Reality and Imagination:- Teleporters
This article is a part of a series of articles on Teleporters and Time Machines. This is part 1/2.
Perhaps it was imagination he lacked when my father saw Batman for the first time. His poetic license gave life to all the fancy devices Batman used, execpt his computer. A screen, that could give the information of any person, at any time, seemed to be impossible. Yet now he sits in his office, with laptops and wireless internet connections, and wonders at the leaps of technological advance. So, its only natural to ask, where do we stand in terms of invention of a teleporter, and can we, by the magic of technology build one?
Is Teleportation possible?
So, the basic teleportation allows for people to be broken down atom by atom, with the information transferred to another place, where the atoms at that place rebuild the person. That is just the essence of it.(Well physically, people, nuerologists, any one could say that they wont be the same person, and ask questions such as how will the memories, or feelings be transferred, or how many copies of you will be there?) Anyways, there are a lot of many different ideas of teleportations and teleporters, in the science fiction, from the Warp Drive in Star Trek, or the inherent ability to telport in Power Rangers, to the regular “fast travel” options in video games, such as the Mass Effect series, we see different kinds of teleporters. So, one might ask, can we invent a Warp Drive/ a fast travel checkpoint? Well the answer still remains unclear, but what matters is that Particles, small ones, such as photons, can be and have been teleported. How?
Quantum Entanglement and Teleportation
Lets begin at an unfamliar point, quantum entaglement. It basically means that if there are two particles, one here and one at the centre of the galaxy, and you measure the properties of one here, the other one, will have the same property as the one we have measured. (For the sake of brevity, this is as far I am going to go into it, but if you’re interested, check these out-1)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuvK-od647c 2)-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs)
In 1997, a group of scientist, led by Anton Zeilinger, then at the University of Innsbruck, and A. Francesco De Martini, of the University of Rome, carried out succesful teleportation of photons. Remember here that two seperate photons have a strange intimate relationship. Lets see how they did it.
Lets say I have a really cool photon, and I want to send it to my friend in Tokyo. But, due a pandemic, the imports and exports businesses have shut down. So how will I send it to him? I can teleport it. But how? Having just 2 photons wouldn’t work. Well it would, but it wont be a true teleportation. From the Uncertainity Principle, and Max Born’s ideas, even if I measure the photon at my end, and tell him about its properties over the phone, what he will have is a different particle, because the particle, chose one of its many forms, as it were, when I measured it, and as a result, I cant have the original photon anymore. So what Martini and Zeilinger suggested is that take three photons, two partially entangled here, and one in Tokyo. So I get my two photons, and have them interact with each other. With this, I can find out the properties of the second photon with relation to the fisrt one. (Similar to how using x-3y=0, we can calculate y in terms of x as x=3y, we can find the properties of one photon, relative to the other one.) I can measure the first one, and by the properties with that, I can use the information of the partial entanglement, and then write all the properties on a paper, work out the math, and then phone him to tell about the properties of the first one. Then he can influence his particle in Tokyo to get the original photon. Bear in mind my measurement actually disturbs the original photon that I have, since both of mine are entangled. Therefore, we have not produced a copy of the photon, not disturbing the natural law. So we have succesfully teleported a particle from where I am to Tokyo. This, in a way is true teleportation. But lets now exit from the microscopic to the macroscopic world, and try to telport something like a car or a person.
Macroscopic Teleportation
The obvious guess is to make chamber, where the movement of the particles can be controlled, similar to the teleporter connecting the Hall of Justice( the Justice League HQ on Earth) to the Watchtower(Their HQ in space). So, by far, I can use that to telport myself to Tokyo, using the method above, and tell him the properties of my atoms over the phone (the call will be very expensive, I would be telling him about 10³⁵ seperate pieces of Information, he better have a lot of time, a huge pen and a thick notebook). But there are two things problems- Firstly, there are about 7 x 10²⁷ atoms in the human body, and influencing that many atoms is very difficult, but the bigger problem is the second one. It is that I would have to find 7 x 10²⁷ entangled atoms to measure myself, which is very hard to do, since the second part of the entangled pair can be literally anywhere in the universe. These two problems have, by far, prevented macroscopic teleportation and scientists believe that we wont have a teleporter in the near future, but what can I say, after all, my father was wrong about the Batcomputer too.
