Teleportation is still a long dream away

Quite a bit of breathless excitement was generated the other day with news out of Australia that scientists there had successfully "teleported" something. Next step: the famous "Star Trek" transporter.

Well, not quite. The scientists who "teleported" a laser beam packed with data from one spot to another, a yard away, were the first to say this interesting achievement was nothing close to true teleportation.

That didn't stop a lot of excited, rather fanciful commentary about a future when planes, trains and automobiles would no longer be needed.

But then came the comments from Lawrence Krauss, a professor of physics at Case Western Reserve University and author of a book on the physics of Star Trek.

To actually build a transporter, he wrote, "would require us to heat up matter to a temperature a million times the temperature at the center of the Sun, expend more energy in a single machine than all of humanity presently uses, build telescopes larger than the size of the Earth, improve present computers by a factor of 1,000 billion billion, and avoid the laws of quantum mechanics."

Speaking on behalf of all who dream the impossible, we say:

"And your point is, Professor Krauss?"