But because the remaining particle of the formerly entangled pair maintains a link to its partner – which had been linked with the light packet – the light can be reassembled elsewhere.

Though the technology is one small step on the road to teleporting a human, it echoes the particular destruction and reassembly of the teleporting deck used in Star Trek.

And, like the cat in Schrodinger’s famed thought experiment, the light exists in two states of being until it is measured by an outside observer.