�Beam me up, Scotty! - Teleportation, and Personal Identity

Near the end of the Nineteenth Century a Prussian
woman arrived at her local telegraph office with a bowl of
sauerkraut she wanted sent to her son. She insisted that,
if soldiers could be sent to the front by telegraph, certainly
her sauerkraut could be sent the same way. (Standage,
1998)
The Prussian woman thought that communication
and transportation could coincide. She may have been
correct. In 1993 an IBM scientist, Charles H. Bennett,
predicted that quantum teleportation is possible, but only if
the original object is destroyed. More recently, in October,
1998, Caltech scientist H. Jeff Kimble succeeded in
instantaneously transporting information contained in the
quantum state of a photon one meter across a lab bench
without it traversing any physical medium in between.
Kimble and his colleagues used an extremely delicate
quantum mechanical phenomenon, �quantum
entanglement.� Kimble"s findings suggest that
teleportation of the sort depicted in the Star Trek television
series and movies is theoretically possible.