3. Apparition (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)
Why We Want It It’s the magical way to teleport,
and
teleportation makes life easier.
Can We Get It? Scientists have been working on teleportation for decades, but disassembling matter and then reassembling it correctly in a different place is more complicated than it sounds; the most they’ve managed to teleport is a few photons over short distances. But a team at the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Quantum-Atom Optics has recently proposed a new technique that could teleport as many as 50,000 atoms. Their method disregards quantum entanglement—wherein two
particles are linked, and any change to the state of one changes its twin—and instead uses what they call “classical teleportation,” where particles disappear entirely from one place and then appear somewhere else. The method is promising but, sadly, isn’t for Muggle or wizard use—it will only be used for transporting ultracold atoms. “We would like to market it—for teleporting Harry Potter’s magic, ultracold poison into the body of the enemy!” team leader Dr. Ashton Bradley says cheekily. “More seriously, commercialization is possible, probably in 10 to 20 years.”