is it physically possible to teleport an object?

[narcotic]

well, I'm not talking about any living thing (unless you consider vegetables as such..), 'cause even if you could break one apart, and assemble it back perfectly, it'll be dead...
But what about objects, like a chair, a tomato etc.
is it theoretically possible? will it be possible in the future, and how...?

 

[Valkerie]

Watch Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory, when the little boy was put into a television. That's science right there.
You know I hear that black holes consume things and spit them out somewhere else.

Nano technology, manipulation of very small matter, or molecules, etc. particles thereof. You can use the speed of light to move information, like fiber optics or satelites. Put this together and what do you have?

Also consider bio-technology, how fast do our brain cells move in our head? And the communication of nerve systems in the body.

It's possible for smaller things, but like an apartment building, we've yet to see.

 

[Howard]

Certainly, if we ever figure out how to convert energy into mass.

EDIT: And I don't mean by throwing a ball or compressing a spring.

 

[Skyclad1uhm1]

The theory is already there, but in practice they cannot do anything large yet. For a single atom you may be able to reproduce the state in a similar atom in a different place, but to do that to trillions of atoms all at the same time is an entirely different thing. Especially when they all differ from eachother. The movement of every single electron has to be just right, otherwise it fails. And you do not 'teleport' the object that way, you just create an identical copy. To teleport it you would need to turn the original to energy and use that energy to create the new one in a different spot.

 

[iwantanewcomputer]

impossible to scan/detect every atom's exact location and velocity at a single time, and detect their bonds to other atoms(electron position) then pt them back together.

lets see...1 mol H2O weighs 1kg...i weigh ~ 100 kg, I have 6.02x10^25 atoms in me. not happening.

 

[L00PY]

It depends on what you mean by teleport. Your preconceived notion of breaking an object apart into individual atoms and then reassembling them is not teleportation -- it's breaking something apart and reassembling it.

The Wiki defintion is very possible to picture happening in the future. It's defined as "Teleportation is the process of moving objects from one place to another more or less instantaneously, without using conventional transportation."

All you need is a future technology (that isn't present day conventional transportation) that will move an object more or less instantaneously. The "more or less" fudge is what will make "teleportation" possible.

For example, we already have today what might have been considered teleportation 200 years ago. In today's world, if given a sheet of text in the US, I can walk over to the fax room and make it appear anywhere in under a minute. Wouldn't that concept be indistinguishable from teleportation back then?

How does that Clarke quote go... "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." It's an analogous concept.

 

[Shalmanese]

Originally posted by: iwantanewcomputer
impossible to scan/detect every atom's exact location and velocity at a single time, and detect their bonds to other atoms(electron position) then pt them back together.

lets see...1 mol H2O weighs 1kg...i weigh ~ 100 kg, I have 6.02x10^25 atoms in me. not happening.

1 mol of H2O weighs 18 grams...

 

[venk]

Not until we figure out how to get around Heisenberg Uncertainty.

 

[MrDudeMan]

Originally posted by: iwantanewcomputer
impossible to scan/detect every atom's exact location and velocity at a single time, and detect their bonds to other atoms(electron position) then pt them back together.

lets see...1 mol H2O weighs 1kg...i weigh ~ 100 kg, I have 6.02x10^25 atoms in me. not happening.

pass that pipe over here...

 

[Loki726]

Originally posted by: Bigsm00th

Originally posted by: iwantanewcomputer
impossible to scan/detect every atom's exact location and velocity at a single time, and detect their bonds to other atoms(electron position) then pt them back together.

lets see...1 mol H2O weighs 1kg...i weigh ~ 100 kg, I have 6.02x10^25 atoms in me. not happening.

pass that pipe over here...

I get it next!

 

[BitByBit]

If by teleport, we're talking about Star Trek's transporters, then I doubt it.
The idea behind them is that matter is completely converted into energy, then turned back into matter, using data patterns and such.
To me, this amounts to killing the poor soul who gets transported (would you like to be completely turned into energy?), and then creating a clone of that person using the energy obtained from his matter, and the data describing him.
Of course, the above raises certain philosophical issues, but let's not get into that here.

The only way I can see objects getting transported apparently instantaneously is through some force that acts on the individual atoms comprising who or what is getting transported, without of course, blowing the subject apart in the process.

 

[Oifish]

It is possible in theory, because of E=MC^2. That proves that mass and energy are related. But we have no way, yet, of converting mass into energy and vice versa.

 

[Fencer128]

Originally posted by: venk
Not until we figure out how to get around Heisenberg Uncertainty.

That's the crux.

If you're talking about teleporting an object (i.e. with mass) - as opposed to only dealing with massless information (i.e. atomic state, holograms, etc.), then ignoring the issue of duplication, the uncertainty principle seems to be an insurmountable block to accurate reproduction.

Cheers,

Andy

 

[L00PY]

Bah. You don't need to get around the Heisenberg indeterminancy principle at all. You can have teleportation with pocket wormholes.

Even if wanted to limit yourself to "Star Trek" technologies, Heisenberg's most famous principles don't rule it out -- all they do is define the bounds on the accuracy of your measurements. You just have to be willing to accept "reasonable" measurements instead of "exact" ones and your "Star Trek" teleportation is there. Figure out a way of teleportation that involved skewed distributions (say a log normal one), and you might even be able to get an even tighter upper bound on variance of the product of the uncertanties.