Before you watch the video above, see if you can figure out how British magician Scott Penrose fooled a mall full of shoppers into thinking they were witnessing the miracle of a Star Trek transporter. His secret is revealed at the end of the clip.

It’s part of a promotion for movie streaming service Blinkbox, which will soon be offering the Star Trek Into Darkness movie to its customers in the UK.

As real as this video looks, no, there is no such thing as a transporter that can move a human being from one place to another. However, it so happens that the world’s first complete quantum teleportation was announced on Wednesday — but it wasn’t human beings being transported.

In the scientific breakthrough, University of Tokyo scientists figured out how to transport photonic quantum bits from one place to another in a useful way for the first time. Using a hybrid technique that makes your brain hurt just thinking about it, their new noise-free technique of making photons occupy two places at the same time brought the world one step closer to quantum computers that will be thousands of times faster than those we use today.

While you recover from that brain twister, enjoy the magic of this prank, and wonder along with me whether the Star Trek transporters might not really be transporting anyone at all, but duplicating them while destroying the original.

Image and video: YouTube/BlinkBoxLive