Professor Michio Kaku of City University, New York, maintains the technology to teleport a living person to another part of the Earth or even space could be available within decades - or at least by the next century.
Prof Kaku, known as Mr Parallel Universe for his futuristic claims, which also include the possibility of real time travel and invisibility, has studied various sci-fi technologies deemed impossible and concluded some will eventually happen.
He said: "A lot of things you see on Star Trek will in fact be possible - like the teleporter.
"You know the expression beam me up Scotty, we used to laugh at it. We physicists used to laugh when someone talked about teleportation and invisabilty, something like that, but we don't laugh anymore we realised we were wrong on this one.
"Quantum teleportation already exists. In fact, we took a film crew and went to the University of Maryland and actually filmed an atom being teleported. It zapped across the room from one chamber to another.
"So at an atomic level we do it already. It's called quantum entanglement."
This is a process that allows connections (like an umbilical chord) to be formed between atoms and their information transmitted between others further away.
He said: "I think within a decade we will teleport the first molecule."
He said quantum physics was about the bizarre and impossible - objects disappearing and reappearing elsewhere and being in two places at the same time.
He added: "But electrons do this all the time - they are called transistors. Light does it - it is called a laser beam."
He said light has also already been teleported.
He added: "The BBC flew us out to Vienna in Austria. We teleported light across the Danube River 500metres."
He claims the next step will be to teleport photons to the Moon after 2020 when it is anticipated humans will again land on the lunar surface.
He believes in time, adapting this process to bigger objects - and then living things such as animals and even people - will be no more than a complicated scientific "engineering project".
This is "likely to be solved in time", he said.
More mainstream scientists remain unconvinced by his claims and suggest that the differences between a human and an atom, mean the small-scale success to date do not point towards a living being being deconstructed and reassembled elsewhere - whether alive or dead or even as they were before teleportation.
The problem being the whole basis of teleportation is translating something physical into data, sending it somewhere else, and then re-assembling it.
It is widely felt that the so-called quantum entanglement system used to teleport an atom, would be virtually impossible in terms of time and survival for anything alive.
There are trillions of atoms in the human body, meaning a person would have to be broken down into individual ones before each were entangled, read, digitised and teleported, before that whole process were done in reverse to bring them to the new location.
Students at the University of Leicester, estimated the data from a single being would take quadrillions of years to teleport somewhere - in some cases slower than walking depending on how far away they were beamed.
Worse still, there is no way of knowing if abode could survive being stripped down to atoms and reconstructed.
When atoms are teleported they are destroyed with a copy rebuilt from the data - so you would effectively die and be brought back to life - or would it even be the same person arriving if they survived or a new clone?
Physicists at the California Institute of Technology first teleported a single photon back in 1998 a mere three feet.
Since then, distances have increased, but this is still working largely with photons.
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