Beam Me Up, Scotty!

28m

Whether you’re stuck in traffic, waiting at the airport whilst delay after delay is announced or just really missing someone far away, a lot of us have probably wished we could teleport. But is this superpower the stuff of science fiction? Or could it, one day, become a reality?

Listener Faith wants to know whether Star Trek’s Transporter could ever deconstruct and reconstruct humans in the real world, and it turns out quantum physics holds some tantalising potential for this seemingly impossible task. To search for answers Hannah and Dara dive down the quantum rabbit hole, exploring entanglement, superposition, and trying on some very special socks.

Contributors
Ivette Fuentes - Professor of Quantum Physics at University of Southampton
Winfried Hensinger - Professor of Quantum Technologies at the University of Sussex
Helen Beebee - Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds

Producer: Emily Bird
Executive Producer: Sasha Feachem
A BBC Studios Production

Press play and read along

Runtime: 28m

Transcript

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Speaker 3 You're about to listen to a brand new episode of Curious Cases. Shows are going to be released weekly, wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 3 But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes first on BBC Sounds.

Speaker 3 I'm Hannah Fry. And I'm Dara O'Brien.
And this is Curious Cases. The show where we take your quirkiest questions, your crunchiest conundrums, and then we solve them.
With the power of science.

Speaker 3 I mean, do we always solve them?

Speaker 2 I mean, the hit rate's pretty low.

Speaker 3 But it is with science.

Speaker 2 It is with science.

Speaker 3 Do you know the way the things you think? Why haven't they invented this? Right. Yeah.
And I'm hoping that if we say them, then people will go and invent them.

Speaker 3 Do you know the greatest invention I ever heard of? Tell me. It's called the back home button.
Right. Yeah.
Do you got any of the technical...

Speaker 3 The technical details are somebody else's problem.

Speaker 3 It was raised more as a kind of a philosophical, What would you give if you, at the end of an evening, could just press a button and then be instantly transported, not just to your home, like, but like properly underneath the duvet, all cuddled up.

Speaker 3 And then you go there, go and find the home. Like, dear Scrad.
You know, you stumble out of the club, you know. You do.
I do. And then bits are still pounding in your head, but

Speaker 3 then you're going to navigate your way back and buses and taxis or whatever you're doing.

Speaker 3 I think it's when you've been on a work trip and you're in some airport getting like budget airline home, what I would give for a back home button right then, yeah, I think it is all my worldly possessions, apart from my actual home and the duvet.

Speaker 3 Yeah, just

Speaker 3 leave me the bed. Yeah, press the button and get home and you don't have a home anymore.
That would do it. And I know actually that's teleportation.
Yeah, that's what that's what it will require.

Speaker 3 We have got a question that aligns with this topic because Faith has written into curiouscases at bbc.co.uk and here's what she had to say.

Speaker 5 Hello, Curious Cases. My name is Faith.
I'm 13. And I would like to know if a Star Trek transporter would ever actually work.

Speaker 5 Is it possible to physically deconstruct someone and put them together in a different place, like in Star Trek?

Speaker 5 Or is this completely science fiction?

Speaker 3 Fate, thank you Faith, has made this question sound more scientific than I mean. Well you know what?

Speaker 3 If we're going to go down the science road, because this is a science podcast, I think there's only one bit of science which we should turn to and that of course is the quantum world.

Speaker 3 And luckily for you Faith and Dara combined, we have got not one but two amazing quantum experts joining us. Yes, quantum computing expert Professor Winfried Henzinger.

Speaker 3 What an excellent name for a quantum physicist. Absolutely.
It sort of can be anything until you observe it.

Speaker 3 Oh, and you observe it, and you go, that is, wow, that feels like a 1930s quantum physicist. Professor Winfried Henzinger from the University of Sussex, he is.

Speaker 3 And Professor Yvette Fuentes, quantum physicist at the University of Southampton.

Speaker 3 Thank you both for joining us. Are you both, by the way, science fiction fans? Yes.

Speaker 6 100%.

Speaker 6 That's how it started for me, actually.

