Teleportation

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The word Teleportation 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 latter part of the word "transportation". 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."[1] Fort suggested that teleportation might explain various allegedly paranormal, though, as is typical of his proposals, 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.

With present techniques, exact (quantum) teleportation is possible only with photons and atoms.[2] 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. The copy may be sufficient even though destruction of the original is not required in the latter case. 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 someone is said to occupy two places simultaneously. The word "teletransportation" (which simply expands Fort's abbreviated term) was first employed by Derek Parfit as part of a thought exercise on identity.

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[edit] Science

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

[edit] 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] 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.

[edit] Davis report

In 2001, the United States Air Force commissioned Eric W. Davis, Ph.D., FBIS, to do a scientific study of teleportation.[5] The Davis report has been very controversial due to its recommendation of further studies of p-Teleportation:

A research program improving on and expanding, or implementing novel variations of, the Chinese and Uri Geller-type experiments should be conducted in order to generate p-Teleportation phenomenon in the lab.[5]

The report (page 2) classified teleportation concepts into five sections:[5]

sf-Teleportation 
"the disembodied transport of persons or inanimate objects across space by advanced (futuristic) technological means." The report does not further define sf-Teleportation, and has no further comment on it than to dismiss it from the scope of the report. This type of teleportation could use a physical connection between the two locations, such as a wire. Using existing technology, such as the Internet, or telephone lines, could be the means for this type of teleport. However, this means it would be extremely slow, since a typical living animal is approximately equal to 600YB (yottabytes). Compression could be utilized, but would have to be effective in keeping all data intact.
p-Teleportation 
"the conveyance of persons or inanimate objects by psychic means."
vm-Teleportation 
"the conveyance of persons or inanimate objects across space by altering the properties of the spacetime vacuum, or by altering the spacetime metric (geometry)." This category includes the use of wormholes for transport, and the modification of the speed of light.
q-Teleportation 
"the disembodied transport of the quantum state of a system and its correlations across space to another system, where system refers to any single or collective particles of matter or energy such as baryons (protons, neutrons, etc.), leptons (electrons, etc.), photons, atoms, ions, etc." The report explicitly includes in this category a process essentially the same as that envisioned by the fictional transporters of Star Trek. It also includes quantum teleportation by means of quantum entanglement.
e-Teleportation 
"the conveyance of persons or inanimate objects by transport through extra space dimensions or parallel universes."

The report did not investigate sf-Teleportation other than to define it. The report recommended further study in all other types of teleportation (pages 28-29, 47-49, 54, 62).

[edit] Teleportation scenarios

The use 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 sufficiently accurately 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, such as religious people, might wonder if the soul is recopied or destroyed, and might even consider it murder. Likewise, someone with a secular worldview 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 would be a different sentience with the same memories as the original. Many of the questions are shared with the concept of mind transfer.

It is not clear if duplicating 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 than the original), traveling into the future (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.)

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). (In the Terminator movies, Skynet used its displacement technology to produce a time machine, and thus named it the "Time-Space Displacement Equipment.")

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

p-Teleportation means of teleportation are sometimes referred to as "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.

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, 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."

[edit] 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'.

Scientists teleported atoms in 2004.[2]

Oct 2006 - For the first time, Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have conducted a teleportation experiment involving a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions 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" [1]

[edit] Alleged historical accounts

[edit] 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 ha-Derekh ("the jumping of the road") in Judaism; and "miraculous transport" in Christianity.

[edit] Philip the Evangelist

The following is recorded in Acts 8:36-40 in the New Testament, and apparently describes the teleportation of Philip from Gaza to Azotus.

"As they traveled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, "Look, here is water. Why shouldn't I be baptized?" And he gave orders to stop the chariot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip baptized him. 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."

[edit] 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 25 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 defence was that he had travelled 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 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.

[edit] Teleportation in fiction

[edit] Science fiction

Perhaps the earliest teleportation story in science fiction was printed in 1877: David Page Mitchell’s story "The Man Without A Body" details the efforts of a scientist who discovers a method to disassemble a bird’s atoms, transmit them over a telegraph wire, and then reassemble them. When he tries this on himself, the telegraph’s battery dies after only the man’s head was transmitted.

Arthur Conan Doyle's The Disintegration Machine (a 1927 Professor Challenger story) also revolves around the idea of teleportation.

A short-distance teleportation device (used instead of elevators appeared in the 1939 movie serial Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. A combination teleportation device and time machine was featured in the 1950sTV space opera Captain Z-Ro.

