Next to warp engines, transporters are among the most prominent technological advances that separate routine operations on a Starfleet vessel and one in operation in space today. While NASA is experimenting with some advanced forms of propulsion, no work has been devoted to developing transporter technology.

As generally presented in hundreds of Star Trek episodes, the general process of "beaming down" goes like this: an object (or person) stands on a transporter pad and is scanned so as to extract all of the information that describes the exact composition of every single atom in their body. This information is then relayed to a destination and used to reconstruct a precise replica of the original. Meanwhile, the original is destroyed in the process.

Think of a fax machine that destroys the original and creates an exact replica at the same time.

Earlier this week Australian physicist Ping Koy Lam and his research team announced that they had replicated — and improved upon — early teleportation research performed at the California Institute of Technology in 1998.

Summarizing his research to the media, Lam said, "We have taken a beam of laser light and completely destroyed it and then made measurements of the destroyed laser beam and then took the measured results to the other side of the lab and reconstructed an exact replica of what we have destroyed.''

Lam's team had teleported an entire laser beam, something that is composed of billions of photons. In so doing they had to destroy and then exactly replicate many billions of individual photons, and do so in a nanosecond.

The exact process employed in this recent demonstration is "quantum teleportation." Quantum teleportation utilizes one aspect of quantum physics known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which states that it is impossible for someone to measure both the position and the speed of an object at the same time. You have to pick one or the other.

If you've watched Chief O'Brien fiddling with the transporters on the Enterprise-D you've heard him refer to the "Heisenberg Compensators" at one point or another.

Utilizing the same approach as the Caltech's researchers, Lam's team used a process called "quantum entanglement" to allow the original laser beam to communicate its exact structure to the laser beam that will replicate it. The two beams communicate via radio waves sent from the original to the replica. All of this happens at the speed of light. The replicated beam and the original beam thus share half of a two-particle entangled state.

It is one thing to teleport photons. Sending atoms is going to be a much more complicated procedure. Yet Dr. Lam feels that someone will do this in the next few years. Meanwhile Lam sees his work as being useful in the information technology business, specifically in the field of data encryption.

As to when a transporter capable of teleporting humans from one location to another will come online, one can only guess. Viewers of Enterprise recall that in the year 2151 transporters are still something people would rather avoid using if at all possible.

If you are going to do this with a human, this is something you have to get right the very first time.

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