Is teleportation possible? Yes, in the quantum world

There are many new effects in quantum physics, and on the face of it quantization is one of the tamest, as we shall see. Yet in a sense it remains the key to all the others, for if everything is quantized, how does any quantity change from one value to another? How does any object get from one place to another if there is not a continuous range of

time–space curved under the influence of mass. Quantum physicists describe a virtual state in which electrons seem to try out instantaneously all possible futures before settling into particular patterns. Quantum behaviour is mysteriously instantaneous.

Ironically, there is a sense in which those words are precisely true: in that experiment the entire multiversal photon is indeed an extended object (wave), while instances of it (particles, in histories) are localized.

A more exotic variant of what is essentially the same idea is the following. ‘A tangible photon is real; a shadow photon is merely a way in which the real photon could possibly have behaved, but did not. Thus quantum theory is about the interaction of the real with the possible.’

Quantum physics tells us that the waves that make up physical objects such as electrons, atoms and molecules are not like water waves or sound waves. They are waves of probability and are purely mathematical structures; they have no physical reality. What makes them physically real is when their probability wave is “collapsed” by an act of observat

On a subatomic level, a single particle can exist as an array of possibilities, in many places at once. This ability to be in many places at once is called superposition.”