Later authors of science fiction used the term and concept of teleportation more extensively, making the concept a staple of the genre. Early science fiction writers like A. E. van Vogt’s World of Null-A (Astounding Science Fiction, August 1945), George Langelaan’s The Fly (Playboy Magazine, June 1957) and Algis Budrys’ Rogue Moon (Gold Medal Books, 1960) used teleportation in their fiction. Alfred Bester's acclaimed novel The Stars My Destination details a culture transformed by the discovery of instantaneous "jaunting."

In Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series teleportation has been described as "not quite as fun as a good solid kick to the head" on account of the fact that teleporting involves having your atoms ripped apart in one place and put back together somewhere else. Also in Todd McFarlane's comic books Spawn is physically ill after teleporting.

In the short story The Fly by George Langelaan (mentioned above), as well as the three films based on it (see The Fly (1958 film), The Fly (1986 film) and The Fly (2006 film)), a scientist teleports himself, but a housefly gets in the telepod with him, causing him to swap heads with the fly in the short story and 1958 film and turning him into a half-fly, half-human hybrid in the 1986 and 2006 films.

For the most part, widespread pop-culture awareness of the teleportation concept began with the numerous Star Trek television and theatrical movie series (beginning in 1964 with the original TV series pilot episode, The Cage) that was originally spawned by television writer-producer Gene Roddenberry, primarily as a work-around for the prohibitively-expensive visual effects required to land a starship on a new planet every week. The teleportation of Star Trek is likely the most widely-recognized fictional teleportation: the “transporter” device, which is used to teleport people and things from ship to ship or from ship to planet and the other way around in an instant. Persons or non-living items would be placed on the transporter pad and are from top to bottom dismantled particle by particle by a beam with their atoms being patterned in a computer buffer and converted into a beam that is directed toward the destination, and then reassembled back into their original form (with no mistakes!). Until the advent of quantum teleportation (through particle entanglement), the Heisenberg uncertainty principle was thought to stand as the chief barrier to developing a Star Trek type teleportation device. The act of precisely pinning down the position of one of the body's subatomic particles to make a recording would give the particle an indefinite momentum, thus making it impossible to copy both a particle's position and momentum at the same time, hence necessitating the (fictional) "Heisenberg compensators" (as shown explicitly in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Ship in a Bottle"). However, as science has progressed since the advent of Star Trek, there are no physical barriers to implementation of a teleportation device making use of quantum state teleportation (although there may be engineering or design barriers). It should be noted though that quantum state teleportation makes use of destruction of the original particle as part of the process in order to reconstruct. In destroying the original particle, the position/momentum (Heisenberg pairs) need not be measured, but can be transferred through prior entanglement and classical communications channels to a distant identical particle.

One particularly novel variety of teleportation can be seen in Harry Harrison's short-story collection One Step from Earth, nine stories all revolving around a variety of teleportation Harrison calls matter transmission (or "MT"). Rather than using the Star Trek metaphor of disassembling and reassembling something, MT works by taking two screens and aligning them to share the same part of another dimension (called "B-space"). "What goes in one comes out the other," as one character puts it. The stories explore the technical difficulties of the system -- the screens can be separated by theoretically infinite space, but the quality of that space (such as the presence of gravitational fields) can affect transmission -- as well as the social implications of having such a device. In one story, "Waiting Place," a one-way MT screen is used to dump criminals on an isolated planet where they will only be a danger to each other; in another, "Wife to the Lord," a man achieves godhood in the eyes of his people by using the planet's sole MT screen to work miracles.

In James Patrick Kelly's 1996 Hugo Award winning story, Think Like a Dinosaur, a woman is teleported to an alien planet, but the original is not disintegrated because reception can't be confirmed at the time. Reception is later confirmed, and the original, not surprisingly, declines to "balance the equation" by re-entering the scanning and disintegrating device. This creates an ethical quandry which is viewed quite differently by the cold-blooded aliens who provided the teleportation technology, and their warm-blooded human associates. This story was subsequently made into an episode of Showtime's acclaimed revival of The Outer Limits. Jack Chalker's Soul Rider series explores similar moral issues.

