Teleportation

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Teleportation is the alleged process of moving objects from one place to another more or less instantaneously, without using conventional transportation.

The word was coined in the early 1900's 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 in the second chapter of his 1931 work, 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." (Fort, 553) [1]

With present techniques, teleportation is conceivable only with elementary particles, or theoretically, by encoding information about an object, transmitting the information to another place, such as by radio or 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 someone is said to occupy two places simultaneously. The word "teletransportation" (which simply expands Fort's abreviated term) was first employed by Derek Parfit as part of a thought exercise on identity.

Contents

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Historical

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Biblical

There is a reference in the New Testament which has been interpreted as an instance of teleportation. Acts 8:26-40 records Philip the Evangelist the deacon baptizing an Ethiopian on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. Immediately after the baptism he disappears and reappears in Azotus about 55km away.

There is another as well. Paul the Apostle said that he didn't know if he was in the body or out of the body caught up in the third heaven.

"This boasting is all so foolish, but let me go on. Let me tell about the visions and revelations I received from the Lord. I was caught up into the third heaven fourteen years ago." 2 Corinthians 12:1-2, NLT

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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 had gotten 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.

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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 cat’s atoms and transmit them over a telegraph wire. 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.

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.

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 money-saving measure to avoid the requirement for footage of the starship's crew flying shuttles in every episode. 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!). The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, however, stands 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, expressed as heat, destroying the rest of the body's tissues long before a complete recording could be made. Hence the need for the Heisenberg compensators (as shown explicitly in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Ship in a Bottle").

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.

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.

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 the Half-Life series of computer games, in which a scientific experiment goes 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).

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

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Popular culture

In the realm of science fiction and comic books, many fictional characters exhibit the endogenous 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:

Wrestlers Kane and the Undertaker of 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.

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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.

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Recorded 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. [2] [3]
  • ...further experiment summaries pending...
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Davis report

In 2001, the United States Air Force commissioned Eric W. Davis, Ph.D., FBIS, to do a scientific study of teleportation. He submitted his report (AFRL-PR-ED-TR-2003-0034) in August 2004. 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. [Davis report, page 62]

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

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.
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).

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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 the Ethiopian finance minister, "Spirit of the Lord grabbed Philip, and the eunuch saw him no more, for he went on his way rejoicing. Philip found himself in Ashdod."

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Teleportation lab experiments

In recent times, a successful quantum teleportation experiment involving the use of 'entangled' photons was conducted. 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'.

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See also

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Sources

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