Information about Teleportation

Teleportation is the movement of objects or elementary particles from one place to another, more or less instantaneously, without traveling through space.

With present techniques, "exact" quantum teleportation is possible only with photons and atoms.^[1] "Inexact" teleportation (where quantum states are not preserved), is possible by encoding information about an object, transmitting the information to another place, such as by radio or an electric signal, and creating a copy of the original object in the new location. Teleportation has also been proposed to explain various anomalous phenomena, and the concept has been widely used in science fiction.

Similar is apport, an earlier word used to describe what today might be called teleportation; and bilocation, when something is said to occupy two places simultaneously. The word "teletransportation" (which simply expands Charles Fort's abbreviated term) was first employed by Derek Parfit as part of a thought exercise on identity.

Etymology

The word was coined in the early 1900s by American writer Charles Fort to describe the strange disappearances and appearances of anomalies, which he suggested may be connected. He joined the Greek prefix tele- (meaning "distant") to the Latin suffix portare (meaning "to carry"). Fort's first formal use of the word was in the second chapter of his 1931 book, Lo! "Mostly in this book I shall specialize upon indications that there exists a transportory force that I shall call Teleportation." Though, with his typical half-serious jokiness, Fort added, "I shall be accused of having assembled lies, yarns, hoaxes, and superstitions. To some degree I think so, myself. To some degree, I do not. I offer the data."^[2] Fort suggested that teleportation might explain various allegedly paranormal phenomena, though, typically, it's sometimes difficult to tell if Fort took his own "theory" seriously, or instead used it to point out what he saw as the inadequacy of mainstream science to account for strange phenomena.

Science

Although the use of teleportation has traditionally been found only in science fiction and fantasy, the theory and experimentation of quantum teleportation has been of interest to physicists.

Recent developments

Until recently, scientists had been able to transport only light or single atoms over short distances (millimeters). However, it was reported in October 2006 in the weekly science magazine "Nature" ^[3] that Professor Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have made a breakthrough in the field.^{[4] [5]} Their experiment involved the transportation of information from a weak light beam to a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms, located half a meter away. The technique involved the use of quantum entanglement, quantum measurement and quantum feedback.

Teleportation scenarios

There are several hypothetical methods of transporting matter from place to place without physically travelling the distance. Some are seriously proposed and studied by scientists, while others exist mainly in fiction.

One proposed means of teleportation is the transmission of data which is used to precisely reconstruct an object or organism at its destination. The use of this form of teleportation as a means of transport for humans still has considerable unresolved technical and philosophical issues, such as exactly how to record the human body, particularly the brain, with sufficient accuracy and also be able to reconstruct it, and whether destroying a human in one place and recreating a copy elsewhere would provide a sufficient experience of continuity of existence. Believers in the supernatural might wonder if the soul is recopied or destroyed, and might even consider it murder. Likewise, someone with a material world view who considers the body synonymous with the self might also see the disintegration of a given corpus as the killing of a human being. The reassembled human might be considered a different sentience with the same memories as the original, as could be easily proved by constructing not just one, but several copies of the original and interrogating each as to the perceived uniqueness of each. Each copy constructed using merely descriptive data, but not matter, transmitted from the origin and new matter already at the destination point would consider itself to be the true continuation of the original and yet this could not logically be true; moreover, because each copy constructed via this data-only method would be made of new matter that already existed at the destination, there would be no way, even in principle, of distinguishing the original from among the copies. Many of the relevant questions are shared with the concept of mind transfer.

It is not clear if duplication of a human would require reproduction of the exact quantum state, requiring quantum teleportation which necessarily destroys the original, or whether macroscopic measurements would suffice. In the non-destructive version, hypothetically a new copy of the individual is created with each teleportation, with only the copy subjectively experiencing the teleportation. Technology of this type would have many other applications, such as virtual medicine (manipulating the stored data to create a copy better, or perhaps radically different, than the original), a sort of suspended animation (by creating a copy many years after the information was stored), or backup copies (creating a copy from recently stored information if the original was involved in a mishap.)

Dimensional teleportation is a mechanism often shown in fictional works, particularly in fantasy and comic books. It involves the subject exiting one physical universe or plane of existence, then re-entering it at a different location. This method is rarely seriously considered by the scientific community, as the currently predominant theories about parallel universes assume that physical travel is not possible between them.

