Beam Me Up, Scotty!
Curious Cases
BBC
4.8 • 4.1K Ratings
🗓️ 14 November 2025
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Whether you’re stuck in traffic, waiting at the airport whilst delay after delay is announced or just really missing someone far away, a lot of us have probably wished we could teleport. But is this superpower the stuff of science fiction? Or could it, one day, become a reality?
Listener Faith wants to know whether Star Trek’s Transporter could ever deconstruct and reconstruct humans in the real world, and it turns out quantum physics holds some tantalising potential for this seemingly impossible task. To search for answers Hannah and Dara dive down the quantum rabbit hole, exploring entanglement, superposition, and trying on some very special socks.
Contributors Ivette Fuentes - Professor of Quantum Physics at University of Southampton Winfried Hensinger - Professor of Quantum Technologies at the University of Sussex Helen Beebee - Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds
Producer: Emily Bird Executive Producer: Sasha Feachem A BBC Studios Production
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Hello, I'm Emma Barnett. For most of my career, I've been on live radio, and I love it. |
| 0:13.3 | But I've always wondered, what if we'd had more time? How much deeper does the story go? |
| 0:19.2 | I remember having this very sharp thought that what you do right now, this is it. |
| 0:24.3 | This defines your life. |
| 0:26.0 | I'm ready to talk and ready to listen. |
| 0:28.3 | I'm insulted by how little the medical community is ever bothered with this. |
| 0:33.9 | Ready to talk with me, Emma Barnard, is my new podcast. |
| 0:37.0 | Listen on BBC Sounds. You're about to listen |
| 0:39.6 | to a brand new episode of Curious Cases. Shows are going to be released weekly, wherever you get your |
| 0:44.4 | podcast. But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:52.8 | I'm Hannah Frye. And I'm Dara O'Brien. |
| 0:55.1 | And this is Curious Cases. |
| 0:56.8 | The show will we take your quirkiest questions? |
| 0:58.8 | Your crudious conundrums. |
| 1:00.3 | And then we solve them. |
| 1:01.2 | With the power of science. |
| 1:02.8 | I mean, do we always solve them? |
| 1:03.8 | I mean, the hit rate's pretty low. |
| 1:05.8 | But it is with science. |
| 1:07.5 | It is with science. |
| 1:44.2 | Do you know the way there's things you think, why haven't they invented this? Right. Yeah. And I'm hoping that if we say them, then people will go and invent them. Do you know the greatest invention I ever heard of? Tell me. It's called the back home button. Right. Yeah. Do you got any of the technical? The technical videos are somebody else's a problem. I was raised more as a kind of a philosophical, what would you give if you, at the end of an evening, could just press a button and then be instantly transported. Not just to your home, but properly underneath the duvet all cuddled up. And then go, there you go and find the homeless the gas crowd. |
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