[Ramana]

Ramana asked the Naked Scientists:
   
If everything is made of protons, electrons, neutrons.... is teleportation a possibility by dismantling and re-constructing a physical object? In other words, why can't we travel faster than light?

What do you think?

[JP]

Hi Ramana,

The problem with teleportation faster than the speed of light can be illustrated with a simple question: how would you give someone instructions to reconstruct the object on the other side?  You have to send them the blueprints somehow, which is going to be limited by the speed of light.

Teleportation itself (moving an object by dismantling it and reconstructing it at another point) has two problems:
1) Physically, because of something in quantum mechanics called the uncertainty principle, you can't know  all the information about the particles exactly, so exactly reconstructing it would be a problem.
2) Storing the blueprint of all the particles in an object is going to take a huge amount of data--probably more than any computer in existence.  Then you have to send that data to someone, they have to read it, and then they have to reconstruct the object.  Given the requirements on data storage and transfer, even if this is possible, it's a long way off.