Teleportation in the Real World

March 5, 2008

By Chris Gorski
ISNS Contributor

So there they were, Hayden Christensen and Doug Liman, the star and director, respectively, of the superhero teleportation movie Jumper, sitting at the front of one of the giant lecture halls at one of the most serious schools of science on the planet -- the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their movie stormed through U.S. box offices over the past few weeks, and is now doing the same in Europe.

Next to Christensen and Liman were MIT physicists Edward Farhi and Max Tegmark, lecturing a hall full of students on the reality of the science that is inspiration for Jumper. Press materials for the movie envision several different ways to teleport a person, including the old “beam me up, Scottie” Star Trek standard of deconstructing someone in once place, then reconstructing them somewhere else.

While the film tries hard to connect its human teleportation and wormhole jumping with real science, in the end the movie is just Hollywood fantasy, with lots of special effects and very little science. But as Farhi showed as he scribbled electron transport diagrams across a vast blackboard, teleportation is part of real science.

And Tegmark’s explanation that scientists are changing their views about the rules governing unstable collapse of a wormhole due to energy violation clearly brought the phenomenon into the realm of serious science -- although wormholes remain entirely theoretical. The students got it, even bursting into laughter when Farhi noted that you “you have to collapse the wave function” to make real teleportation work.

The serious science of teleportation and wormholes is actually mind-blowing. Physicists can perform a phenomenon called quantum teleportation over a distance of a few miles. Unfortunately, the only items currently teleport-able are photons and electrons -- and they must teleport one at a time. In practice, teleportation doesn't really mean sending an actual item anywhere, but recreating the exact state of a given object in another location, which is possible because of something called quantum entanglement.

Here is how it works, sort of. When two subatomic particles like photons come near each other, they share a connection that cannot be fully understood until one half of the pair is measured. They maintain this connection, even if separated by considerable distances. Measuring the properties of one particle reveals the properties of the other, even if it has traveled far away. This connection is so strangely counterintuitive, yet so tied into the theory of quantum mechanics, that it troubled Albert Einstein, who called it "spooky action at a distance." But to determine the properties on one of the quantum pairs, scientists have to bring in a third particle -- it has to do with being able to do a measurement.

By measuring the state of the one of the pair, you can determine the state of the other electron, even if it is a mile away, because the two are paired and connected. The state of one is “teleported” to the other. This experiment has been done, and it works.

Taking advantage of this effect to teleport something made up of multiple particles – like Captain Kirk - is a whole lot more complicated. “It requires you to have something at the receiving end,” Farhi said. For a human, you’d need a huge bag of electrons, neutrons and protons waiting for the teleporting person. The person wouldn’t really teleport, but the state of his or her electrons, neutrons and photons would, through “spooky action,” be communicated to the bag of particles. Out of the bag, Farhi said in reference to Jumper’s Christensen, the actor would come.

It’s messy and clearly isn’t ready for humans. But it could be a great way to communicate inside of a very fast quantum computer, Farhi said.

Wormholes are the preferred method of transportation in “Jumper,” but a lot of scientific work needs to be done before considering them as a real possibility. Wormholes have never been created, or even observed. Wormholes, if they exist, could connect distinct parts of space-time. A connection between two areas would allow something to pass through and reemerge in a different location, or even a different time. This idea forms the basis for many science fiction tales, but until scientists determine if wormholes exist, or even if they can exist, it remains far-fetched to suggest them as a mode of transportation.

To see a Discoveries and Breakthroughs Inside Science TV segment on a Los Alamos National Laboratory effort to use quantum entanglement and teleportation to provide computer security, go to: http://www.aip.org/dbis/stories/2000/privacy.html

ISNS contributor Chris Gorski is with the American Institute of Physics’ Discoveries and Breakthroughs Inside Science program. He is a news researcher, writer and filmmaker who specializes in science.

***This story is provided free for media use by the Inside Science News Service, which is supported by the American Institute of Physics, a not-for-profit publisher of scientific journals. Please credit ISNS. Contact: Jim Dawson, news editor, at jdawson@aip.org.