Teleportation — Fact and Fiction

jcatcw writes "Earlier this week actor Hayden Christensen, of Star Wars fame, and director Doug Liman discussed teleportation with MIT professors to compare the reality to the special effects version in the upcoming movie, Jumper. Edward Farhi, director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT, said, 'It's a little less exotic than what you see in the movie. Teleportation has been done, moving a single proton over two miles. [But] teleporting a person? That is pretty far down the line. The quantum state of a living creature is pretty formidable. That is just not in the foreseeable future.'"

Heisenberg Compensators! Duh!

[by Anonymous Coward]

Obviously this guy didn't read enough Star Trek technical manuals.

Well double dumbass on you

[Weaselmancer (533834)]

Hayden is Star Wars, not Star Trek. That's why he doesn't know it.

Death and Rebirth

[Sangui (1128165)]

Whenever I see discussion about teleportation discussed, I think about Ilium and how in reality when they were teleporting, they were being killed and brought back to life at the other end, they were never the same person, made of the same atoms, just an exact copy.

Re:Death and Rebirth

[Tangent128 (1112197)]

Good (if creepy) exploration here: To Be [youtube.com].

Re:

[khallow (566160)]

Sounds like one of the weaker Dan Simmons novels. After all, we don't stay the same person. Most of our matter gets flushed out over a few years (as I understand it). And it's obvious that we change substantially over the years in other ways. I still teleportation as less of a change than living ten years.

Re:Death and Rebirth

[v1 (525388)]

The part that would worry me is the consciousness. Brings up questions like what happens when you die. Does your consciousness cease to exist? probably. So if they replicate you to teleport you, haven't they created a new (but identical at that moment) copy, and then destroy your consciousness? Would your new copy of your consciousness know anything had happened? unlikely.

If sometime in the future teleportation becomes possible, eventually everyone will be using it. By the time a child is old enough to ponder the above, they will have been teleported hundreds of times. At which point either you don't care anymore, or you don't believe your consciousness is destroyed by the teleportation. (since it would not be evident to the latest copy of you) Then you start getting into weirder things, like if someone teleports you, who has never been teleported before, against your will, could they be charged with murder? It's kinda absurd to think your consciousness somehow transfers with the teleportation.

I think this would escalate to a whole new level if you teleported someone and failed to erase the original, and the two got together and were told to argue it out who needs to live and who needs to die. They'd both have the same conscious train of thought and would probably both want to live and would both believe they were "the real one" etc.

Re:Death and Rebirth

[ScrewMaster (602015)]

I think this would escalate to a whole new level if you teleported someone and failed to erase the original, and the two got together and were told to argue it out who needs to live and who needs to die. They'd both have the same conscious train of thought and would probably both want to live and would both believe they were "the real one" etc.

There was an episode of ST:TNG which dealt with that idea, when a transporter beam was deflected by the oddball atmospherics of a hostile planet and the Riker who was beaming up got doubled ... one made it back to the ship, the other ended up trapped on an abandoned research base for ten years until he was rescued by Enterprise. The one that got out was the one that we all came to know, and the dupe started out identical but evolved emotionally in a different way. It was kind of a cool episode, actually.

Re:Death and Rebirth

[langelgjm (860756)]

It was called Second Chances [memory-alpha.org]. Gotta love wikis.

Re:

[Domstersch (737775)]

It's kinda absurd to think your consciousness somehow transfers with the teleportation.

No, it's absurd to think that it doesn't, unless you're a dualist [wikipedia.org]. In which case you're beyond help anyway.

Does it matter that you "die"?

[by Anonymous Coward]

But does that really matter? Your atoms are being replaced all the time, just small bits at a time. Scanning and sending data, instead of the actual matter or energy, seems much more plausible. You aren't your atoms, you are the information that your current atomic configuration describes. Have any scars? That scar likely doesn't have a single atom that it did at the time of your injury. It's been copied, bit by bit, atom by atom, over and over again. Teleportation differs only in that it does a whole lot of atom swapping all at once. If the information is beamed correctly, "you" will "arrive" properly.

