Teleportation

One of the holy grails touted in science fiction nearly ubiquitously would be that of teleportation - the capacity to transport oneself across space virtually instantaneously. This usually requires some sort of capsule or pod to ‘beam up’ the individual being teleported, or even deconstruct and reassemble their atoms remotely, as with Mike TV in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”. This wily, capricious character wanted to be able to travel as fast as television beams through the fiber optic cables, which for purposes of travel on earth (if this were possible), would seem instantaneous, since would practically be near the speed of light. This would still be rather clunky and slow for interstellar travel, however, and some other method would be needed to approximate actual instantaneous teleportation. Wormholes have likewise been proposed as potential portals of instantaneous travel in a real-world scenario, though for now the travelling through them remains the stuff of science fiction since the real-world physics of such gets a little messy. That is to say, wormholes could possibly deconstruct Mike TV’s atoms, but I don’t think they would do a very good job at reassembling them on the other side. It also of note that, in fact - at least in one very real sense - we teleport every day. While it may not be instantaneous, simply walking across the room is an act of teleportation, for what are you doing but moving your atoms through space and time and transporting them across the space-time continuum? However, there is at least one very real account of near-instantaneous teleportation that I’m aware of, and I haven’t quite worked out the mechanism, though it could be impossible to do so anyway.

“When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing. Philip, however, appeared at Azotus and traveled about, preaching the gospel in all the towns until he reached Caesarea.” (Acts 8:30-40)