Teleportation has long been confined to science fiction but has only recently become reality, albeit on a much smaller scale than seen in Star Trek.

In 1998 a team of physicists at the California Institute of Technology teleported a single photon and in June 2002 scientists at the Australian National University managed to do the same with a laser beam. While that’s not earth-shattering, it certainly proves the concept. Photons are not the only particle that has been teleported either, both beryllium and calcium have since been successfully teleported.

So what about something that could actually be useful? Are we any closer to being able to hop onto a pad in our lounge and suddenly appear at the shopping center? Not much closer, but perhaps a little bit. And without raising all the associated philosophical complications of teleportation, something like that would be pretty cool.

I think development and further scientific research is going to take a very long time, but at least progress is being made and that takes it out of the realm of pure speculation and means practical teleportation (say of macroscopic objects) might just be a possibility.