What If You Could Teleport Anywhere Just by Blinking?

It's the middle of the night, and you're standing on a mountain you don't even know the name of, in your pajamas, in the snow. This week you've been to almost every country on Earth... and right now, you can't remember how to get home. From now on, you can close your eyes, picture a place, blink twice, and be there. Instantly. School is one blink away (with time for a croissant in Paris), lunch is tacos in Mexico City, dessert is gelato in Rome, and you watch the sun set twice in one day. But if the picture in your head is blurry, you might end up somewhere close... or in a stranger's kitchen while he eats his cereal. We follow the consequences all the way: the fun, the clever uses, a delivery business, jet lag without a plane, ears that won't stop popping, never being dressed for the weather, a phone that never stops buzzing, and what happens to a place when you stop paying attention to it. Plus the real science of teleportation: quantum teleportation of photons, the Micius satellite, the "is it still you?" problem, the staggering amount of information in one human body, body clocks and jet lag, the Arctic tern, and how homing pigeons find their way home. So... would you want to be able to teleport? Tell us in the comments. 00:00 Lost on a mountain at night 00:25 The postcard 00:46 The rules 01:21 School by blink (and a croissant in Paris) 01:35 Lunch around the world 01:49 Ridiculous weekends 02:06 Homework, front-row seats 02:22 Soup, the lake, lunch with your friend 02:35 Blink Delivery 02:49 The whole world is your backyard 02:58 Where it goes wrong 03:02 Jet lag without a plane 03:22 Ears pop, thin air 03:37 Never dressed for the weather 03:51 The stranger's kitchen 04:05 Everyone needs you 04:22 Everywhere and nowhere 04:40 Home goes blurry 04:56 Real science 05:06 Quantum teleportation 05:23 The Micius satellite 05:36 Is it still you? 05:55 The size problem 06:14 Your body clock 06:28 The Arctic tern 06:49 Homing pigeons 07:11 Bending the rules 07:22 Back to the mountain 07:32 Remember the little things 08:04 Home 08:22 Traveling differently 08:57 Would you? Sources: First quantum teleportation of a photon's state: Bouwmeester et al., "Experimental quantum teleportation," Nature 390 (1997), Zeilinger's group in Innsbruck (a Rome group led by De Martini published a similar result the same year) Ground-to-satellite quantum teleportation with Micius, up to about 1,400 km (about 870 miles): Ren et al., "Ground-to-satellite quantum teleportation," Nature 549 (2017) The original state is destroyed when it's teleported: the no-cloning theorem (Wootters and Zurek, Nature, 1982) About 7 × 10^27 atoms in an adult human body: a common estimate for a 70 kg person Sending all the information in one person taking longer than the age of the universe: University of Leicester physics students, "Travelling via teleportation," Journal of Physics Special Topics (2013) Jet lag taking about a day per time zone to adjust, and light resetting the body clock: see e.g. the CDC Yellow Book chapter on jet lag Arctic terns flying about 70,900 km (about 44,000 miles) a year, roughly three round trips to the moon in a lifetime: Egevang et al., "Tracking of Arctic terns Sterna paradisaea reveals longest animal migration," PNAS (2010) Homing pigeons using the sun, smell and Earth's magnetic field: see e.g. Wiltschko and Wiltschko, "Avian navigation," and Gagliardo's work on olfactory navigation Next time: What if you could time travel? #WhatIf #Teleport #Science #Animation #QuantumPhysics