Speaker 3 Oh, same for me. Oh, really? Oh, that's great.
It feels like that's our best example of teleportation.

Speaker 6 So Faith asked about teleportation. So that I, in primary school, asked my mom, what do I need to study to build a teleportation device?

Speaker 6 And so I decided in primary school that I would study physics based on the very question your listener has just asked.

Speaker 3 Well, Faith is 13, so I'm afraid she's late by about

Speaker 3 two years. I'm joking, Faith.
I'm joking. The perfect time to ask this question, Diaz, and yourself as well.

Speaker 7 I also felt very connected to the situation because

Speaker 7 when I was maybe nine or ten, Star Wars came up, and I've never seen a film like that. And I went to the cinema and I came out jumping, thinking, like, oh my god, I want to be on a spaceship.

Speaker 7 I can understand her passion.

Speaker 3 Delighted to put this in that context of fangirling, fanboying over this this as an idea. Because

Speaker 3 you're both working quantum mechanics.

Speaker 3 Can either view. And this is, I know, a ridiculous death.
Some of quantum mechanics for us in a couple of sentences.

Speaker 7 Well, quantum mechanics is the physics that describes very small particles like electrons and atoms, but it's very different to the physics that we know, that we call classical physics, Newton's laws.

Speaker 3 Also, a branch of physics which tends to be counterintuitive, surprising, would you say?

Speaker 6 100%.

Speaker 6 I mean, I would take this one a step further and say this is the very foundational theory describing everything. And it is super counterintuitive.

Speaker 6 There's lots of really counterintuitive things in this theory, such as that two objects can somehow be connected, even for the other end of the universe.

Speaker 6 Or one object can be two different places at the same time. That's the idea of superposition.

Speaker 3 So hang on, is quantum physics the right bit of science that we need for teleportation? And before you answer, please say yes, because we've got no other guests.

Speaker 3 Definitely, yes. Absolutely.
Okay, good.

Speaker 3 So why? Why? What is it that you can use for this ridiculously almost impossible task?

Speaker 7 Okay, because quantum teleportation uses entanglement, and entanglement is a property of quantum systems.

Speaker 3 Okay, and what is that property?

Speaker 7 Okay, so let me explain what entanglement is using an example that was used by John Bell. So John Bell wrote a very important theorem about quantum mechanics, and he had a student called Bertelmann.

Speaker 7 He always wore one sock green on one foot and a red one on the other. So if you wanted to see what socks he was wearing, you would see a green one on his right shoe.

Speaker 7 You immediately knew that on the other leg he had the other color. John Bell used Bertelmann socks to explain what classical correlations are.
Actually, I know Bertelmann, and he's 80 years old now.

Speaker 7 He still has one red and one green one.

Speaker 3 But wait, did you only ask him to show you one leg so you could infer what the other sock was when you met him? Yes. Okay, good.

Speaker 7 So I thought that maybe we could talk about entanglement if Hannah wants to play Bertaman's socks. Sure.

Speaker 7 We have a bunch of socks, red and green, and we talk in the morning and you tell me, like, I'm going to wear red and then I wear green.

Speaker 7 Okay, and let's say we come every day here to work, and every time we show our socks, it gets a little boring, right?

Speaker 7 Because Monday you have red and I have green, but then Tuesday, because we agreed, I'll have green and you'll have red.

Speaker 7 And every single day we have this, we call it correlation because they're somehow connected. But this is all classical.

Speaker 7 Now imagine that we have these sort of, I don't want to call them magical, but well, why not? Let's call them some special socks. They're quantum socks.

Speaker 7 The socks are red and green in a superposition at the same time. So you don't even know which one are they when I look at them.

Speaker 7 Half of the time they will be red, and half of the time they will be green. So because our quantum socks were made by the same person,

Speaker 7 mine are the same. So when we come to work, they will ask you to show your socks, and then yours will be, let's say, red, and mine will immediately be green.

Speaker 7 So you ask, how is this different from the classical game that we were playing, right? Well, it's different that your socks are red and green at the same time until they're measured.

Speaker 7 But in the moment that the rest of the team sees them, mine changes color

Speaker 7 immediately.