Normal notions of being, self, life and death don't really apply, at least, most of what people think of doesn't apply and if you break it down, it usually comes down to religious questions, like the soul. If you believe that your body requires a supernatural soul to animate it with intelligence and desires, than teleporation likely isn't for you. If you believe that you are essentially a matrix of interacting atoms, a materialist in other words, than it shouldn't bother you.

Re:

[4D6963 (933028)]

Does it matter that you "die"?

Well yeah, because you actually die. What do you think, that because some machine created a carbon copy of you you'll be somehow magically linked to it? No, that's if as you grew a twin/clone and then killed yourself. You die, you're getting killed, the way you chose, and life goes on for your copy, who is a copy of you, but not you.

And actually you don't actually have to get killed when you get teleported, you're "telecopied", you're only killed for the sake of not spamming

Re:

[Lije Baley (88936)]

Here's a potentially related observation:
Let us assume there is nothing "mysterious" about consciousness, that the technology exists to scan and recreate biological structures exactly, down to the molecular level, and also that a means exists to "freeze" or otherwise suspend a person's biological processes without damage.

There is a room with two operating tables, let's say one with a blue light overhead and one with a red light overhead. You are brought into the room and placed on the table under the blue

Re:Death and Rebirth... Thinking wrong use here...

[davidsyes (765062)]

I will venture to say the governments would be all to happy to have precision site-to-SOME/ANY-site lock-on capability. They'd rather snatch and destroy living targets than spend the effort to insert humans to do the snatching. Why lose expendable assets (human, allied/aligned soldiers) when taking out the enemy (or enema) means only needing to lock on and scramble?

With a weaponization of such quantum technology, simple bombs or surveillance devices could also be inserted, with quantum self-destruct structu

Re:Death and Rebirth... Thinking wrong use here...

[ArcherB (796902)]

I've always wondered about the same thing. Rather than beam in a team of commandos down to the surface to kill a bunch of guys, why not just teleport the bad guys off the starboard bow?

My other thoughts:
Using it as a cloning/copy tool, (which was done in a few episodes). "Counselor, why don't you go down to the teleporter and copy yourself so we can have a threesome?" or "Scotty! I need you to copy these 20g bars of latinum for me. I need to go back to the surface and tip one of those green strippers."
Using the teleport as a backup tool. "The captain is dead again. What is the latest tape backup? Do we have one backed up BEFORE he became such a bitch?"
Medicine. Why use a scalpel to remove a liver when you can just beam it out? Why do they still have disease when they can just beam everything BUT the virus back to the ship?

Yeah, we spend too much time pondering things like Star Trek. Then again, I guess that's what made it such a great show; it makes you THINK!

Re:Death and Rebirth... Thinking wrong use here...

[Rude Turnip (49495)]

"Scotty! I need you to copy these 20g bars of latinum for me. I need to go back to the surface and tip one of those green strippers."

Latinum cannot be replicated without being detected as "counterfeit." That's why it is used as a currency.

On the theory...

[dada21 (163177)]

...I actually dreamed about teleportation theory a few weeks ago. That's odd that this comes up.

I woke up to thinking about it. If you teleport a la Star Trek, you're probably going to die just because pieces of your organs are seperated. Maybe if you could be placed in a true time-temporal state, it might work in chunks.

I'd guess the best way to teleport would be to map your atomic structure, and use some sort of carbon/hydrogen/oxygen builder to rebuild you piece by piece exactly using the atoms at the other end. Impossible today, yes. Probably a bit too scary for things living.

The thoughts moved to faster-than-light travel, and the same problems came up. If you could accelerate to "warp speed", would all your atoms accelerate at the same time or would you be stretched to oblivion?

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle (4333)]

Yeah, and even send our teleporter signals through.... it's always a bootstrapping problem, isn't it?

You have got to be kidding me

[handelaar (65505)]

"Next week, we'll be discussing the differences between general and special relativity with Big Bird from Sesame Street."

Re:You have got to be kidding me

[Malevolent Tester (1201209)]

Today, we'll be looking at the letter c

Distance?

[calebt3 (1098475)]

How much does distance affect this? Is two miles near the theoretical limit something can be teleported before degradation sets in? Or is that just how far the scientists have bothered to try at this point?

