While the transporter room in Star Trek may be light years beyond current technology, quantum teleportation is not. Last year Viennese physicist Anton Zeilinger successfully teleported light particles across a distance of 600 metres, under the Danube River. In an interview at the German ideas and culture website, signandsight, Zeilinger discusses his work and the mysteries of quantum theory.

Describing the details of his teleportation experiment, he explains that the actual particles are not transfered at all—only the properties. As Zeilinger explains, “That is something so crazy that it could only exist in the quantum world. You can actually remove all the properties of a particle and give them to another particle.” It’s not a copy, the original loses all of its properties.

The interview continues down the rabbit hole and meanders into other popular topics in new age discussions of quantum physics including entanglement, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Albert Einstein’s spooky action at a distance, the singularity.

Zeilinger: “…I believe that quantum physics tells us something very profound about the world. And that is that the world is not the way it is independently of us. That the characteristics of the world are to a certain extent dependent on us. (Read more)

Photo credit: Prof. Anton Zeilinger’s website