Speaker 3 So there's like the sort of uncertainty in what color they are until someone looks at them, at which point all of that uncertainty collapses in both my socks and yours exactly right yes so that's very different right to what we're used to we don't see that happening with normal socks just gonna say that i don't wear socks i wear a box with a cat in it uh and

Speaker 3 and i walk around all day with the box and the cat in it i don't have

Speaker 3 how is it doing we don't know i've got to check live

Speaker 3 we don't know i must check i mean sometimes you can feel it moving around but sometimes you can't but you know it could still be there i'm sorry am i confusing our our quantum metaphors here?

Speaker 3 Is the cat gold Schrödinger? Yeah, the

Speaker 3 but wasn't the whole point of Schrodinger's cat, not that it was like, hey, guys, look, here's a way to explain it. Wasn't it a way to sort of ridicule the absurdity

Speaker 3 of quantum? Like, guys, if you think of the implications of this,

Speaker 3 then this is the sort of situation that you would have. The ridiculous scenario where a cat is both alive and dead.
And obviously, that can't be true.

Speaker 7 That's what I was very worried.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 7 He was very worried. He really didn't like it.
And he used that example to see: see, look, if particles can be in a superposition of two different situations, quantum mechanics makes no sense.

Speaker 7 It's absurd. How could we have a cat being dead and alive at the same time?

Speaker 3 But it failed as a piece of ridicule because it is that. Yeah, but I mean, but also,

Speaker 3 this is absurd. Are you sure? Like, are you sure this is what's going on? It doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 6 So we do experiments every day at my PhD students in the lab every day see all of that happening.

Speaker 3 not with cats but with atoms because presuming the point of the Bertelmann socks is that Bertman can walk away can walk away to the other side of the planet can walk away to Alpha Centauri can walk away to the you know surface of a distant moon and the minute you check the socks near you his socks immediately

Speaker 7 pick a side the distance doesn't matter and also they don't have to talk like in the classical situation no i explained that like hannah and i would have to talk on the the phone and agree.

Speaker 7 If you wear red,

Speaker 7 but with the quantum, you don't need to agree in that way.

Speaker 3 Tell me what brings us back to the teleportation.

Speaker 7 So, first of all, let me tell you what we teleport. Because if you're a fan of Star Trek, you might think that what you're teleporting are the atoms, no?

Speaker 7 So, the typical teleportation protocol in Star Trek is that you go into a machine and then suddenly you disappear and you appear somewhere else.

Speaker 7 So, that looks like your atoms actually went from one place to another. But actually, we don't teleport matter.
What we teleport is just the information of the matter.

Speaker 7 So let's say, for example, that I have a particle and it has a property that is pointing up or down. So classically, it would be either up or down.

Speaker 7 But quantum mechanically, it's in the superposition of up and down. So what we teleport is that information in the superposition.
In what combination of of up and down it is.

Speaker 3 And at the end of whatever you make the observation, you observe, you measure, you test, the very first one makes the second one, the far away one, switch to being essentially a copy. Yes.

Speaker 3 Yeah, because its properties are the same as the first one. Yes.
Okay, so that would, so now you have, it's not teleportation, I suppose.

Speaker 3 We'll keep moving away from teleportation, as we know from the movies, but now you've got two identical copies of this electron. Yes.

Speaker 3 But you're teleporting information there rather than actual things, aren't you? you? Yes. I mean, like, going back to your socks thing, which I loved.

Speaker 3 You know, I'm sort of imagining this digital pair of socks, which is like swirling different colours until it gets settled.

Speaker 3 You know, okay, sure, like, you can settle my pair of socks and immediately yours settle, and there's information that's teleported. But can you teleport actual objects?

Speaker 7 No.

Speaker 3 Even like subatomic objects.

Speaker 7 No, that's the, that's, I'm sorry to be like the fun killer.

Speaker 7 I would love that, but we can't do do that. So let's say again with the game with the socks, we cannot teleport like my socks into your house.

Speaker 7 What we teleport is just the information about what is the state of the sock. Is the sock red or green or in a superposition, but not the sock itself.

