'Beam me up, Scotty!" Thanks to laboratory work in Austria, Australia and the United States, teleportation -- long a staple of science fiction -- may soon be possible in a limited form.
Teleportation is a bastard coinage, combining Greek tele (distant) with Latin portare (to carry). Strictly speaking, all transport is teleportation. But "teleporting" has come to mean the transfer of matter from point A to point B without moving it through intervening space. When you teleport something, you make it disappear at one location and instantaneously appear at another.
In a sense, things can already be teleported. Facsimile copiers duplicate original documents far from their origins. Telegraph, Telex, telephone and television (that tele again) reconstitute text, speech and visuals at far-flung points. And all solid-state appliances, from TVs to iPods, use an effect called quantum tunnelling, in which small areas without electrons ("holes") vanish from one side of a barrier and instantly reappear on the other side.
But sci-fi purists, while acknowledging the power of such techniques, do not call them teleportation. To merit that name, they say, a process must transmit not mere data, but matter -- if not the captain of the USS Enterprise, then at least a bowling ball or a bookend.
Scientists in several labs around the world now believe that this may be done one day. The secret lies in breaking down matter into transmissible information.
To teleport a rabbit, for example, you would scan it, determining the exact position of every one of its atoms. Your data would then be sent to a receptor point, where a companion machine would use them as blueprints to build an exact replica of your bunny.
The receptor could be across the city or in another star system; the information, being dimensionless and immaterial, could go anywhere. Rabbit, bowling ball or human, every object could be scanned into a set of specifying data.
Impossible? A new theory suggests that it may not be.
Until recently, conventional wisdom forbade matter transmission. Below about one 10-thousandth of a millimetre, the laws of physics that govern our everyday world give way to the weird, counterintuitive realm of the quantum. At these scales, the uncertainty principle dominates. Mathematically stated by German physicist Werner Heisenberg 70 years ago, it says you can know a particle's exact position or its momentum, but not both at the same time. Thus, there is always some uncertainty in determining the properties of a particle at the quantum scale. Scanning an object at resolutions required to "beam it up" is therefore impossible.
But in a landmark paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, a team of scientists at IBM showed how a simple particle could be scanned at one location and perfectly replicated at another, without any material transfer between the two locales.
The IBM researchers demonstrated that a quantum effect called "EPR entanglement" could bypass the strictures of the uncertainty principle. Using this technique, an object -- a cesium ion, say -- could be reduced to pure information. The scan would change the object, but the information it generated could then make an exact replica of the scanned object at any future time and at any point.
The capital letters in EPR entanglement stand for the scientists who first discussed it: Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen. Entangled particles are like star-crossed lovers: Once they interact, they remain acutely sensitive to each other across any intervening distance. Einstein called the relationship "spooky."
The effect, since demonstrated in the lab, "delivers exactly that part of the information in an object which is too delicate to be scanned out and delivered by conventional methods," according to a research bulletin from IBM.
A rash of experiments completed this summer at the Australia National University, the University of Innsbruck in Austria and the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado applied the EPR technique to teleport photons (light particles) and metal ions across more than a metre of space without physical movement of any material.
But while all the researchers use the term teleport to describe their achievements, they are cautious about forecasting an Enterprise-style matter transporter.
For one thing, says Rainer Blatt of the Innsbruck team, the amount of data needed to specify a human being to a resolution of 10 nanometres is in the order of 100,000,000,-000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Transmitting that amount of information by fibre optics, the fastest known means today, would take several thousand times the current age of the universe, Dr. Blatt says.
The odds are we won't see Captain Kirk materialize in our midst too soon.
Still, the U.S. military recently spent $25,000 for a report on teleportation by U.S. theoretical physicist Eric W. Davis. He identified several possible types of teleportation, including "psychic teleportation," moving objects through space-time deformities called wormholes, and manipulating empty space or "the cold vacuum."
According to his military clients, "Dr. Davis expressed great enthusiasm for research allegedly conducted by Chinese scientists who, he says, have conducted psychic experiments in which humans used mental powers to teleport matter through solid walls. He claims their research shows 'gifted children were able to cause the apparent teleportation of small objects (radio microtransmitters, photosensitive paper, mechanical watches, horseflies, other insects, etc.).' "
Mainstream academics are skeptical of Dr. Davis's claims. Michio Kaku, a physicist at the City University of New York, said that "the only way to use [teleportation]as a secret weapon is to allow our enemies to bankrupt themselves thinking they can produce a teleportation machine. . . . Wormholes, negative energies, warped space-time, et cetera, require futuristic technologies centuries to millions of years ahead of ours. The only thing going down this wormhole is taxpayers' money."
Despite such skepticism, teleportation, even in its current primitive form, may have immediate and far-reaching applications.
Today's electronic computers are based on semiconducting microchips that are rapidly nearing the limits of their technology. Pushing electrons along microcircuits generates almost as much heat per unit area as a toaster, putting today's CPUs at risk of meltdown. Moreover, information sent along microcircuitry moves at a crawl compared with theoretical limits such as C, Einstein's famous symbol for the speed of light in a vacuum.
Teleporting data back and forth from processor to memory would vastly increase computational speed and save energy as well.
We won't be able to beam ourselves aboard the Enterprise any time soon. But an incredibly fast, environmentally friendly quantum computer might be available within a decade.
William Illsey Atkinson, a frequent Globe and Mail contributor, is writing a book about the impact of video games on children's brains.