Whether it’s the sci-fi future of beaming humans across space or the more grounded concept of quantum computing, our visions of teleportation so far have always clung to a central premise: the ability to transport quantum states between distant particles, known as entanglement.
A property first described by Einstein back in the 1930s, entanglement represents some of the most outlandish physics of the subatomic world—specifically, the fact that particles can experience an inexplicable, invisible link across even vast distances.
When the position, orientation, and other properties of a particle are transmitted to an entangled particle somewhere else, the receiving particle immediately takes on the characteristics of the original one. But because of a little-understood property of quantum physics, the original particle spontaneously ceases to exist the instant the information is transferred.
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