Speaker 6 But I mean, maybe it's helpful to think about what we are.

Speaker 6 So essentially we are just made out of atoms, right? So

Speaker 6 you're essentially pretty much mostly water and a bunch of other stuff, right?

Speaker 6 So at the end of the day, like what makes us distinct from just a bunch of water and a bunch of other stuff? That's the first question you have to ask.

Speaker 6 And what makes us distinct is actually the quantum state. Right.
So so the state of the atoms is what makes makes it important.

Speaker 6 And the good news is that we can teleport the state of one atom at a time. That works.

Speaker 7 And now people have already started actually do something really crazy and that is to entangle or create superposition of macroscopic objects too so what's the largest object that has been teleported there's been able to teleport a group of atoms and let's say like 10 to the 13 atoms that's loads that is a lot how many are there anything you know what that is like the size of a small particle like a dust particle

Speaker 7 That's what we've been able to teleport.

Speaker 7 And remember the information of it, right? But not from one one star to another, but from a small place in the lab to another

Speaker 7 that is like a meter, let's say, maximum.

Speaker 3 Okay, I mean, look, it's a star.

Speaker 3 It's a star.

Speaker 3 That's a lot. It's 10 to the 13 atoms.

Speaker 3 How many are there in a human? 10 to the 27,

Speaker 3 which is not, by the way, twice as many. That is

Speaker 3 many, many times. Many, many, many, many, many times 10.

Speaker 3 Also, presumably a lot more screaming would be involved. Yeah, I mean, yeah.
I mean, let's get to the out part of all this. But the on the other side, what are you building the replica out of?

Speaker 7 So you would have to have a copy of all, let's say, if we're made of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, you would have to have the same sort of ingredients, let's say, on the other side.

Speaker 6 And that's kind of how OSPOC spins down like on the Enterprise, right? Having a bunch of atoms on the Enterprise and a bunch of atoms on the planet.

Speaker 6 And what we need to do is we need to read out this quantum state of the atoms on the enterprise. And then essentially, there is what's called, unfortunately, a no-cloning theorem.

Speaker 6 So we can't clone a person by teleporting them. Now, the only way I can determine the quantum state of that being on the enterprise is actually, we have to measure that.

Speaker 6 We have to open the box, right? And when we open the box, we have to, unfortunately, destroy the quantum state. And so, bang, Scotty isn't anymore on the Enterprise.

Speaker 6 He is gone because we measured his quantum state of the atoms that made up Scotty.

Speaker 6 And so now we need to take atoms on the planet, we need to inscribe the quantum state into these atoms to then recreate Scotty.

Speaker 3 You have to have the stuff there. You can't say teleport gold to give yourself a second pile of gold, if you know what I mean.

Speaker 7 That would be really nice, but unfortunately, we're not going to have to.

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 would you tell us if you developed that teleportation? I'm not very sure I would.

Speaker 3 Do you think we're ever going to get to human then? Do you think we'll ever get to human size?

Speaker 6 I think it's hard.

Speaker 6 Never say never, because some of our really clever listeners who are listening right now, including a listener who asked the question, may just decide, I'm just gonna invent that, I'm gonna do that.

Speaker 6 Things that people thought are completely impossible to achieve, we are doing nowadays.

Speaker 6 On the other hand, I should also say that with the understanding we have right now and the technologies we use right now, it would be very, very difficult or impossible.

Speaker 7 We don't know how to do it right now.

Speaker 3 I mean, but look, all I heard was never say never. So that's that's our

Speaker 7 and that's why I wanted to know and the other thing is that we don't know like how gravity and quantum mechanics fall together so our theory isn't complete and maybe details details you know maybe later we can

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Speaker 3 Okay, here's the question though, right? Let's say, let's say that we managed to do this. I'm feeling better about it than I was earlier.
Would we want to do it?

Speaker 3 What does it mean to teleport an actual human? Well, joining us, we have Philosopher of Science, Professor Helen Beebe from the University of Leeds, with us in the studio.

