• Question: Do you think that science will go so far that we can create a way to send things to other places (as in teleporters)?

    Asked by Yolo Swaggins to Alison, Hannah, Jonny, MarthaNari, Paul on 23 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Jonny Brooks-Bartlett

      Jonny Brooks-Bartlett answered on 23 Jun 2015:

      At first I would have said that this wasn’t possible. You would have to find a way somehow to move every single particle in your body in the right way to end up in the right place at whatever destination you choose.

      However there is a area of physics called quantum physics. I don’t know much about quantum physics but I know that it has proven that a lot of weird things can happen in nature. Therefore I can imagine that maybe one day it will be possible. I don’t think we’ll be able to achieve it anytime soon though. It’s a very hard problem.

    • Photo: Paul Brack

      Paul Brack answered on 24 Jun 2015:

      I’m not sure who would want to be the first volunteer! After all, our bodies are very finely balanced, so if you left behind just a little bit, it could have some very serious consequences. Definitely a long way off.

    • Photo: Martha Havenith

      Martha Havenith answered on 24 Jun 2015:

      Funny enough, I think if anything like this can work at all, Star Trek probably got it right: You could possibly analyze a structure (say, a chair) precisely on an atom-by-atom level, then take apart the chair’s molecules in one place, and assemble exactly the same structure in another place from the atoms flying around there. It would be like sending the chair (it vanishes in one place and appears in the other), but you wouldn’t actually send the same atoms to the other place, only information about the structure they need to be in. Transmitting information quickly over large distances is most likely easier than sending big swarms of molecules. I agree with Jonny and Paul though, this kind of thing would be hugely difficult, and possibly quite dangerous if it went wrong. I’d give it a few hundred years at least!

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