'tele' betrays an attempt to apply the technology like that of 'telephony', 'television', 'telegram' etc albeit to transport a physical object! So some definition of 'teleportation' talks of 'movement of an object without passing through the physical space'. (This definition is not very smart because actually 'space' is never 'physical'). But the notion is clear. When someone scans a document into a computer and then sends it through Email, of course you wont see anything actually moving through space. What passes through space are waves. The document however, can be reprinted at the other end so that it seems like 'the paper has gone to the other end without passing through space'. Apparently, such is what inspired the idea of 'teleportation'.
The basic idea of 'tele' movement of anything is that we don't need to move that thing itself all.This is because it already exists in some way at the other end. We only need the information pertaining to how to reconstruct it at the other end, plus a machine that can do the reconstruction at the other end. So what moves from one end to the other is not the object but the wave that carries the information pertaining to how to reconstruct or manifest the object. It is this way that 'tele' becomes 'fast' way of sending information. Rather than sending a physical letter, just send the fast EM waves. So the idea of teleportation comes to mind when we want to send an object but very fast. Suppose you want to go to stars. Can you convert yourself into some waves that travels very fast, and then reappear at the other end?
So in teleportation, speed is realized by the sending of some waves rather than sending the physical object. But we have learnt from quantum mechanics (QM) that 'particles' are actually waves! So if 'teleportation' is movement of something through waves, then QM teaches us that all movements are actually teleportations! In QM, what moves from place to place is never a 'particle' in the usual sense we understand 'particles'. Rather, a wavepacket moves from place to place. This quantum wavepacket can be seen as to carry information pertaining to the appearance of a 'point-like' particle. QM then doesnt describe how this 'point-like' particle moves from space to space. The point-like particle, just appears on the wave during observation, as if via some teleportation. So the waves just tells us of the probability of manifesting a particle at a given region. The manifestation itself is done via some mysterious teleportation into the place we are observing the particle in!
In Quantum Field Theory, the distinction of particles is done away with all together. This is to say that if you swap two electrons, it will be like you have not done anything at all! Infact you think of particles as wave packets themselves. So they are excitation of an underlying field. This means that all motion is teleportation! There is no notion of 'movement' in ordinary sense at all.A pulse dies in one place and an entirely different pulse is generated from another place. It is 'entirely different' simply because an entirely different portion of the same medium is excited. With this understanding of matter, we see that we must think of something like a 'soul' which moves from place to place in order to preserve our identity, or perhaps better, we think of ourselves as somehow 'omnipresent' in the quantum field. Then teleportation becomes easy to understand. Nothing actually moves. We are already there at the place we would appear. We are just not yet manifest. So teleportation is actually a game of 'manifestation' and 'demanifestation'.
If in QM all fundamental particles actually moves via teleportation, you may now wonder why the entire macroscopic object doesn't similarly teleport. If so, then you are on the right track! In QM, what we now explain is the ussual motion, not teleportation! For a macroscopic object to move from A to B, it must appear to be at every point between A and B at a particular moment. In other words it appears like at no point does teleportation happens during movement. In reality though, teleportation happens at every moment to each of the individual particles! The reason the entire object donnot seem to teleport as a whole is that the particles teleport more often to the points very near, and only rarely teleport to distant places. In other words the probability of a particle teleporting over a 'macroscopic distance' is low. Then the probability of the entire ensemble of particles making up the macroscopic object, all of them teleporting to the same, macroscopic location is near zero. So QM does not forbid teleportation. It only makes it extremely rare.
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