Speaker 3 Are there alarms going off for you about this idea? I mean, talk to us. Well, not so much alarms, but I think there's a really puzzling question about...

Speaker 3 So as Winfrey's said, you know, when you beam Captain Kirk from the USS Enterprise to the planet, you're not transporting any matter. You're just,

Speaker 3 in some sense, reproducing Captain Kirk on the planet. And unfortunately, the original...

Speaker 3 becomes deceased at that point. But there are two ways we could think about this, right? One is you've killed Captain Kirk and made a completely new person who isn't Captain Kirk at all.

Speaker 3 It's literally a different object.

Speaker 3 Or you could think that somehow what's important to the identity of Captain Kirk is not the stuff he's made of, but the information, in which case he's kind of moved from the ship to the planet.

Speaker 3 And it's just, at least when it comes to people,

Speaker 3 I think most of us are just kind of a bit conflicted. We're not sure what to say.
So like if you think about a sort of a non-sciencey case, right?

Speaker 3 So I leave my coffee cup on the table in the living room, and Hannah comes along and accidentally, you know, smashes it to bits with a hammer. And

Speaker 3 that's the kind of thing I do. And then thinks, oh, Hella might be a bit annoyed about that.
Maybe I better, I know what that mug looked like.

Speaker 3 I'm going to whip out my potter's wheel and make an exact duplicate of it.

Speaker 3 So, you make an exact duplicate of it, you stick it in the kitchen cupboard, and then I get home and I find the coffee cup, and I think, oh, that's weird.

Speaker 3 I could have sworn I left that on the living room table. It must have moved.

Speaker 3 now I'd be wrong right the coffee cup has not moved from the table to the cupboard the original coffee cup has gone and a new cup is in the cupboard that's just the way we think about coffee cups right there's no sense in which the cup has moved from the table to the cupboard I'm just mistaken about that but if you think about something like I know text messages right so I've got my phone set up so that when my text message I send you a text message at the moment it arrives with you it disappears from my phone we think of them differently right it's like I sent you a text message.

Speaker 3 It sort of in some sense moved from my phone over here to your phone over there. We do think of that as, well, that's the same text message.
So now there's a question, kind of like, are people

Speaker 3 like more like text messages or are they more like coffee cups? Because in a sense, what we've done to Captain Kirk is exactly what we did with the coffee cup, right?

Speaker 3 You destroy the original, you make a new one.

Speaker 3 Do we think it's a new person who isn't captain kirk at all he just mistakenly thinks he is because of course from his point of view it's like oh one minute i'm on the ship oh next minute i'm on the planet marvelous but from the original captains kirk's point of view it might be a bit like oh you're going to kill me but i'm not sure i'm happy about that but then i also wonder though okay the difference between the coffee cup and the text messages that the text messages is about information traveling rather than necessarily physical atoms and I sort of wonder about in the Captain Kirk example for me there's a lot about like

Speaker 3 if it is the same person, they should retain the same memories. Yeah, I think that's kind of the question, right? What is it that's important for our own identity as people?

Speaker 3 Is it the stuff we're made of, so that if you do the transporter being with Captain Kirk, it's like the coffee cup, or is it the memories, the aspirations, the character, all of which I take it would be preserved?

Speaker 3 And it doesn't really matter that I've just assembled, in a sense, reassembled you out of a bunch of stuff lying around on the planet. It's still going to be you.

Speaker 3 Is it the physical stuff or is it the information that makes us human? It feels like we have got very deep here. So, what do you think of it? Is it the same Captain Kirk?

Speaker 3 Is he going to remember where he lifted

Speaker 3 khakis?

Speaker 7 I'm not very sure. I think we don't know yet if everything we are are just a bunch of atoms and let's say fields and information.

Speaker 7 I think this is one of the big philosophical questions that people take different perspectives.

Speaker 7 Maybe people that are religious as well would have a different point of view, which is also valid, to say, are we just a bunch of atoms? Are we just made of matter? Or is there something else?

Speaker 7 I mean, something interesting also to think about is that when we were children, of course, we were also made out of atoms, but those atoms are not the same atoms now. So what makes us?

