Homeschooling Quantum Teleportation

While teaching my future 6th grader about how quantum tunneling enables positively-charged hydrogen nucleii to overcome like-charge repulsion so that nuclear fusion may occur in the Sun, my student first made a joke about the hydrogen nucleii teleporting. I replied that quantum teleportation is a very real thing, but that it would be a lesson for another day. It’s also not what anyone would expect it to be.

The word "teleportation," of course, conjures up images of Star Trek transporters beaming crew members to and from planets, ships, and other adventurous places. Point one is that actual teleportation moves neither matter nor energy; it only moves information.

I’ve been using two younger siblings as props, but this lesson required adding myself as a third prop. Building on our lessons on superposition and entanglement, we first placed the two sibling-electrons under two bedsheets to become entangled. One sibling-electron stayed in place under one bedsheet, while the other sibling-electron took the second bedsheet and moved to the other side of the room.

I represented the third electron, the one with the information that we want to send. I moved under the first bedsheet to become entangled with the first sibling-electron.

I initially gave an extremely oversimplified explanation of what happens: my…