religions including Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.

There have been cases where young children recall information which some believe to be from past lives they lived. The late Dr. Ian Stevenson, a medical doctor who was head of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, documented and published an estimated 3,000 cases of this over a period of 40 years. He tried to match up these claimed experiences with people who actually died.  

Extra Sensory Perception (ESP)

Extra Sensory Perception, or ESP, is the ability to obtain information through means other than the five senses. Examples of it include telepathy or “mind reading,” as it’s more popularly known. Precognition is another form and involves knowing of a future event ahead of time. Another form is remote viewing, seeing a distant place through paranormal means.

The U.S. military and CIA did research exploring the military and intelligence applications of ESP, particularly remote viewing. Project "Stargate" was a $20-million study started during the Cold War. It was spurred on by reports that the Soviet Union was investigating ESP. Although some claim that there were successful instances of remote viewing the project was shut down in 1995. [ The 10 Most Outrageous Military Experiments

The practice of "dowsing" or "divining" often features a person using twigs or a rod to find a water source. It can, however, be used for other things as well. Pedro Ruiz Calderón, the 16th-century priest, claimed to have been able to find buried treasure using supernatural means, and made a good amount of money selling his abilities. Needless to say modern-day scientists are skeptical that dowsing can actually be done.

(Shown here, an 18th-century depiction from the 1733 book "Histoire Critique des Practiques Superstitieuses.")

Predicting the Future

In many ways predicting the future is not a supernatural power. Economists, climatologists, demographers, all use scientific (or semi-scientific) methods to try to predict the future.

The use of supernatural powers to predict the future, however, has a much longer history. The use of horoscopic astrology, though not based in science, dates back more than 2,000 years and is tailored to the individual.

An ancient astrologer would determine the positions of the planets, sun and moon at the time their client was born. They would then use the information to determine their future.  Researchers reconstructed and published in 2012 the oldest known astrologer's board , found in a cave in Croatia.

Astral Projection

Invisibility

From HG Wells 1897 novel "The Invisible Man" to Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, the ability to make yourself invisible is one that has long fascinated science fiction writers.

Pedro Ruiz Calderón, the Catholic priest put on trial in 1540, claimed to be able to turn invisible. He said that the ability came in handy when he snuck in and out of the bedrooms of his mistresses.  

Although the power seems fantastic scientists are working on technologies that may one day be able to render large objects partly or entirely invisible. Using artificial metamaterials they are developing techniques to bend light. Another effort, published in 2011 in the journal Nature Communications, uses calcite to block off red and green lasers and ordinary white light .

Love Spells

The ability to use supernatural abilities to make someone fall in love with you has ancient origins.

Archaeology Magazine reported on a case from Roman Egypt in which two wax figurines were found in an "erotic embrace." They contained an inscription which read in part "seize Euphemia and lead her to me Theon, loving me with mad desire, and bind her with unloosable shackles, strong ones of adamantine, for the love of me..."

Although modern-day scientists don't believe in love spells some substances, like strawberries, are said to act as an aphrodisiac, increasing sexual desire. [Top 10 Aphrodisiacs]

Teleportation

Teleportation was made famous by the series "Star Trek." People, aliens included, could beam from the fictional starship Enterprise to the surface of a planet in one piece (although transporter malfunctions were occasionally used as a plot device).

In real life Pedro Ruiz Calderón, the priest who went on trial in 1540, claimed to be able to teleport from Mexico to Europe and back again. His claim was laughable since, if he could do that, he could have easily escaped his trial!

Today scientists working in the field of quantum physics are working on teleporting light , with some success . Whether we will ever be able to teleport spaceship crewmembers or warlock priests is another matter. [ Twisted Physics: 7 Mind-Blowing Findings ]

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Owen Jarus is a regular contributor to Live Science who writes about archaeology and humans' past. He has also written for The Independent (UK), The Canadian Press (CP) and The Associated Press (AP), among others. Owen has a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Toronto and a journalism degree from Ryerson University. 

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Time Travel vs. Teleportation

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What superpower would you rather have? Time Travel vs. Teleportation​

Time Travel vs. Teleportation was a Splatfest event in Splatoon 2 . It was held in in North America, Oceania, and Europe from from 18 May 2019 to 19 May 2019 . It was announced on 10 May 2019 at 08:00 UTC in-game. The results were given on 19 May 2019 at 14:00 UTC .

• 3.1 English
• 3.3 French (France)
• 3.4 French (Canada)
• 3.6 Italian
• 3.7 Russian
• 3.8 Spanish (Spain)
• 3.9 Spanish (Latin America)
• 7 Names in other languages
• 9 References
• 10 External links

The full name of each choice was "TIME TRAVEL" and "TELEPORTATION". The team name portion of Splatfest titles was "Time Travel" and "Teleportation".

