Surely you’ve thought many times, while stuck in traffic, squeezed in a crowded bus, or wracked by turbulence on a plane, how great it would be to be able to get from place to place without the hassle of travel. If you could walk through a magic door and find yourself in the Seychelles or Paris. If there was a teleport that could take you anywhere you wanted in the blink of an eye.

Teleportation has been around in science fiction for a long time. It allows intrepid spaceship crews to travel to the surface of planets where no one has gone before, and mad scientists to experiment with them. In reality, however, we have no choice but to get in a car, plane, or walk.

Teleportation is a tempting idea. It would make transportation immeasurably easier and allow the exploration of the Earth and near space. In purely theoretical terms, it could take two forms. The first would involve scanning the transmitted object down to the subatomic level, relaying that information to the target, and materializing the subject. The second would require the creation of some kind of space-time doorway through which we could pass from Sydney to Anchorage in a single step.

The first version already works. But don’t celebrate, it’s only for single particles for now. Quantum teleportation is for the transfer of information. It doesn’t actually move any matter. It uses a phenomenon called entanglement. It creates a pair of particles that are quantum entangled. When the quantum state of one changes, the quantum state of the other changes immediately, even if it’s at the other end of the universe.

We can think of entanglement as a coin divided into two halves. When a “heads” is flipped on one, a “tails” immediately appears on the other.

The entangled particles serve as carriers of key quantum state information during teleportation magic. Because subatomic particles are considered indistinguishable, if an electron is created somewhere in exactly the same quantum state as the original electron, in terms of physics the new electron is completely indistinguishable from the original. Moreover, when the quantum state of the original electron is destroyed during the measurement, it can be said that we have teleported the original electron, even though no mass transfer has taken place.

If we could teleport information about all the particles in our body in a fraction of a second and then reconstruct it, we would have teleportation. But our body contains about 7 × 10²⁷ atoms, which requires an unimaginable amount of data to be sent. We can’t do that yet with current technology.

Wormhole as a shortcut between two points in space.

The other possibility of opening a teleport would be some kind of space-time tunnel. It’s long been speculated that it could be a wormhole. A material object creates a kind of dent in space-time, like a depression under a ball on a taut elastic fabric. The more massive the object, the more extended the hole in space-time. An infinitely stretched spacetime is called a black hole, and what falls into it never comes out. However, it is theoretically possible for that infinitely stretched fold of spacetime to merge with spacetime somewhere else to form a tunnel.

So far, we have not encountered any wormholes. Their properties and their possible uses as cosmic shortcuts remain unknown.

It is possible that they will be too small, connect inappropriate parts of the universe, or collapse after the passage of even a single atom. But theoretical physicists speculate that, with enough exotic matter, a wormhole could be not only made bigger, but stabilised. Exotic matter, in short, is matter with properties that have never been seen before. It would contain negative energy density and a large negative pressure. Such a stabilized wormhole would allow the passage of information and quite possibly people. Moreover, it might not just connect two places in our universe, but could be a shortcut to another dimension or the past. But the first step to building a wormhole teleport is to find and explore a wormhole.