Another form of teleportation common in science fiction (and seen in The Culture and The Terminator series of films) sends the subject through a wormhole or similar phenomenon, allowing transit faster than light while avoiding the problems posed by the uncertainty principle and potential signal interference. In both of the examples above, this form of teleportation is known as "Displacement" or "Topological shortcut" (Scientific American).

Displacement teleporters would eliminate many probable objections to teleportation on religious or philosophical grounds, as they preserve the original subject intact — and thus continuity of existence.

Teleportation by means of the mind or innate personal abilities are sometimes referred to as p-Teleportation, "psychoportation", or "jaunting"; named after the fictional scientist (Jaunte) who discovered it in The Stars My Destination (originally titled Tiger! Tiger!), a science fiction novel by Alfred Bester. This method could hypothetically work through any of the mechanisms proposed above, but are usually portrayed in fiction as displacement-type or dimensional teleportation to simplify its use in the story.

In religious, occult, and esoteric literature, teleportation is the instantaneous movement of a person or object from one place to another, by miraculous, supernatural or psychic means rather than technological ones. For instance, in Acts 8:39-40, after Philip evangelized an Ethiopian official: "When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing. Philip, however, appeared at Azotus and traveled about, preaching the gospel in all the towns until he reached Caesarea."

Teleportation lab experiments

In June 2002 the Ph.D. project of Dr. Warwick Bowen led by Dr. Ping Koy Lam, Prof. Hans Bachor and Dr. Timothy Ralph of the Australian National University achieved (quantum) teleportation of a laser beam.^[6]

It was a successful quantum teleportation experiment involving the use of 'entangled' photons. A target photon was successfully 'scanned', its properties 'copied' onto a transition photon, and finally the photon was recreated at another location of arbitrary distance, proving in essence the theorems proposed by Einstein to explain his 'strange action at a distance'.

Teams of scientists from the University of Innsbruck and the U. S. National Institute of Standards and Technology worked independently to teleport ions of calcium and beryllium, respectively, in 2004. The two groups used different techniques to achieve similar results under the same basic protocol.^[1]

In October 2006, Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark conducted a teleportation experiment involving a microscopic atomic object containing trillions of atoms. They teleported the information a distance of half a metre. "For the first time, it involves teleportation between light and matter, two different objects."

In June 2007, Ashton Bradley's team at the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Quantum Atom Optics in Brisbane, Australia, proposed a technique that avoids quantum entanglement entirely. "We're talking about a beam of about 5000 particles disappearing from one place and appearing somewhere else", says Bradley. "We feel that our scheme is closer in spirit to the original fictional concept", he adds. While the technique can also transmit quantum information in the beam, the technique itself does not rely on the quantum properties of particles, so the team have dubbed the new method "classical teleportation". John Close, an expert on atomic laser physics at the Australian National University in Canberra, is impressed. "Using entangled atomic states looks pretty tough in comparison." Close wants to set up an experiment to test the system, but estimates it will take at least four years. ^[7]

Historical, mythical and religious accounts

Religious traditions

Accounts of miraculous teleportation occur in a number of religious traditions, such as Tay al-Ard ("folding of the earth") in Islam; Kefitzat Haderech ("the shortening of the way") in Judaism. Teleportation is also known in Tibetan Buddhism.

Gil Perez

There have been many alleged accounts of teleportation. One of the best known is said to have occurred on the evening of October 24 1593, to Gil Perez.

A Guardia Civil, Gil Perez, is said to have appeared suddenly in a confused state in the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City, wearing the uniform of a Philippine regiment. He claimed that moments before finding himself in Mexico he had been on sentry duty in Manila at the governor’s palace. He admitted that while he was aware that he was no longer in the Philippines, he had no idea where he was or how he came to be there. He said the governor, Don Gomez Perez Dasmariñas, had been assassinated.

When it was explained to him that he was now in Mexico City, Perez refused to believe it saying that he had received his orders on the morning of October 23 in Manila and that it was therefore impossible for him to be in Mexico City on the evening of the 24th. The authorities placed Perez in jail, as a deserter and for the possibility that he may have been in the service of Satan. The Most Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition questioned the soldier, but all he could say in his defense was that he had traveled from Manila to Mexico "in less time than it takes a cock to crow".