In Stephen King's The Jaunt, teleportation is a routine form of transportation in the future, but sentient organisms must be asleep while undergoing the process to avoid nightmarish results. When 'Jaunting', a sentient organism's mind does not particulate when transmitted, unlike the physical matter of the organism's body. The mind therefore experiences the Jaunt, but whilst the particles that make up the organism travel instantaneously, to the conscious mind the trip seems to last forever. A convicted criminal, offered a full pardon on the condition he takes a Jaunt awake, emerges on the other side but instantly suffers a massive heart attack, uttering the cryptic phrase: "It's eternity in there..."

The Tomorrow People, a television series first made in the mid-1970's and then re-made into a modern, Nickelodeon program incorporated teleportation as a gift bestowed upon a group of random teenagers.

In the last few decades, the rise of computer games has resulted in a rise in teleportation scenarios. One such example is in the Doom series, the UAC's experiments with teleportation technology provide a way for demons from Hell to enter our universe. Similarly, the Half-Life series of computer games features a scientific experiment gone wrong and allows bizarre aliens to teleport onto Earth.

In the Mega Man series and its spinoffs, many robots (including the titular character) have built-in teleportation devices, and booth-style teleporters also exist. The phenomenon is depicted as a streak of colored light (colored the same as the character).

Within the Massively Multiplayer Online Game, Second Life, all avatars (residents), have the ability to teleport. Originally, residents could only teleport from one telehub to another telehub which were located within a cluster of regions (referred to as "sims") and then walk, drive or fly the remaining distance to their destination, but this was later replaced with point-to-point teleportation. The elimination of telehub teleportation had an economic effect on the prices and values of virtual real estate surrounding the telehubs as residents no longer had to pass through, around or over shops and buildings placed next to a telehub. Within the culture of Second Life residents typically shorten the word "teleport" to the letters: TP.

Within the Massively Multiplayer Online Game, Anarchy Online, all characters have the ability to use a "Whoompa" to teleport instantly to a destination listed above the doorway. This type of teleportation is limited to the planet Rubi-Ka. However, in the Shadowlands a character may teleport instantly to a "garden" using "Insignia's" on certain statues. (ex. Thrak, Enel, Shere...etc)

The Marvel comic books feature many mutants with teleportation powers, such as Nightcrawler, Magik, Amanda Sefton, Madelyne Pryor, Blink, The Wink, Paragon, Silver Samurai and dozens of others.

The BBC science television series Blake's 7 featured a 'teleporter' on the spaceship Liberator. It required the teleportee to wear a bracelet for transport to and from the spaceship: misplacing a bracelet while away from Liberator was a plot device used from time to time in the series. Teleportation was not a known technology to the Federation (the oppressive interstellar regime in power), which gave the rebel crew of the Liberator a technological advantage throughout the series.

F.M. Busby's book "The Singularity Project" uses quantum singularities (artificial black holes) to transpose two masses.

[edit] Teleporting fictional characters

In the realm of science fiction and comic books, many fictional characters exhibit the power to teleport, including:

In computer and video games many games make use of teleportation to enhance both plot and the way the game plays. Popular examples include:

In the Mother series, the main characters of the first two games (Ninten and Ness, respectively) gain the ability to teleport to places they have previously been to, although it requires a running start.

  • In the Warhammer 40,000 universe, a number of races make use of teleportation technology. This concept has been conveyed to both the original table-top strategy game and the Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War computer games.
  • Toki Tori has a "telewarp" ability which allows him to teleport over short distances

Wrestlers Kane and the Undertaker of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) have appeared to teleport. For example, when Undertaker's theme music begins, sometimes the lights turn off, and then the Undertaker suddenly appears behind his opponent.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Fort, Charles. "Lo!" Published by CosimoBooks. May 14, 2004. Retrieved on October 4, 2006.
  2. ^ a b Rincon, Paul. "Teleportation breakthrough made." BBC News. June 16, 2004. Retrieved on October 4, 2006.
  3. ^ "Nature vol.443, 557" Quantum teleportation between light and matter.
  4. ^ Staff Writer. "Scientists teleport two different objects." CNN (via Reuters. October 4, 2006. Retrieved on October 4, 2006.
  5. ^ a b c Davis, Eric W. "Teleportation Physics Study: Special Report (AFRL-PR-ED-TR-2003-0034)." Air Force Research Laboratory/United States Air Force. August, 2004. Retrieved on October 4, 2006.
  6. ^ Staff Writer. "[http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/auspac/06/17/aust.startrek/ 'Star Trek' teleporter nearer reality]." CNN. June 17, 2002. Retrieved on October 4, 2006.

[edit] Further reading

[edit] External links

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