Are there any serious scientific organizations, crack-pots and trekkies not included, who are working on an actual system of teleportation? Because it does not seem out-of-hand impossible, like say time travel, it seems likely that somewhere, someone should be working on this project.
What do you mean by teleportation? If you’re looking for a beam-me-up style transporter, the answer is not really. It’s just not practical: If you want to get an object from Point A to Point B, it’s a lot easier to keep all the pieces-parts together while you move it, than to disassemble it and re-assemble it at the atomic level. The title, however, seems to be referring more to warp drive, or some equivalent way of getting speeds effectively faster than light. Are there any serious scientists working on this? You’re talking to one. (Admittedly, though, most of us are Trekkies, to dome degree.) Don’t get your hopes up: All we’re able to do so far is try to work out some of the theoretical groundwork. Even if everything ends up looking good on paper (and we’re not sure of that yet, and probably won’t be, for a while), it’ll still probably be a few hundred years before we’re able to do any real experiments, and an unknown time after that before we can make a starship out of it.
It’s also interesting to note that Special Relativity tells us quite clearly that hyper-travel, as you call it, is, in fact, time travel. No matter how you do it, and no matter what loopholes in the laws of physics you use, if you can get from Point A to Point B and arrive at B before a photon travelling through vacuum would, then you can use that same method to travel backwards in time.
IBM is working on teleportation.
It should be noted that what IBM seeks to teleport is a “quantum state”, not an actual piece of matter. To actually make a piece of matter disappear in one location and reappear in another, you would have to be able to describe it’s mass in quantum terms, which I don’t believe anyone knows how to do yet (except maybe the theoretical Higgs boson?)
Thanks Chronos, this is something that has been bothering me for years (I really need to get a hobby). I am familiar with the IBM project but I was more interested in the “Star Trek” style beaming(yeah, I’m a trekkie too). You make a good point about it being easier just to move the whole object rather than break it down.
Another childhood fantasy destroyed.