Teleporting a human is impossible, but teleporting information is entirely feasible
In early April 2026, a high-ranking official from the American Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) claimed that he once teleported into a diner. Employees and visitors at the establishment told journalists they didn’t recognize him from a photo. But the topic itself stirred up an old question: is teleportation even possible? In short — yes. But it looks nothing like what you see in “Star Trek” or any other science fiction movie.
Quantum Teleportation in Simple Terms
When we hear the word “teleportation,” the image that comes to mind is straight out of a movie: a person disappears in one place and instantly appears in another. Real quantum teleportation is a far more subtle and far less spectacular thing. Quantum teleportation doesn’t transfer material objects — it only copies the quantum state of one particle onto another. No matter actually travels anywhere. So teleporting a human is impossible.
Sounds complicated? Then imagine that you and your friend on the other side of the city each have a cube from a magical set. These cubes are “linked” in such a way that, by performing a certain procedure with your cube and sending your friend an ordinary message (by phone, for example), you can make their cube take on the exact state of yours — the color, the pattern, everything. Your cube loses its pattern in the process. This is a rough but essentially accurate analogy for quantum teleportation. What’s transferred is not the thing itself, but information about its state.
The theoretical idea of quantum teleportation was first proposed in 1993 by a group of physicists led by Charles Bennett. And as early as 1997, two independent groups of experimenters carried out teleportation in practice for the first time using photons.
How Quantum Entanglement Works
All the magic of quantum teleportation rests on a phenomenon called quantum entanglement. Its essence astonished even Albert Einstein! Two particles that have been in certain conditions become linked: measuring one instantly tells you about the state of the other, even if billions of kilometers separate them.
Entangled particles are connected so that their properties correlate regardless of the distance between them: measuring the state of one particle instantly affects the state of the other. This doesn’t mean that information is transmitted faster than light — to complete the teleportation, you still need an ordinary communication channel to convey the measurement result. Therefore, quantum teleportation doesn’t violate the theory of relativity and doesn’t allow sending messages instantaneously.
The teleportation process itself looks roughly like this: the sender (usually called Alice) has a particle in an unknown quantum state. Alice and the receiver (Bob) each have one particle from an entangled pair. Alice performs a joint measurement on her “unknown” particle and her half of the entangled pair, then sends Bob the result through an ordinary channel. Bob, knowing the result, performs a simple transformation, and his particle ends up in exactly the same state as the original. The original is destroyed in the process — physics doesn’t allow copying a quantum state without destroying the source.
Quantum Teleportation of Information
Over three decades, scientists have come a long way — from laboratory tricks with individual photons to transmitting quantum states across hundreds of kilometers and through space.
- 1997 — the first teleportation of photons, carried out by groups of scientists in Austria and Italy;
- 2002 — scientists from the Australian National University teleported the quantum state of a laser beam;
- 2006 — researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark transferred information within a laser beam to a group of atoms at a distance of about 30 centimeters using quantum teleportation;
- 2012 — in China, the state of a particle was teleported over a distance of about 18 meters;
- 2017 — Jian-Wei Pan’s team used the Micius satellite to teleport the quantum state of a photon over a record 1,200 km — between the satellite and a ground station;
- 2025 — researchers from the University of Stuttgart transmitted quantum information between photons emitted by two different quantum dots for the first time.
The last result is especially important for practical applications. The experiment was conducted in an ordinary fiber-optic cable about 10 meters long, similar to those already used in modern internet networks. This means that part of the future quantum infrastructure could potentially operate on existing communication lines.
Micius — the world’s first satellite designed for quantum information transmission to Earth. Image source: wikipedia.org
Why Quantum Teleportation Is Needed
Why bother transferring the state of one tiny particle to another? The answer lies in communication security and computing. Quantum teleportation can significantly impact classical communication systems: unlike conventional channels that can be eavesdropped on, a quantum channel is theoretically protected from interception — the very act of measuring a quantum state destroys it.
This is the principle behind building the quantum internet. It’s a network where information is transmitted not as ordinary bits, but through the quantum states of photons. The problem is that photons get “lost” in long fiber-optic cables — amplifying them like a classical signal is impossible because amplification destroys the quantum state. The solution is quantum repeaters, which restore information through teleportation and allow quantum communication to be extended over large distances.
In 2025, scientists from Oxford demonstrated for the first time the quantum teleportation of logic gates — the minimal components of an algorithm — through a network connection between two quantum processors. This opens the way to combining small quantum computers into a single powerful computing system — much like ordinary servers are combined into clusters.
Can a Human Be Teleported?
This is where science fiction crashes into harsh physics. Transferring the quantum state of a single photon is a task that the world’s best laboratories have worked on for decades. The human body consists of approximately 7 octillion atoms (7 × 10²⁷). Teleporting the quantum state of each of them without a single error is a task beyond any foreseeable technology.
But the problem isn’t just about scale. There are fundamental questions:
- Quantum teleportation destroys the original. If you were to “teleport,” your body at the departure point would be destroyed, and a copy with the same set of states would appear at the arrival point. Is that still you — or already someone else?
- If even one particle ends up out of place during the copying process, the consequences could be fatal.
- Technically, there might be a temptation to “edit” the copy — add improvements, remove diseases. And that’s an entirely different ethical territory.
So teleporting a human in the foreseeable future is impossible. Quantum teleportation is a tool for working with information at the level of individual particles, not a means of transportation.
Where Do Media Claims About “Real” Human Teleportation Come From?
As for the story of FEMA official Gregg Phillips, who claimed to have teleported into a diner, he himself clarified that the word “teleportation” was not his but belonged to his conversation partner on a podcast, and that the conversation took place during the early days of intensive cancer treatment, under the influence of strong medications. Journalists from The New York Times interviewed employees at three locations of the diner chain, and no one remembered Phillips’s visit.
Gregg Phillips, who claimed to have experienced teleportation. Image source: popcrush.com
The very idea of instant human transportation is present in many religious and mythological traditions — from the ancient Indian texts of the Vedas and the Yoga Sutras to biblical stories in which apostles were “carried” by the Holy Spirit. Phillips, responding to criticism, referred specifically to biblical precedents.
Science currently provides not the slightest basis for believing that a human can instantly move from point A to point B. But quantum teleportation is a very real and rapidly developing phenomenon — it just doesn’t work with people, but with information encoded in the states of elementary particles. And it is precisely this “modest” version of teleportation that holds the future of secure communications, quantum computers, and possibly an entirely new internet.
