This Quantum Mechanics Breakthrough Could Be What Lets Us Teleport And Time Travel Very Soon

Quantum mechanics has a variety of applications, not least of which is in computing. But aspects of this science have other applications too.

And now, scientists believe they're one step closer to using it to perform teleportation, or even time travel.

Quantum mechanics, for those of you in the dark about it, is the study of our universe at the subatomic level. It's the science of how the building blocks of our universe interact, and they often do this in ways that defy traditional physics. One of these interactions is quantum superposition.

Quantum superposition is the ability of a quantum particle to exist in two states at once. The most prominent example of this is Schr?dinger's cat, but there are other ways to look at it too. Consider if you will, a spinning coin. While the coin spins, it could be either Heads or Tails, and there's no way to know which it will be until it stops turning. Quantum superposition therefore would be a coin that never stops spinning, so it's always both heads and tails at the same time.

We've been theorizing and studying quantum mechanics for something like the past century, but it wasn't until recently that we actually managed to demonstrate effects like quantum superposition in a real-life setting. And now, an international team of scientists have managed to put an entire molecule into a state of superposition, which is a huge deal.

Physicist Markus Arndt and his team are the first humans to witness this, a meeting of the quantum and classical worlds. Well, they didn't really "see" it, but they witnessed it in measurements they took during the experiment.

Essentially, the superposed molecule is the largest object ever put into two states at once. "The experiments we do show that very complex things can be prepared in states that you would never believe existed if you saw them for a billiard ball, a man, or a car. But why should nature be different on a small scale? Is quantum physics not valid at the macroscopic scale?" Arndt told Popular Mechanics.

The idea is that we need more study and research into this. The hope though, is that we'll continue to be able to put larger and larger objects into this state of flux, which opens up other avenues.

Shutterstock/agsandrew

For instance, what happens if we can put an entire planet into superposition? Essentially, we're saying it's where it is, and also saying it's somewhere else in the universe. And that lets us theoretically play around with space-time in its vicinity by warping its gravitational waves. And that gives us time-travel, and teleportation.

It could take millennia for this kind of research to come to fruition. But if and when it does we could use this to instantaneously travel across the universe, or at least partways across it. We could even end up reaching our destination in the future, without having actually experienced the passage of time.

It's a lot of work to superpose even a single molecule though. Arndt and his colleagues created a synthetic molecule made of up to 2,000 atoms and a special interferometer to recreate the perfect conditions they needed for the experiment. So even getting to the stage of doing that to a billiard ball could take a long long time.

HG Wells

But at the very least, we now have a sort of blueprint for it. And the technology needed to do this is getting better, as is our understanding of this field of inquiry.

So for now, it's just a matter of letting the brains of the world ponder this all-encompassing question some more, as the tech catches up.