Quantum teleportation has officially been achieved by scientists, which is exciting news, but probably not for the reasons you’d think. It does not involve the teleportation of objects or people a la “Star Trek,” but rather the sharing of data between two quantum computers. Scientists have known it’s possible to “teleport” information from one space to another via quantum entanglement instantaneously for a while now. A recent report, published in Nature, details how a University of Oxford team sent a quantum algorithm, wirelessly, from one quantum processor to another. The goal was to essentially allow for the two extremely powerful computers to work together like one supercomputer. That gives the tandem computers a boost in power to solve problems they wouldn’t otherwise be able to, and it was all fueled by the instantaneous transfer of information through quantum entanglement.
Quantum entanglement is when two particles, like photons or electrons, remain connected or “entangled” even across great distances. In the case of quantum computers, those particles are qubits — the basic unit that denotes quantum information. However, through the experiment, nothing was actually moved; the light particles (data) still remained in the same place while separated by a distance of two meters. So, realistically, the teleportation in q