Speaker 3 The mind-blowing questions the kid was, would they say, your cells regenerate after X number of weeks or months, so it's not you. I mean, it's a bit super thesis,

Speaker 3 sugar babe's uh paradox of uh

Speaker 3 we all have our own favorite

Speaker 3 sugar babes is the proper philosophical uh the yeah but it is the uh but the notion that we aren't really the same thing anyway i think it's just to earth this a philosophical discussion could we just try to learn to teleport a coffee cup first before we start worrying about how we teleport our own consciousness like that surely there is a distinction there between what we could or could not teleport depending on our consciousness on it having a consciousness well all i'm saying here is uh the price that you pay for the back home button suddenly suddenly went up it's like yes yes the price you're paying is uh not being sure whether you really are yourself anymore i mean outside the nightclub as people just collapse into a heap dead uh and they're and their actual copy then are fine uh sitting at home oh yeah would you transport your hangover that's uh oh that's a very good point actually yeah if you recognise that then the quantum state of the hangover

Speaker 7 would you volunteer to be teleported i'm i'm all right thanks

Speaker 6 after watching the fly of what was that film, like I think we all kind of

Speaker 3 airline fly home. Thanks very much.

Speaker 3 It does feel that you need one person somewhere else. You need a pile of skin and bone cells sitting somewhere else, and you need some sort of extra.

Speaker 3 And then you need a 3D printer that basically gets all the squelchy stuff and goes

Speaker 3 and prints up the person while the person is going, so what do I do now? Or you just die. You just die.
That's what you do.

Speaker 3 We can agree that you can use it for quantum computing. Okay.
In what way do you use it and what does it do?

Speaker 6 So, what is should I start by even explaining what a quantum computer is? Probably

Speaker 3 most people don't know. How does that even know what we have?

Speaker 6 So, a normal computer processes information in bits.

Speaker 6 So, essentially, like I put some number in that is a string of zeros and ones, and that's being computed inside a processor, and out comes the answer.

Speaker 6 So, for example, if I want to multiply two numbers, I put them in as two as true strings of zeros and ones, and it be it's being using logical logical gates inside a process.

Speaker 3 It's basically a switch to T or one

Speaker 6 Exactly.

Speaker 6 And so in a quantum computer, that's a little bit different because now suddenly we have quantum bits. So a quantum bit is not zero or one.
A quantum bit can be zero and one at the same time.

Speaker 6 And now we're going to make user superposition to encode a lot of information in a relatively small memory. And the quantum processor now does all these calculations simultaneously.

Speaker 6 And so you can see how the fact that you you have a quantum bit enables a whole different way to do computation by doing all these calculations simultaneously.

Speaker 6 And so that allows us, for example, in a quantum computer to solve problems that would even take the fastest supercomputer in the world millions or billions of years to solve.

Speaker 6 A quantum computer could possibly solve that in an hour. And so what we're talking about is creating new pharmaceuticals, understanding processes in nature much better, breaking encryptions.

Speaker 3 The example that I heard and really liked was: if you imagine a maze, you know, like the kind of ones that kids do, right, when they're drawing.

Speaker 3 If you have a classical computer doing it, it's like, okay, here we go, right, let's check this one and then we'll go this direction.

Speaker 3 No, it didn't work. Okay, let's go back to the BNA, check this one.
It has to check every single route once, one at a time.

Speaker 3 Whereas a quantum computer is more like taking a big bucket of water and like chucking it in at the top and allowing the water to drip through, testing every single possible route simultaneously.

Speaker 3 So it means that the combinations that you have to run through just disappear.

Speaker 6 Exactly. That's exactly right.
And that's exactly right. You only get one answer at the end, but it's the right answer.
It's essentially the shortest way to make it to the labyrinth.

Speaker 3 But why, and how teleportation? How teleportation?

Speaker 6 So imagine like you have this quantum processor. Imagine you have hundreds or thousands of millions of atoms or qubits, each one of them carrying a particular function.

Speaker 6 Sometimes you might want to just quickly get the answer from that part of the quantum computer over to the other side of the quantum computer and actually can do this immensely fast doing teleportation.