Teleportation Fraud

[camperdave (969942)]

Science hasn't teleported squat. They've just caused one particle to mimic the quantum state of another. The number of particles at the source hasn't changed. The number of particles at the destination hasn't changed. So in what way was anything "teleported"?

Re:Teleportation Fraud

[AsnFkr (545033)]

Sounds more like they sent a fax.

Quantum Teleportation != FTL communication!

[Cordath (581672)]

Here's an extremely simplified version of how Quantum Teleportation works. This model *will* break down if you push it too far, but it's a better model of the real physics than a Star Trek transporter.

1. Go out and buy two identical rubik's cubes.
2. Put them into identical configurations.
3. Send one to the other side of the planet.
4. Now, create any new configuration you want, but record the steps you take. (e.g. Rotate top 90 degrees left, etc.)
5. A person on the other side of the planet with the other cube can now recreate your cube precisely if you call them up and tell them the steps you took.

In quantum-land, there are some rather huge differences, which I'll talk about in a moment. However, the crucial thing to get out of this necessarily imperfect macroscopic example is that this kind of teleportation relies on preparing identical rubik's cubes in advance, classically transporting one of them to the receiver, and communicating via classical channels when actually performing the teleportation. At NO point can information travel faster than light (FTL). i.e. Quantum teleportation does *not* break causality. However, you will note that you can, potentially, communicate a very complex rubik's cube configuration with a very small ammount of classical data, provided you choose your initial state and operations intelligently.

The reality of Quantum Land (This will most likely confuse you. For that, I apologize.)

The pair of identically configured rubik's cubes are meant to be an analogy for an entangled pair, which is the most crucial thing to have in any quantum teleportation scheme. (You can make entangled pairs out of many things, such as photons or electrons. However, these things are typically tiny and simple. Complex Atoms, molecules, etc. don't work so well.) Where the analogy breaks down is entanglement, which is something we just don't see in macroscopic objects. The key idea behind entanglement is that you can place two things into a state that is not separable (i.e. You cannot describe one things state without also describing the other simultaneously), and any operation on one of them will have an effect on the other no matter how far separated the two things are. (NOTE: This does NOT allow FTL communication.) The problem is that quantum operations on entangled states are probabilistic rather than deterministic. If the sender performs operations, measurements really, on her half of the entangled pair and a new particle that is to be teleported, the receiver needs the results of those measurements to do anything useful, such as reconstruct the particle the sender had. Those results *must* be communicated from the sender to the receiver via classical channels.

Another big thing to note about quantum teleportation is that it, currently, is applied to indistinguishable particles. When you copy a rubik's cube, the copy is made up of complex molecules in a configuration that is unique. If you can magically examine the structure of any two real world rubik's cube you can tell them apart. They are distinguishable. A pair of photons in the same state, on the other hand, are indistinguishable. When you perform quantum teleportation, the copy that comes out at the sender's end is an absolutely perfect copy of the original because it has the exact state of the original and the particles themselves are not distinguishable. The state of the original, however, is changed when it is measured in the teleportation process, and there's no way to recover it. Effectively, the original is destroyed and a perfect copy comes out at the other end.

So there you have it. Quantum teleportation isn't really like a Star Trek transporter at all. It actually a lot stranger than that, and much more difficult to grok. (especially the entanglment part) Again, I apologize for not being able to come up with a way to explain entanglement without throwing a lot of math at you. (I'm not sure you can really understand it without the math.)

Fixed that for you.

[by Anonymous Coward]

Earlier this week "actor" Hayden Christensen...

disassembly never made sense

[jollyreaper (513215)]

The Star Trek method never made any sense, chopping up a living organism and beaming it defies even scifi logic. It makes more sense to just say it's a wormhole between here and there.

Re:disassembly never made sense

[Quarters (18322)]

The Star Trek method makes perfect sense. Roddenberry & Co. didn't have the budget for establishing shots with shuttle craft and planetary atmospheric flight. They needed something that would be cheap to produce, not eat up lots of show time, and would have a good "wow" factor.

Re:

[VValdo (10446)]

They could have done something like the Stargate, except with controlled exit points rather than only to other gates.

GlaDOS wouldn't let them.

More ontopic, congrats to Doug Liman on his deal with the WGA [wga.org].

W

(the pastry is a mistruth?)

