Quantum physics. Entanglement. Teleportation. Have you heard terms like these flying around the science fiction sections of the film world? Have you ever wondered just how accurately these films portray real science? Well, my friends, today is your lucky day: this column, Fantasy Science & Coffee aims to bridge the gap between science and science fiction in films and, occasionally, popular culture. My hope is to explain things in a fun way – like we’re chatting over coffee.
You may be thinking: who is this person, why does she think she can explain science, and why the heck would I want to have coffee with her? Well, I’m Radha, a researcher in India, currently pursuing a PhD in theoretical quantum physics. I quite like hot beverages. I’ll also pay.
In this sixth part of the series published on the second and fourth Tuesdays of every month, we are going to chat about teleportation in films and in real life.
Let’s begin.
Fans of science fiction are no stranger to the word ‘teleportation’. Each story may have its own style of teleportation, but the premise remains the same: instantaneous movement between far off points in space. Let’s take a look at a few popular examples of teleportation in science fiction, shall we?
Teleportation in Star Trek
Arguably, the most popular use of teleportation in science fiction is in the iconic transporter of the Star Trek universe. The transporter converts a person or an object into an energy pattern through a process called dematerialization. The energy pattern is then beamed to a target, where it’s converted back to the original through rematerialization.
Teleportation in Jumper
In the film, Jumper, based on a book by the same name, certain humans have the ability to travel instantaneously to any existing place, by moving through a rift they create in the fabric of spacetime. Each jump is subject to the jumper’s prior knowledge of the destination. In the film, a picture of the location is sufficient, but in the book, the jumper has to have been there before.
Interestingly, rifts or tunnels through spacetime have actually been scientifically hypothesised. They’re called wormholes; I talked about them earlier in Fantasy Science Pt. 1: Wormholes. While, in theory, they can bridge two far off points, so that you can flee to Mars any time the in-laws come to visit, in actuality they host a number of complications that are not human friendly.
Teleportation in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
WonkaVision in the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was based fairly accurately on the principle of data transmission. A picture that originates elsewhere but appears on your screen can be broken down into bits, i.e. zeroes and ones. The stream of bits associated with the picture is the data that is transmitted to your device, and ultimately translated to something you can see on your screen. That’s exactly what is happening to little Rex here:
The difference between real data transmission and WonkaVision, however, is that WonkaVision literally breaks the original item into pieces and transmits those fragments so that the object appears for real in a television set, albeit much smaller. Here’s the scene in which Wonka demonstrates his invention, chocolate and snotty brat included.
Teleportation a.k.a. ‘Apparition’, in Harry Potter
In the wizarding world of Harry Potter, through a process called Apparition, magical folk can instantaneously move from one location to another at will, if they can picture the destination. While the actual style of teleportation hasn’t been delved into, the squeezing sensation that is described in a snippet from the books shown below leads me to believe that Apparition makes use of wormhole-like travel in much the same way Jumper does. I imagine witches and wizards being squeezed through tiny tunnels between two points of space.
Harry felt Dumbledore’s arm twist away from him and re-doubled his grip: the next thing he knew everything went black; he was pressed very hard from all directions; he could not breathe, there were iron bands tightening around his chest; his eyeballs were being forced back into his head; his ear-drums were being pushed deeper into his skull.
– From Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
What is real teleportation?
When it comes to teleportation, I have good news and bad news. The good news? Teleportation is real. Very real. The bad news? It’ll be a while, if ever, before you can say, “Beam me up, Scotty!”
While real teleportation isn’t as romantic as it is in science fiction, it’s still pretty darn cool. Scientists have successfully demonstrated teleportation across tens of kilometers. However, they are not teleporting humans; they’re teleporting quantum states of quantum particles such as photons and electrons.
What is a quantum state? You can think of it as a very specific description or a characteristic of a quantum particle. For now, I’ll draw an analogy with the characteristic ‘color’.
