Common sense is useless in the world of the extremely tiny, where the rules of quantum mechanics govern. One of the most striking differences is that two particles—like two photons of light—can be entangled, so that what happens to one of them will determine what happens to the other, even if they are very far away. It is what Einstein, a skeptic, called “a phantasmagorical action at a distance.” The physical Anton Zeilinger, born in the small Austrian town of Ried im Innkreis 78 years ago, has been proving for a quarter of a century that the most absurd predictions of quantum physics are correct. A little over a decade ago, his team managed to teleport a quantum state between two entangled photons of light. One was on the Canary island of La Palma and another, in Tenerife. There was 143 kilometers among them.
