Teleportation — Fact and Fiction 348
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! (Score:4, Funny)
Well double dumbass on you (Score:3, Informative)
Hayden is Star Wars, not Star Trek. That's why he doesn't know it.
Death and Rebirth (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Death and Rebirth (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Death and Rebirth (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Death and Rebirth (Score:4, Informative)
SPOILER ALERT! (Score:2)
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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.
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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.
In the world of fiction, anything can happen, and except for a few extraordinary cases, it quite doesn't matter here in the real world.
In the real world, you can rest assured, that as far as we know, the "transportation" process destroys the original quantum state (No cloning theorem [wikipedia.org]), so it is not possible to "fail to erase the original"—because existence of the original would mean that you made an "imperfect copy" of what you were trying to transport, and in this case, it's fairly clear which one n
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Does it matter that you "die"? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Exactly - scientific scanning is the ultimate gift (Score:2)
To be transported light-year distances? Just for a "backup"?
It would really mean nothing to "you", but would be the check-point backup for your future self.
"For Bob so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Body, that whoever replicates Him shall not perish, but ha
Re:Exactly - scientific scanning is the ultimate g (Score:2)
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The fact that the person typing this is a guy with delusions that he is the same person who signed up for this Slashdot account when acct numbers were in the 200,000's--I admit that this is the case--is no consolation at all.
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To me, Quantum No Cloning and the Teleportation phenomenon makes this philosophically interesting. Suppose that consciousness or soul is some actual thing, tied up in the quantum processes taking place in and between our neurons; that our selves are part of the continuous interactions and entanglements going on in our brains.
No Cloning and Teleportation would mean that I couldn't really be copied, bu
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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
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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
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> The quantum state of a living creature is pretty formidable.
That's really the difficulty: reading and writing all the states of all the atoms/particles with enough accuracy to keep something alive is quite likely impossible. I would say the best (most likely possible) method of teleportation would be more like warping space so that something ends up in a different locat
Re:Death and Rebirth... Thinking wrong use here... (Score:3, Interesting)
With a weaponization of such quantum technology, simple bombs or surveillance devices could also be inserted, with quantum self-destruct structu
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Re:Death and Rebirth... Thinking wrong use here... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:4, Informative)
Latinum cannot be replicated without being detected as "counterfeit." That's why it is used as a currency.
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Poetic, but inaccurate. With a few exceptions, almost all nerve cells do not get replaced over your entire lifespan. And in the end, those are the cells that define your personality, which is what you would call an "identity".
I actually agree with the idea that if one could replicate the exact quantum state of every particle in your body, then there is no difference from the original. But everything
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Teleportation does not seem to be about matter but about state. I feel this may be thought-evidence for consciousness continuity or some kind of existence fidelity (if one considers consciousness as something describable by quantum physics).
One day perhaps teleportation will be viewed as we see flight today: simple fundamentals and devilish engineering.
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Star Trek is explicitly not this, it's an analog process - your body 'energy blob' is really moved. This allows Star Trek to skirt many moral and ethical questions so they can get on with the Space Western.
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Are you made of the same atoms from one instant to another?
How would you test it?
so it's a fax machine? (Score:2)
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Hmm, a 2003 book. Sounds alot like the premise of Think Like a Dinosaur [wikipedia.org] (1995).
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On the theory... (Score:3)
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?
My money's on wormhole technology (Score:2)
Even if that were possible, think about what it would require. You'd have to record the state and location of every elementary particle in your body, then transmit that information somewhere, and reassemble your body, atom by atom. If you do the numbers, making the very generous assumption that the computer responsible for the process requires one cycle per particle, you'll find there haven't been enough computer cycles in the entire history of compu
Too small (Score:2)
The wormholes we think exist are too small to carry much in the way of matter. Possibly some photons.
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To be fair, I'd expect that by the Star Trek era somebody will have learned how to write a decent parallel program [wikipedia.org].
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Yeah, if you're confining the problem to Star Trek, that's how it works - time is supposed to be frozen for the transportee. See how Scotty was preserved in transporter ring buffers for 70 years or whatever without aging. The magic sauce of the transporter technology is instantaneou
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You have got to be kidding me (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You have got to be kidding me (Score:5, Funny)
Distance? (Score:2, Interesting)
Teleportation Fraud (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Teleportation Fraud (Score:4, Insightful)
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But seriously, with a fax, there's a communications line that can be disrupted. Can a quantum teleportation "instruction" to "state-mimic" be disrupted? (I don't know, and that's why I'm asking")...
