The first step in demystifying quantum "teleportation" is to stop calling it "teleportation", which is a term that is made to be misleading.
The second thing to do is to stop reading any article that ever says anything remotely resembling, "the photon/atom/whatever was teleported..." since that is a flat-out falsehood that only a ignoramus or a liar would publish.
No photon, no atom, no thing has ever been "teleported" nor ever will be. Only the quantum state gets "teleported", and the quantum state most decidedly does not have the ontology of a "thing". That is why the quantum world is so weird.
Quantum "teleportation" ought to be called something like "entanglement transfer", which has the advantages of being a) fairly accurate and b) hard to use in the misleading and dishonest ways "teleportation" gets used.
> The first step in demystifying quantum "teleportation" is to stop calling it "teleportation", which is a term that is made to be misleading.
> No photon, no atom, no thing has ever been "teleported" nor ever will be. Only the quantum state gets "teleported", and the quantum state most decidedly does not have the ontology of a "thing".
I used to think the same thing as you, but if you accept quantum mechanics as complete and accurate, then the quantum state describes the totality of the system. There is nothing more than the state -- no other hidden variables.
So it comes down to the philosophical question: if you can make a perfect copy of something, except you have to delete the original version in the process (see the no-cloning theorem), is the new version the original "thing"? I would argue yes, it is. It's completely indistinguishable in every way.
(Now do I actually believe quantum mechanics is complete? I'm not sure I do. But if I assume that it is, then quantum teleportation is really teleportation.)
Asher Peres, one of the coinventors of teleportation, had an amusing story (with a serious subtext) about the question of what is teleported: "Later, when a newsman asked me whether it was possible to teleport not only the body but also the soul, I answered “only the soul.” Even that is a gross oversimplification."
In teleportation experiments to date only some degrees of freedom are teleported. So it doesn't usually make a whole lot of sense to say "the atom" was teleported. Rather, it'll just be the quantum state associated to nuclear spin states, or electronic degrees of freedom, or whatever.
Cool article. I wonder what the maximum number of degrees of freedom that has been teleported so far is. I also wonder if it gets exponentially harder to transmit larger and larger quantum states (the only reason I posit this is because it always seems like Nature prohibits us from doing all kinds of cool things in an exponentially hard way).
The second thing to do is to stop reading any article that ever says anything remotely resembling, "the photon/atom/whatever was teleported..." since that is a flat-out falsehood that only a ignoramus or a liar would publish.
No photon, no atom, no thing has ever been "teleported" nor ever will be. Only the quantum state gets "teleported", and the quantum state most decidedly does not have the ontology of a "thing". That is why the quantum world is so weird.
Quantum "teleportation" ought to be called something like "entanglement transfer", which has the advantages of being a) fairly accurate and b) hard to use in the misleading and dishonest ways "teleportation" gets used.