No, not spoiler in that sense. Doug Liman’s new action movie “Jumper” is all about teleportation, you see, and one of the questions that’s going to be on people’s minds is something like “Is teleportation really possible, or is it just some silly science fiction thing?”. I like it when such questions come up, and I like trying to answer them too.
This time I get to do it officially, since Doug Liman’s people are doing a private screening of the film this evening and there’ll be a panel of some of the film’s creators and a scientist for questions and answers afterward. I’ll be the scientist.
The downside is that I’ll be the bad guy of the evening by having to pour a bit of cold water on some of the flights of fancy. The spoiler, you see, as in spoilsport. The upside (besides, you know, free movie) is that I’ll maybe get to explain some really cool physics to an interested audience. So what’s the answer to the question above about teleportation? Well, it is not as straightforward as you might think. I’ll say “Yes and No”, and let you go over and read more in a longer post I did on some of the physics over on Correlations.
In other teleportation news, here’s an amusing coincidence. I learned the other day that the actress Marlene Forte (who, you may recall, has generously played many times the role of Lucha in readings of the play “Dark Matters” that I co-wrote and developed with playwright Oliver Mayer*) has been cast in the upcoming new Star Trek Movie…as the Transporter Chief. Well Done, Marlene!
-cvj
(*See for example a post about an early reading here.)
See this post for an expanded version of the above comment.
-cvj
Hi,
It went very well. We were at the School of Cinematic Arts, at USC. We had a hugely full house, and for the panel, two of the producers, the visual effects supervisor, costume supervisor, production designer… basically, the perfect people to have a discussion with about the physics! Teleportation physics aside, I’m very impressed with how they realized the teleportation effect visually. All through the film I could see that a good deal of thought had gone into several bits of the working physics – conservation of momentum and so forth – and it was indeed true. They were very careful. Visual effects supervisor, Joel Hynek, has a physics background, in fact. During the panel discussion it came out that they’d spent a huge amount of time thinking about those issues, as well as how the teleportation might affect things nearby and so forth. They then build on the basic universe they’ve created in a number of ways – They have a nice idea, the “jump scar” that is left for a while as spacetime slowly heals itself after a jump… the scar can be used to follow someone to where they jumped… I like all the attention they paid to these things, and overall I was happy to be there to tell them they did a good job on that. Of course, I pointed out the things I pointed out in the Correlations post about the physics of teleportation vs the reality… and there were some nice questions from the audience, such as about wormholes, and so forth…(a young lady was very passionate about how an Einstein-Rosen bridge would need two black holes, and how disruptive to travel that would be, which allowed me to talk about why that’s not the problem (and why black hole are not in fact relevant)…. I did not have the gall to reference the aforementioned History Channel show about this, but the producer and I recommended Kip Thorne’s excellent book, of course.)… all in all it was good fun for an evening’s panel work. And I got a free SCA hat as a thank-you gift. So it’s a win-win.
-cvj
‘This time I get to do it officially, since Doug Liman’s people are doing a private screening of the film this evening and there’ll be a panel of some of the film’s creators and a scientist for questions and answers afterward. I’ll be the scientist.’
Clifford, did it go well? I’d be scared to be teleported into an extra dimension, because I saw a sci fi film about it when a kid, where a fly gets into the teleportation chamber and messes things up a little. But good luck to whoever has the guts to try this for real. Presumably all it would take using today’s technology is to slice a person up into molecular-thick layers, then quickly toss those slices into a special scanner like a computer scanner but having an electron microscope head in place of the CCD chip, before they move out of position.
At the receiver end, you could have something like a fine laser jet printer, with ink wells filled with the various amino acids and such like, which will be quickly sprayed out in a tiny jet as layer and layer are deposited to re-generate the 3d person.
I did read the article you linked to, where you don’t go into these technical trivia of teleportation, but discuss the more advanced stuff like the worry of whether the reproduced person will have atoms in exactly the same state as before, and showing quantum entanglement might help out.
Tne evidence from Alain Aspect’s and many other experiments for wanefunction entanglement is indirect and really can bbe interpreted as showing problem in mainstream quantum mechanics. It’s only when you assume that the usual […]
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