Anyone who has watched any of the good old series, be it Voyager or The Next Generation at two different moments in time will be able to tell you how our current reality is not that far off from the Star Trek universe anymore. Sure, we still can’t travel at the speed of light, never mind ten times faster than it. But so many physics concepts and contraptions that show up in the famous series are more or less part of our current reality.
Talking computers that can receive tasks via voice communication? Do Siri, Cortana and Google Now ring a bell? Those little PDAs they used to read reports are actually something we would call ‘primitive tablets’ of our days. Video and voice calling? Ha, way ahead of you. And those holodecks they have on the USS Enterprise may be a step up from our Microsoft HoloLens and the other VR or AR technologies coming out this year, but it’s still 2016. Star Trek only happens several hundred years in the fictional future, so we’re definitely ahead of track.
The latest news we got from German scientists from the University of Jena only confirm this even further. Their long-term efforts and research in the field of teleportation are starting to yield much more promising results that we could’ve hoped for so early.
Teleportation has been a terribly sought for concept for humanity, strongly apparent, especially during the 20th century. In spite of countless efforts and experiments, no physical object has yet to be teleported anywhere. But while the concept is still baffling scientists at work when it comes to full-fledged objects, it seems that its elusive nature has been decrypted when it comes to anything larger than the quantum scale.
For years, teleportation of data in the form of electrons and light particles has been a known concept that scientists tried to use as basis for further research. But that gave little to no insight regarding how teleportation could be made reality at larger scales, given the elementary particles’ very particular nature.
However, Alexander Szameit and his team recently managed to demonstrate how the concept of teleportation can and exists outside of the quantum realm. However, in order for us to be able to achieve the much sought-after teleportation, a special kind of laser beams should be used. These lasers would help link the information that you wish to transmit to a particular property of the light, resulting in instant transmission.
The only issue with this concept is that it still limits teleportation regarding spatial coordinates; the concept currently functions only on a local basis.
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