The old poem

[Chairboy (88841)]

"I teleported home one night
with Ron & Sid & Meg
Ron stole Megan's heart away
and I got Sydney's leg."

- Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Shouldn't that be...

[kbob88 (951258)]

"Earlier this week actor Hayden Christensen, of Star Wars fame,

"Earlier this week actor Hayden Christensen, of Star Wars infamy..."

There, fixed that for you.

Re:

[Swampash (1131503)]

Nah, I liked Christensen in SW2 and 3. I thought he did pretty well with the script and direction he had... WHICH WAS AN ABOMINATION BEFORE GOD.

How about recreation?

[RyanFenton (230700)]

If full-on analog teleportation using raw physics isn't possible in the short-to-mid term, what about recreation of a person at the endpoint?

What I mean by that, is you are able to identify what in a person's brain (and related nervous systems) that allows them to be their own unique person, and can store that as some kind of information, if that can be sent to a far-off location, to a reusable body or synthetic equivalent. This body could then perform the same role that the original would. You could afterwards read what changed in the meantime to find out what happened.

Of course, like all teleportation/copying ideas, it would challenge our definitions of what makes any of us unique, and the underlying nature of our definition of self.

Ryan Fenton

Re:

[RyanFenton (230700)]

Drat - should have added a dash between re- and creation, otherwise it looks like a word for relaxation (which itself looks like a rather funny word in that context). Darn you again, written english!

Ryan Fenton

Quantum Information

[ilikepi314 (1217898)]

The article doesn't go much into it, but I once saw and spoke with one of the leading researchers into quantum information theory. He gave a fantastic seminar on how to send "instant signals". This is my poor memory trying to recall things over my head, so please correct me if I make a mistake, but I think this is the general principle:

You need quantum entangled particles so that their states are always related, and no matter how far apart, when you mess with one particle, the other one instantly changes st

Actually, it's not that hard

[by Anonymous Coward]

On my planet, we figured it out about 8 Earth years after we reached the point where you are. That's how I got here.

Post-singularity

[ecloud (3022)]

I think it will be done after the singularity, after technology has subsumed biological evolution. After that, it will not be so important because virtual reality and actual reality will have merged and people will be able to send themselves (in the form of software) anywhere that the network extends. But if it's possible, it still will remain an interesting academic challenge.

Science aside...

[januth (1000892)]

It sounds like they combined the pretty decent book by Steven Gould with Highlander 2 and Underworld.

Plot outline from IMDB: "A genetic anomaly allows a young man to teleport himself anywhere. He discovers this gift has existed for centuries and finds himself in a war that has been raging for thousands of years between "Jumpers" and those who have sworn to kill them."

Another Hollywood abortion...

Very funny, Scotty!

[PPH (736903)]

Now beam down my pants!

Heisenberg Compensators

[TobyRush (957946)]

I'm just assuming that everyone here knows this already, but for the one or two of you who don't know, the Heisenberg Compensator is the part of the ST transporter that deals with the pesky quantum issue of not being able to pin down the exact location of the subatomic particles whizzing around in Picard's body.

Of course it's physically impossible to make such a compensation, and when one of the technical guys on the show's staff (Okuda?) was asked how the Heisenberg Compensator worked, he replied, "Very well, thank you."

I see dead people!

[r_jensen11 (598210)]

The quantum state of a living creature is pretty formidable. That is just not in the foreseeable future.

Then let's start with something more simple. Can we expect to teleport dead people in the foreseeable future?

Shilling

[peccary (161168)]

Sez Hayden: "Not that there's anything at all novel in this discussion, mind you, but it gives us a chance to hype an upcoming Hollywood flick on the front page of Slashdot. Just in case some of you nerds really are living in a bubble that our producers haven't managed to penetrate."

Re:Shock

[by Anonymous Coward]

I think you mean space.

Re:

[Laebshade (643478)]

So is reading your comment.

And so is reading this one.

Re:An information universe

[acid_andy (534219)]

If I have a long stick and you hold the other end of it and I thrust my end towards you, you will instantly faster than the speed of light feel it at your end.