Speaker 6 And while teleportation is really hard when teleporting a person, it's actually very straightforward and very easy to do with individual atoms.

Speaker 6 And so it's immensely effective to move information very fast across your quantum computer and share that information in such a way to drastically speed up the operation of a quantum computer and make it really fast.

Speaker 3 Yvette, we do have quantum teleportation. We use quantum teleportation.

Speaker 7 Oh, yes, another place where we use teleportation is in satellite based quantum communications.

Speaker 7 People can do quantum teleportation to send messages from one part of the planet to another, to teleport across thousands of kilometers.

Speaker 7 So we were talking at the beginning how we thought about quantum mechanics applies to the very small, but our experiments are now showing us that this is no longer true.

Speaker 7 And one of the things we don't know is where does this stop?

Speaker 7 Can we go even to longer and longer distances? Or can we have more and more massive systems still in the quantum states? So we don't really know when quantum mechanics starts and when it ends.

Speaker 3 So here's what I'm hearing. Distance, no problem.
Size, kind of a problem. You know, we're getting there.
Theoretically, absolutely possible to teleport a human. Practically,

Speaker 3 impossible. Philosophically, extremely questionable.

Speaker 3 That's right. I think the summary of where we're right.

Speaker 3 Helen, you're not raising any objections to photons, I see, and electrons going.

Speaker 3 That feels something we're okay with that, are we? I mean, I do want to know what happens when

Speaker 3 you teleport Captain Kirk, when you get to the point when the physicists have worked out how to do that, and you destroy Captain Kirk because you've destroyed the quantum. Is it going to hurt?

Speaker 3 Does that hurt? What happens?

Speaker 6 That's a very good question because now we're getting to the engineering detail of doing this.

Speaker 3 And that, I think, is episode two.

Speaker 3 I feel it is. I mean, I think basically we keep the bits of Captain Kirk, but we need to transport him back again.

Speaker 3 We just keep him as a pile of atoms in the corner. Yeah, exactly.
And he's got most of the same bits. I mean, like,

Speaker 3 oh my God, that went in all sorts of directions. But the answer, Faith, is, I mean, sort of, yes.
Just

Speaker 3 seems to be a good idea. No one's going to volunteer to try it.
But also, no.

Speaker 3 I think so. Thank you to all of our guests, Winfried Hensinger, Yvette Fuentes, and Helen Baby.
Thank you very, very much.

Speaker 3 You're pressing the button? Yeah, but all I'm doing is sending me a a coffee cup pump. That's the, you know.

Speaker 3 You're just texting saying I'm going to be three hours on the plane. Yeah, so I'm just going to send, I'm going to send me a mug back because apparently I can do that, but I can't send me back.

Speaker 3 So you could send your luggage back. That's true.
That'd be handy, and then it might be easier for you. That would be.

Speaker 3 That would be.

Speaker 3 Or you could send the bed to you.

Speaker 3 That. Okay, we worked that out.
That's good. The bed goes to you and you sleep outside the club.

Speaker 3 Solved. Who needs quantum physics? Ah, you're right.

Speaker 3 If you want to be notified as soon as a new episode is released, make sure you're subscribed to Curious Cases on BBC Sounds and have push notifications turned on.

Speaker 4 Hello, I'm Greg Jenner. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me.
We are the comedy show that takes history seriously and then we laugh at it. And in our latest series, we've covered lots of global history.

Speaker 4 We've done the American War of Independence. We've done Empress Matilda and the Medieval Anarchy.
We've done Alexandre Dumas, the French writer, the Kellogg Kellogg brothers, and the health farm.

Speaker 4 We looked at the lives of Viking women, Renaissance-era beauty tips. We jumped to 18th century India and also to ancient Alexandria.

Speaker 4 We looked at the life of Hannibal of Carthage, who fought the Romans, and we've done Marie Antoinette and a big birthday special for Jane Austen.

Speaker 4 Plus, there's 140 episodes in our back catalogue, so if you want to laugh while you learn, the show is called You're Dead to Me and you can find us first on BBC Sounds.

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