Screen shot from the TV series Star Treck

By Agencies, May 29, 2014, Telegraph.co.uk

Star Trek-style ''beaming up'' of people through space could become a reality sometime in the far future, the leader of a landmark teleportation experiment has said.

Nothing in the laws of physics prevents the teleportation of large objects, including humans, Professor Ronald Hanson pointed out.

In contrast, it is physically impossible for anything to travel faster than light.

''What we are teleporting is the state of a particle,'' Prof Hanson, from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, said.

''If you believe we are nothing more than a collection of atoms strung together in a particular way, then in principle it should be possible to teleport ourselves from one place to another.

''In practice it's extremely unlikely, but to say it can never work is very dangerous.

''I would not rule it out because there's no fundamental law of physics preventing it.

''If it ever does happen it will be far in the future.''

Prof Hanson's team showed for the first time that it was possible to teleport information encoded into sub-atomic particles between two points three metres apart with 100% reliability.

The demonstration was an important first step towards developing an internet-like network between ultra-fast quantum computers whose processing power dwarfs that of today's supercomputers.

Teleportation exploits the weird way ''entangled'' particles acquire a merged identity, with the state of one instantly influencing the other no matter how far apart they are.

Giving one particle an ''up'' spin, for instance, might always mean its entangled partner has a ''down'' spin - theoretically even if both particles are on different sides of the universe.

Albert Einstein dismissed entanglement, calling it ''spooky action at a distance'', but scientists have repeatedly demonstrated that it is a real phenomenon.

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