Two months later, news from the Philippines arrived by Manila Galleon, confirming the fact of the literal axing on October 23 of Dasmariñas in a mutiny of Chinese rowers, as well as other points of the mysterious soldier’s fantastic story. Witnesses confirmed that Gil Perez had indeed been on duty in Manila just before arriving in Mexico. Furthermore, one of the passengers on the ship recognized Perez and swore that he had seen him in the Philippines on October 23. Gil Perez eventually returned to the Philippines and took up his former position as a palace guard, living thenceforth an apparently uneventful life.

This account has received wide circulation, but historian Mike Dash notes ^[8] that there are some problems with the story which call its accuracy into question. Perhaps most importantly, he notes that the earliest extant accounts of Perez's mysterious disappearance date from more than a century after the supposed events. Though Perez was supposedly held for some time on suspicion of witchcraft, no records of his imprisonment or interrogation have been found.

Teleportation in fiction

Main article: Teleportation in fiction

See also

• Astral projection — a controversial interpretation of out-of-body experiences.
• Interstellar teleporter — a hypothetical technology appearing in science fiction
• Psychokinesis — using mental power to transport oneself or others.
• Jumpgate — a portal for interstellar transportation of spaceships.
• Linking room — a collection of portals conveniently gathered together in one location; sometimes visualized as a vast, sometimes infinite, hallway with doors running the entire length.
• Paranormal vanishing — an inexplicable disappearance of objects
• Philadelphia Experiment — a supposed secret experiment conducted by the U.S. Navy at the Philadelphia Naval Yards.
• Portal (fiction) — a magical or technological doorway that connects two distant locations.
• Reality shift — sudden, abrupt changes in reality.
• Stargate — fictional ancient high-technology portal.
• Atlantis teleporters — a technology used by the Ancients for transposing the contents of two teleporter rooms on Atlantis.
• Beaming device — a technology used by the Asgard for orbital ship to planetary surface or closer transport.
• Ring Transporter — a technology used by the Ancients, Ori, Goa'uld, and Tok'ra for orbital ship to planetary surface or closer transpositioning via a set of rings that pop out of the ground or ceiling to surround the subjects at both ends.
• Stargate — a fictional portal for interstellar transportation to another stargate through a wormhole created between the gates.
• Thor's Hammer — an automated teleportation device set up by the Asgard on one planet near the stargate to protect the planet's population from the Goa'uld.
• Wraith transporter — a technology used by the Wraith for transporting from a planetary surface to a memory storage device within their Dart (low-altitude raiding) ships.
• Telefragging — a technique used in many video games, particularly first-person shooters, where a player teleports to the exact position of another, usually causing the death of the latter.
• Transporter (Star Trek) — a fictional technology that transports matter from one location to another with an intermediate state of the matter as energy.
• Tay al-Ard — the concept of Teleportation in Islamic philosophy.
• Wormhole — a hypothetical topological feature of spacetime that is essentially a 'shortcut' through space and time.
• Hole teleportation - a hypothetical teleportation of objects throughout our universe by using the geometrical properties of spacetime. If an object is sent “out of the universe”, then the object can appear at random at any spacetime point in the universe.

References

Further reading

• Darling, David (2005). Teleportation: The Impossible Leap. Wiley. ISBN 0-471-47095-3. 
• Dash, Mike (2000). Borderlands: The Ultimate Exploration of the Unknown. Overlook Press. ISBN 0-87951-724-7. 
• Davis, Eric W. (August 2004). Teleportation Physics Study. Edwards Air Force Base, CA: Air Force Research Laboratory. Accession Number: ADA425545 http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA425545. 
• Fort, Charles (1941). The Books of Charles Fort. Henry Holt and Company. 
• Graham, Danielle (2006, January 20). Experimental data demonstrating augmentation of ambient gravitational and geomagnetic fields. American Institute of Physics Conference Proceedings, 813, 1256-1263.

External links

• United States Patent Application: 0060071122, application for a patent for a 'Full body Teleportation System'
• Article on teleportation