Can we teleport solids to a deposit/room/space with physics and AI? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

Can we teleport solids with physics and AI?

Sure, we can. Just take whatever solid object you want to move, load it onto a moving truck with movers and teleport it to your chosen destination. It should arrive within a few days to weeks.

But I’m guessing that isn’t the answer you were looking for.

You were hoping for something more Star Trek like.

Unfortunately, if you believe that this kind of teleportation is likely to happen any time in the foreseeable future, you’ve been seriously misled. “Quantum teleportation” is a real and potentially rather useful phenomenon, but despite what popular science articles may tell you, it has essentially nothing to do with the transporters in Star Trek. So let’s try to clear up some of the confusion.

In real life, teleportation uses quantum entanglement to transfer a physical state from one particle to another. The idea is that if you already have two entangled particles, one in (let us say) Los Angeles and the other in New York, you can use them to transmit information about a third particle.

Basically, we scan the particle in Los Angeles and then reconstruct an exact copy in New York using its quantum state information.

For scientists and engineers, that’s pretty cool. Without teleportation, there would be no way to send a qubit (a unit of quantum information analogous to a bit in a classical computer) from one place to another without physically moving the object that stores the qubit. But with teleportation, a lot of exciting new technologies become possible: unbreakable quantum cryptography, perhaps even quantum computer clusters and a large-scale “quantum Internet” someday.

However, these applications must work within some major physical limitations imposed by quantum mechanics.

* You can never transmit information faster than light.

* Teleportation requires a separate classical communications channel as well as a quantum channel.

* You can’t use teleportation to transfer a physical object. You can only transfer information about the object. So “beam me up, Scotty” wouldn’t work in real life.

* You can’t copy quantum information using teleportation. Once a particle has been scanned by the transmitter, it irrecoverably loses its quantum state.

* The quantum channel is always destroyed. After teleportation occurs, the entangled particles used in the teleportation process are no longer entangled. That means that if you want to transfer a large amount of information, you must have lots of entangled particles on each end of the channel.

* Reconstructing a large object from quantum information alone is really hard. (Yet another reason teleporting people will be impossible for the foreseeable future.)

In conclusion: don’t believe everything you read. Quantum teleportation is an interesting and useful phenomenon, but it’s not Star Trek, and it has essentially nothing to do with AI. If you want to move a large object, your best bet is to use your favorite shipping service.

This question originally appeared on Quora. More questions on Quora:

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