Before I describe the process of teleporting quantum states — or teleporting colors — you’ll need to know a few somewhat nutty properties of quantum physics:
- In quantum physics, a measurement destroys the state you’re measuring. That is, if you interact with a quantum particle in some manner, you will alter its state. It’s kind of like trying to determine whether a piece of cake is delicious: you have to eat it — thereby destroying it — to find out. (I think we can all agree that you have to eat the whole piece before being able to accurately declare it ‘yummy’!)
- The process of teleportation makes use of a property of quantum physics called entanglement. Two particles are said to be entangled if they can affect one another instantaneously irrespective of how far apart they are. These pairs of entangled particles can be generated by various means in a lab.
- Quantum particles in the same state are identical. What I’m going to describe is how one person, Alice, teleports a yellow photon to her friend, Bob. Essentially, if Bob can somehow manipulate a photon in his lab to become yellow, then the teleportation will be a success. What you’ll see is that in order for this to happen, Alice’s yellow state gets destroyed in the process — it’s as if it physically moved to Bob’s lab!
Teleportation involves a series of elegant mathematical steps that are beyond the scope of this post, but a curious reader can find more details through the links at the end. For now, I’ll describe the principle of teleportation with the help of this useful diagram taken from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech.
We’ve already established that quantum states in our language are colors. So, the state of my hair is brown, the state of grass is green, and the state of the raccoon in your kitchen is grey because goddammit, Benny, I told you to do the dishes after we ate that cake!
In this hypothetical world, suppose Alice and Bob are two friends who live in different countries. They know that at some point of time they’ll want to share things with each other instantaneously, so they ask a third party, Charlie, to give them a pair of quantum entangled particles. In this scenario, Charlie generates a pair of entangled blue photons, and gives one to Alice and the other to Bob.
Suppose, on some special occasion that may or may not involve cake, Alice wants to instantaneously send a yellow particle she has in her lab to Bob. She allows her blue particle to interact with the yellow particle. This results in two things: 1) the state of the yellow particle is altered, and 2) the state of Alice’s blue particle is also altered and becomes something else due to the interaction with the yellow particle.
Since Bob’s blue particle was entangled with Alice’s blue particle, the interaction at her end instantaneously affects his particle — it is no longer blue. The thing is, Bob can’t risk looking at this new version of his blue particle without altering its state – remember that any interaction will cause a change. Alice gives him a call, and tells him exactly how he needs to look at his particle. Read: she tells him exactly what measurement he needs to perform so that the particle’s state alters itself in such a way that it becomes the original yellow. So when he finally looks at it, he sees yellow and not blue!
Will we be able to teleport people any time soon?
Theoretically, to teleport a bigger object made up of many quantum particles, such as humans, the state of each particle should be transmitted for the object to be completely reproduced at the destination. In this way, WonkaVision and Star Trek‘s “energy pattern” aren’t super inaccurate. But an average human has around 10^27 atoms (a 1 followed by 27 zeros), and each atom is made up of a bunch of quantum particles. To teleport the state of each of those gazillions of quantum particles would be a near impossible task.
More than that, if humans and other living beings are somehow made up of more than simply physical matter, as some people believe, there’s no way of knowing just what teleportation may affect: would the person continue to live after being teleported? Would the teleported person be different from the original? These questions open a big can of worms.
I’d say that teleporting humans is not something we will be able to do any time soon, if at all. However, I’m also a bit of a romantic, so I think we’ll be able to teleport simple inanimate objects at some point.
What do you think about the depiction of teleportation in film, and how close do you think we’ll be able to get to achieving it?
More to Explore
News & Articles
Teleporting toward a quantum Internet – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech (2016)
Papers
A quantum teleportation experiment for undergraduate students by S. Fedortchenko (2016)
Advances in Quantum Teleportation by Pirandola, et. al, (2015)
Remote preparation of quantum states by C H Bennett, et., al. (2003)
Resources
Does content like this matter to you?
Become a Member and support film journalism. Unlock access to all of Film Inquiry`s great articles. Join a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about cinema - get access to our private members Network, give back to independent filmmakers, and more.