INNSBRUCK,
Austria -- Albert Einstein dismissed it as "spooky," "Star Trek" made
it science fiction, but Austrian scientists say teleportation is a reality.
The dream of teleportation is to be able to travel by vanishing and reappearing instantly at a distant location, as Captain James Kirk and the crew of the starship Enterprise did in the U.S. television series.
The teleportation team at the Institute for Experimental Physics in the Alpine winter resort of Innsbruck is unable to "beam up" either human beings or any other living things.
But what they have succeeded in doing is transferring the properties of a photon--a single particle of light invisible to the naked eye--to another photon, instantly and without any connection or communication between the two.
"We had one photon prepared with well-defined properties. In the experiment, this photon had to disappear and another photon a meter (three feet) away turned out to be a replica of the original," said Anton Zeilinger, the professor of experimental physics who heads the six-member team.
The experiment--reported in the science magazine Nature--may one day lead to quantum super computers which could process information quicker than the speed of light.
Einstein in the 1930s dismissed this aspect of quantum mechanics as "spooky action from a distance" because it suggested something could travel faster than the speed of light--violating the laws of physics.
"What Einstein said basically is that the world cannot be that strange," Zeilinger explained. "We now know that he was wrong. We now know that the world really is that strange."