So, You Think You're Clever? by John Farndon

Author:John Farndon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd

What do you think of teleport machines? (Economics and Management, Oxford)

Ever since Captain Kirk uttered the immortal words, ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ in the TV science fiction series Star Trek back in the 1970s, the idea of teleportation has been firmly in the public consciousness. Teleport machines are the ultimate sci-fi fantasy trip. Why squash yourself into the commuter train from Balham when you can live in Hawaii and teleport to work in the blink of an eye? Why settle for the pleasures of the local ice rink when you can beam yourself off to skate on the ice oceans of Titan?

The amazing thing is that, far-fetched though these human space-hops seem, teleportation machines are not science fiction; they are science fact, and have been for a few decades now.

It all began with Albert Einstein’s understandable scepticism about the uncertainty at the heart of quantum ideas. Einstein just couldn’t relate to a universe directed by probability; it just didn’t seem scientific. ‘God doesn’t play dice,’ he apocryphally said, and he devised a thought experiment to prove quantum theory wrong. In this experiment, known as the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) experiment, a pair of particles is emitted simultaneously from an atom.

Einstein played with quantum theory’s insistence that things only become fixed once they are observed. So, he said, the ‘spin’ of the two emitted particles is not fixed until they are actually observed, and yet the instant one of them is observed and fixed then the other’s spin must be fixed too – even if it is on the other side of the universe.

Absurd, eh? thought Einstein. So quantum theory must be wrong. Then in 1982, amazingly, French physicist Alain Aspect showed that the EPR is a real effect. The two particles are said to be ‘entangled’. It’s as if they are twins that can telepathically communicate across space.

Amazingly, too, entanglement has been demonstrated again and again over the last few decades and it’s the basis for real, working teleportation machines.

The idea is that if you attach another particle to one of an entangled pair, the attachment is instantly recreated, seemingly magically, in the other one of the pair – no matter how far apart. In 1997, photons were teleported across a laboratory in Rome like this, and since then molecules as big as bacteria have been teleported. In 2012, Chinese scientists managed to teleport a photon 97km in an instant. And in 2013, Swiss scientists succeeded in teleporting data through an electronic circuit.

So teleporting machines are real, and I find them astounding. There is no way humans are going to be transported soon in the Star Trek way, however, despite the progress. The amount of data to be transferred in beaming a human is massive. Some physics students recently calculated that teleporting the data to rebuild the trillion trillion (that is, 1024) atoms in a human being would take 350,000 times as long as the universe is old! And there is another problem. All current thinking about teleportation doesn’t actually move the object – it destroys it and recreates it in another place.

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