Time Travel vs. Teleporation featured the 22nd Shifty Station layout, The Chronicles of Rolonium , which predominantly featured Rolonium . [1]

Shifty Station

Results if Time Travel were to win

Time Travel (Tijd) vs. Teleportation (Plaats)

Announcement

French (France)

Time Travel (Temps) vs. Teleportation (Espace)

Spanish (Spain)

Time Travel (Tiempo) vs. Teleportation (Espacio)

Spanish (Latin America)

Time Travel (Viajeros del Tiempo) vs. Teleportation (Teletransportadores)

Official artwork

Official artwork (EU)

Official artwork (NA/OC)

Official artwork (EU Spanish)

Square version of EU Spanish artwork

Official artwork (Dutch)

Team Teleportation win

Team Teleportation win (Dutch)

Team Time Travel icon

Team Teleportation icon

Official Promo artwork for Time Travel vs. Teleportation Splatfest.

Final results

Front view of the Time Travel tee.

Front view of the Teleportation tee.

• The promotional artwork of Pearl and Marina also appears to reference these franchises, with Pearl wearing a coat reminiscent of those worn by several incarnations of the Doctor and Marina wearing a jumpsuit reminiscent of uniforms worn by Starfleet personnel.

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• Speculations

Teleportation vs time travel

By fredreload August 25, 2019 in Speculations

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Teleportation vs time travel both requires the manipulation of space time. Teleportation is like going through space time where time travel is like falling through space time(going in between space time). Is this analogy correct? Or is there other scientific resources relating to this?

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Since that is science fiction you can make up any analogy that you want, it is your tale.

1 hour ago, fredreload said: Teleportation vs time travel both requires the manipulation of space time. Teleportation is like going through space time where time travel is like falling through space time(going in between space time). Is this analogy correct? Or is there other scientific resources relating to this?

Teleportation would be at C and time travel requires faster than C, so magic vs magic, so "Is this analogy correct?" no.

3 hours ago, dimreepr said: Teleportation would be at C and time travel requires faster than C

If it’s sci-fi you can’t conclude that. I could decree that time travel requires 88 mph

13 hours ago, fredreload said: Teleportation vs time travel both requires the manipulation of space time. Teleportation is like going through space time where time travel is like falling through space time(going in between space time). Is this analogy correct? Or is there other scientific resources relating to this?

Teleportation as modern scientists can perform it right now works more like a fax machine than moving particular matter to a new location without crossing space. If modern scientists could teleport you, which they can't, your body would be destroyed and a copy of you would appear at the target location. They can teleport single atoms at this time and it works more like a telephone that rearranges matter than it does moving the actual same atom to a new location. To be able to teleport you with the modern scientific model the same matter that your body is made of would need to exist at the target location so that it could be reorganized to copy you. 

Perhaps when science advances to a greater understanding they would be able to teleport a person without destroying them but right now that doesn't appear likely. Point is that teleportation as science can now perform it is based in quantum entanglement and information transfer with no space traveled between sender and reciever, making it the most secure form of messaging because it can't be intercepted.

This all means that teleportation is more the manipulation of quantum entanglement and physical information than it is the manipulation of space and time. Since teleportation is instant there is no time to manipulate.

Time travel is understood as the relative motion of two objects as they exist separately under differing physical circumstances. (or more than two people or objects) Key factors in time travel are speed, distance/space and forces of gravity. Gravity warps space and time is observed as the passing through space at a determined meter or measure. Speed has the same effect on the observer or the object in motion as the effect of gravity in that they can both be measured and observed to warp the passing of time to an equal measure. You can combine speed and gravity and increase the effect on the passing of time to a greater factor than one or the other on its own. Whether a human body can survive the stresses of these forces so that time travel is possible for them has yet to be proven or disproven except in the case of miniscule differentiations like that observed with the ISS occupants.

Quantum entanglement doesn't allow FTL communication. In point of detail quantum communication involves encryption not because the message bypasses space time but because of the correlation functions of the prepared message which the receiver would require via normal communication means to decrypt. If I have an apple and an orange placed one in each bag then give you a bag without knowing which bag contains the apple or orange. Once you open your bag I would know what is in my bag without opening it. Entanglement is much the same you prepare the entangled states by the process that causes the entanglement. That is the prepared states, you don't know which states are which until you measure it but your probability choices of possible states are determined by the particles possible states and the method of preparedness. This probability with the detection apparatus forms the correlation function of the entangled particles. So like the bag of oranges and apples once you measure one particle you know the other particles state. No communication is required for that. Nor is there any hidden variables nor action needed. {action has specific meaning in physics}

8 hours ago, Art Man said: Since teleportation is instant there is no time to manipulate.

No, you have to transmit the information, so it's limited to being no faster than c.

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