Although it's a neat idea as a thought experiment with an infinitely rigid stick, in reality the effect cannot be faster than the speed of light as the force you apply accerlerates the molecules at the end closest to your hand first, which in turn apply an increased force against the next molecules along and so on until the force has propogated through the whole stick to the other end. As it's essentially forces accelerating masses, they must still obey special relativity and cannot move faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.

Re:An information universe

[AJWM (19027)]

You're exactly right. In fact, the impulse is transmitted at the speed of sound in the stick.

MY power= Turn anything into CHEESE!

[spineboy (22918)]

Never be hungry. The fastidious would fear being turned into stinky Limberger. Tough guys would have to run or be turned into runny camembert. Bible thumping creationalist would be turned into........American "cheese"

But seriously pre-cog would be cool at first, but might take all the joy out of life - no surprises anymore. Right now my desired powers would be either super-speed like the Flash, or jumping ability like the Hulk. But that could be 'cause I'm living in Los Angeles, where the average traffi

Re:Larry Niven's prior art

[v1 (525388)]

there are far more serious things to consider, like targetting. If you are strictly talking space, I don't even know if they've managed to figure out how fast Earth is moving through space. That's the big one with time travel too... ok lets say you CAN time travel. You'll do that exactly ONCE. ;) Then you'll suck vacuum for a few minutes. Time travel without teleportation is useless even if possible. For all we know someone's already invented it. Other than "I can make things disappear forever" you'd be hard pressed to prove it.

My concern with teleporting a living person

[zygotic mitosis (833691)]

I've always had this nagging feeling that by disassembling your brain and moving it, that instant of consciousness would cease to be. You would actually die; in the destination pod, what is essentially a perfect clone is born with your memories. Of course, it would be seamless, and your teleported self wouldn't have any recollection of having died. This would also be impossible to prove, but it's what I choose to believe about this fictional device. Teleportation engineers kill humans!

Re:My concern with teleporting a living person

[hey! (33014)]

That scenario has actually been analyzed by philosophers (speculative fiction provides a rich source of theoretical problems): if a teleportation technology were to cause me to disappear at point A and have what for all possible purposes would seem to be me appear at point B, would it be me? Or would I have been destroyed at point A and would the person who appears as B just think he was me?

One view, stemming from the Scottish philosopher David Hume, could be characterized as saying the question is meaningless. "Identity" is a construct of language, in reality objects don't have identity they just have a bundle of properties.

If you think about it, the way you pose the problem leads to an answer, which in turn poses new problems.

If we suppose that the entity at B is exactly like you wouldn't that mean he has every property you have? Well, then what about identity? If identity is a property, and the terms of our problem are to assume that B is like A in every respect, then he'd have to be you, because the technology would have reconstructed that property. If he is not you, and identity is a property, the technology has failed to meet the conditions of our problem.

So when you consider some teleportation technology, you ought to consider if it reconstructs whatever property it is that you consider to be identity. For example, if identity is the possession of immortal soul that being nonphysical is not measurable or observable in any way, then there is no teleportation technology that could ensure that your immortal soul isn't stripped of any physical container.

Teleportation (and time travel) would produce a person that is necessarily different in one characteristic: location in space time. If you look at identity as being part of a contiguous process in space time (the way Kurt Vonnegut's Trafamadorians saw people as a kind of four dimensional snake), then teleportation or time travel results in a new, non-contiguous segment, and thus a different identity. But if that is identity, it's not clear why anybody would care so much about it.

So the good news is that according to the bundle theory, you don't have to worry about it teleportation, time travel, or duplication. On the other hand, maybe you should worry about Alzheimer's, brain damage, or learning new things and having new experiences.

Re:

[BungaDunga (801391)]

I've only read pop versions of quantum mechanics but the basic idea requires information to be transmitted from the sending location to the destination classically, slower than the speed of light. This rather large caveat tends to be left out of articles like this. The point of teleportation is not that it is instantaneous, its that it allows you to transmit quantum states without physically transporting the particles in the special state from one place to another.

In a relativistic sense, FTL communication

Re:

[Fred_A (10934)]

Just the contrary. Actually they would rebuild the body without the cancer, the anemia etc and only the brain from the current consciousness-state, the rest of the body would be built according to the recording done when the subject was 21 year old.
IOW immortality.

... for your clone.