�Beam me up, Scotty! - Teleportation, and Personal Identity

Abstract

Near the end of the Nineteenth Century a Prussian woman arrived at her local telegraph office with a bowl of sauerkraut she wanted sent to her son. She insisted that, if soldiers could be sent to the front by telegraph, certainly her sauerkraut could be sent the same way. (Standage, 1998) The Prussian woman thought that communication and transportation could coincide. She may have been correct. In 1993 an IBM scientist, Charles H. Bennett, predicted that quantum teleportation is possible, but only if the original object is destroyed. More recently, in October, 1998, Caltech scientist H. Jeff Kimble succeeded in instantaneously transporting information contained in the quantum state of a photon one meter across a lab bench without it traversing any physical medium in between. Kimble and his colleagues used an extremely delicate quantum mechanical phenomenon, �quantum entanglement.� Kimble"s findings suggest that teleportation of the sort depicted in the Star Trek television series and movies is theoretically possible