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Certainly not teleporting matter in the any sense, but that would still be more than squat.
Quantum Teleportation != FTL communication! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.)
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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"?
The "teleported" part is in that the particles were entangled. So, while they didn't actually move the particle, they "teleported" the properties of one atom onto another at a distance. It's the same as teleportation in that sense, but there are things we call conservation laws that prevent what you're talking about with literally teleporting matter as in moving it somewhere else instantly without it crossing the space between (or falling into a wormhole).
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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"?
In those experiments, you have to realize that all protons are identical. This may not be the intuitive way to look at it, but you can look at those entanglement experiments in this way: You have one proton at point A, in state X. You have another proton at point B, in state Y. After a given amount of time, you have a proton at point B, in state X, and you have a proton at point A, in state Z (Z may be equal to Y, but frankly, I don't know enough about these experiments to say whether the quantum state of
Fixed that for you. (Score:2, Funny)
disassembly never made sense (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:disassembly never made sense (Score:5, Informative)
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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?)
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Remember, folks, when dealing with science fiction, the operative word is always "fiction".
The old poem (Score:5, Funny)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Earlier this week actor Hayden Christensen, of Star Wars infamy..."
There, fixed that for you.
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How about recreation? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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Ryan Fenton
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Once all the data is collected and the original is recycled for later rebuiding materials, an identical system elsewhere would begin reconstruction by first constructing a pipeline rail system (sort of like a 3D outline
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See also "Altered Carbon", as well as "The Matrix" et.al.
Quantum Information (Score:2, Informative)
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 (Score:2, Funny)
Which superpower would you want? (Score:2)
MY power= Turn anything into CHEESE! (Score:3, Funny)
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
Larry Niven's prior art (Score:2, Informative)
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Dan East
Re:Larry Niven's prior art (Score:4, Interesting)
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Earth isn't "moving through space". There is no universal reference frame. (At least, so say both Newtonian mechanics and GR.) Earth is moving relative to the sun, the galaxy, the local group... but not "space".
The obvious answer to all this, and where most serious investigations of time travel wind up, is that you need a coupled pair of machines; you leave one and arrive at the other. Think of a wormhole, with the two different ends at different points in both space and time. Yes, this means you can
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Larry Niven wrote a bit about the problems with teleportation, such as conservation of momentum and energy. You also have to do two-way teleportation, otherwise you're teleporting into matter (that includes air). If you change elevations, what happens to the potential energy? Does it convert to heat?
As far as conservation laws go, you should remember that there is a third system: the teleportation device. Presumably, this device would be able to provide the energy necessary, absorb any additional energy or stray momentum. That's not to say that there are some huge problems, but those problems are not show-stoppers like, "Ha, ha. You violated energy conservation."
And I'm not entirely convinced that the two-way teleportation is a must—why can't you simply displace the air first by creating a vacuu
You mean like the Portal version? (Score:2)
Post-singularity (Score:3, Interesting)
Science aside... (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
Well, let's take a look at this .. (Score:2)
1. Matter Transmission: analyzing the structure of an object, deconstructing it somehow, and transmitting the (vast amount of) energy and information needed to reconstruct the object to a remote location, with all the possible complications that entails (the beam being intercepted, extra copies being made, the transmission being garbled, etc.) I always hear Dr. McCoy's voice when I think about that, "Hell of a way to travel,
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Very funny, Scotty! (Score:3, Funny)
Goog name (Score:2)
Compare to how dull it could have been if it were called a "transfer of quantum state" or something like that.
Heisenberg Compensators (Score:5, Informative)
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! (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not quite sure... (Score:2)
The steps along the way to actual teleportation of human beings would be revolutionary in and of themselves. At a simple level, a teleporter would "scan" the source item then duplicate / recreate it at another location. That implies that the receiving end could recreate a complex physical object from "scratch" given a "template" - so b
On the subject of the movie.... (Score:2)
Not that it means it'll be a bad movie, but man, I hope the screenwriters and directors give credit where it's due.
Shilling (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Shock (Score:5, Funny)
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And so is reading this one.
Re:An information universe (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
My concern with teleporting a living person (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:My concern with teleporting a living person (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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In a relativistic sense, FTL communication
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IOW immortality.
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