Teleportation or teletransportation is the theoretical transfer of matter or energy from one point to another without traversing the physical space between them. It is a common subject in science fiction literature, film, video games, and television.
Since 1993, energy and particle teleportation has become a hot
topic in quantum mechanics.
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Etymology[edit]
The use of the term teleport to describe the
hypothetical movement of material objects between one place and another without
physically traversing the distance between them has been documented as early as
1878.[1][2]
American writer Charles
Fort is credited with having coined the word teleportation in
1931[3][4] to
describe the strange disappearances and appearances of anomalies, which
he suggested may be connected. As in the earlier usage, he joined the Greek prefix tele- (meaning "distant") to the
root of the Latin verb portare (meaning
"to carry").[5] Fort's
first formal use of the word occurred in the second chapter of his 1931
book Lo!:[6]
Mostly in this book I shall specialize upon indications that
there exists a transportory force that I shall call Teleportation.
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.
Fiction[edit]
The earliest recorded story of a "matter transmitter"
was Edward Page Mitchell's "The Man Without a
Body" in 1877.[7]
In episode 20 of the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson children's
programme, Fireball XL5, produced in 1962 before the advent of
Star Trek and its 'transporter', the Nutopians have a "matter transporter"
used to dematerialise and rematerialise people between the planet and an alien
ship not unlike the later transporter of Star Trek fame.
In the Star Trek transporter, which brought the concept of
teleportation into popular knowledge, two essential stages of the process
are dematerialization and rematerialization;
created in an era before any CGI was possible. The visual
effects communicating these processes to the spectators "were
created by dropping tiny bits of aluminum foil and aluminum perchlorate powder
against a black sheet of cardboard, and photographing them illuminated from the
side by a bright light. [...] In the studio lab, after the film was developed,
the actors were superimposed fading out and the fluttering aluminum fading in,
or vice versa."[8] According
to an informal survey carried out by Lawrence M. Krauss on his campus "the
number of people in the United States who would not recognize the phrase 'Beam me up, Scotty' is roughly comparable to the
number of people who have never heard of ketchup."[9]
In his book, The Physics of Star Trek, after
explaining the difference between transporting information and transporting the
actual atoms, Krauss notes that "The Star Trek writers seem never to have
got it exactly clear what they want the transporter to do. Does the transporter
send the atoms and the bits, or just the bits?" He notes that according to
the canon definition of the transporter the former seems to be the case, but
that definition is inconsistent with a number of applications, particularly
incidents, involving the transporter, which appear to involve only a transport
of information, for example the way in which it splits Kirk into two versions
in the episode "The Enemy
Within" or the way in which Riker is similarly split in the
episode "Second Chances".[10]
Krauss writes that in order to "dematerialize"
something in order to achieve matter teleportation, the binding
energy of the atoms and probably that of all its nuclei would
have to be overcome. He notes that the binding energy of electrons around nuclei is
minuscule relative to binding energy that hold nuclei together. He
notes that "if we were to heat up the nuclei to about 1000 billion degrees
(about a million times hotter than the temperature at the core of the Sun),
then not only would the quarks inside lose their binding energies but at around
this temperature matter will suddenly lose almost all of its mass. Matter will
turn into radiation—or, in the language of our transporter, matter will
dematerialize. [...] In energy units, this implies providing about 10 percent
of the rest mass of protons and neutrons in the form of heat. To heat up a
sample the size of a human being to this level would require therefore, about
10 percent of the energy needed to annihilate the material—or the energy
equivalent of a hundred 1-megaton hydrogen bombs."[11]
Science[edit]
Some scientists believe it is not possible to teleport
macroscopic objects such as human beings, but there may be teleportation in the
microscopic world. Three possible kinds of teleportation in quantum mechanics
and quantum electrodynamics have been proposed: state teleportation, energy
teleportation, and particle teleportation[citation needed].
In 1993, Bennett et al[12] proposed that a quantum state of a particle could be teleported to
another distant particle, but the two particles do not move at all. This is
called state teleportation. There are a lot of following theoretical and
experimental papers published.[citation needed] Researchers
believe that quantum teleportation is the foundation of quantum calculation and
quantum communication.[citation needed]
In 2008, M. Hotta[13] proposed that it may be
possible to teleport energy by exploiting
quantum energy fluctuations of an entangled vacuum state of a quantum field.
There are some papers published but no experimental verification.[citation needed]
In 2016, Y. Wei proposed that particles themselves could
teleport from one place to another.[14] This
is called particle teleportation. With this concept, superconductivity can
be viewed as the teleportation of some electrons in the superconductor
and superfluidity as
the teleportation of some of the atoms in the cellular tube. Physicists are
trying to verify this concept experimentally.
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