archived as http://www.stealthskater.com/Documents/Teleportation_01.doc [pdf]
more related articles at http://www.stealthskater.com/PX.htm
note: because important websites are frequently "here today but gone tomorrow", the following was archived from http://discovermagazine.com/2008/mar/teleportation-very-possible-next-up-time-travel on February 29, 2008. This is NOT an attempt to divert readers from the aforementioned website. Indeed, the reader should only read this back-up copy if the updated original cannot be found at the original author's site.
Teleportation? Very Possible. Next Up: Time-Travel.
Some of the most far-out sci-fi is eminently do-able.
by Michio Kaku
Any science-fiction aficionado has seen it all before. Beaming through walls; riding in starships that move faster than light; or traveling instantly to distant places in space and time. These ideas aren’t just creative fantasies, though. They emerge from theoretical physics -- especially the work of Albert Einstein whose vision included a universe that curves back on itself in 3 dimensions of space and a fourth, invisible dimension of time.
If Einstein’s version of the Universe is correct -- and experiments done over the last century suggest that essentially it is -- then the fictionalized feats based on his theories might be possible as well. The potential has become so tantalizing that serious physicists now regularly comment on Einstein-based technologies in the most august journals of their field.
One of the most insightful of such speculators is Michio Kaku -- a physicist at the City University of New York. Einstein’s scientific legacy, Kaku points out, has already formed the basis of many incredible inventions including the laser and the global positioning system. But what would it take to reach the next level -- developing such extrapolations of Einstein’s genius as the means to journey through wormholes, teleport through space, or travel back-and-forth in time? Scientists have already begun the work and Kaku reports on their progress here.
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Another Looking Glass
In science-fiction movies like "Stargate" and "Contact", wormholes connect distant points in the Universe, allowing people to travel from one spot to another in far less time than the hundreds or millions of years required to make the trip at the speed-of-light (the greatest conventional velocity). Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity suggests the possibility of "wormholes" -- literal shortcuts through space-time caused by the curvature of the Universe itself. But do wormholes really exist? Or are they figments of mathematics?
There are several major problems to face. Many solutions result in “nontraversable wormholes”. As with a black hole, once you pass the event horizon of such a wormhole, you can never leave it. In 1988, Kip Thorne and his colleagues at Caltech found a possible way out. A traversable wormhole -- one through which you could pass freely back-and-forth. In fact, for one solution, the trip through a wormhole would be no worse than riding in a plane.
There was a catch, though, that made such a wormhole impractical. Gravity would crush the throat of the wormhole, destroying any travelers trying to reach the other side. To stabilize the throat of the wormhole, scientists would need the repulsive force of perhaps the most exotic and speculative entities in the Universe: negative mass and negative energy. Conceivably, using either could keep the throat open sufficiently long to allow astronauts a clear passage.
Scientists have looked for negative matter in Nature, so far without success. One should note here that anti-matter and negative matter are two entirely different things. The first exists and has positive energy but reversed charge. But negative matter has not been proved to exist. Negative matter is quite peculiar because it is lighter than nothing. In fact, it floats. Unlike meteors that come crashing into planets, drawn by the planets’ gravity, negative matter would shun large bodies like stars and planets. It would be repelled, not attracted. Hence, although negative matter might exist, we’d expect to find it only in deep space, certainly not on Earth.
Even if we could locate or create negative energy or matter, there is still a big problem: getting and manipulating enough of the stuff. Matthew Visser (pdf) of Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand estimates that the amount of negative energy needed to open up a 1-meter-wide wormhole would be comparable to the mass of Jupiter except that it would be negative. He says: “You need about minus-one Jupiter mass to do the job. Just manipulating a positive Jupiter mass of energy is already pretty freaky and well beyond our capabilities into the foreseeable future.” It might be millennia before we can even think about harnessing power on this scale.
Yet, if we ever do create them, wormholes could open the door to traveling not just in space but in time as well.
Building a Time Machine
From the perspective of Science, time-travel was impossible in Newton’s universe where time was seen as an arrow. Once released, it could never deviate from its past. One second on Earth was one second throughout the Universe.
This concept was overthrown by Einstein who showed that time is more like a river that meanders across the Universe -- speeding up and slowing down as it snakes across stars and galaxies. So one second is not absolute. It varies as we move around the Universe.
Once considered to be fringe science, time-travel has suddenly become a playground for theoretical physicists. As Thorne has written: “Time-travel was once solely the province of science-fiction writers. How times have changed! One now finds scholarly analyses of time-travel in serious scientific journals written by eminent theoretical physicists…. Why the change? Because we physicists have realized that the nature of time is too important an issue to be left solely in the hands of science-fiction writers.”
The reason for all the excitement is that Einstein’s equations allow for many kinds of time machines. The most promising design is based on a traversable wormhole. This wormhole is constructed with both of its ends initially located close together. 2 clocks -- one at each end -- tick in synchronization.
Now take one end of the wormhole and its clock and send them into space at near-light speed. Time slows at that end due to an effect in Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity known as time dilation. Relative to a stationary observer on the ground, time aboard a spacecraft appears to slow down. Relative to the spacecraft, time for the observer on the ground seems to speed up.
Since the 2 clocks at the ends of the wormhole are no longer in sync, a wormhole traveler passing from one end to the other can move back and forth in time. But there is a limit to how much time traveling he can do, though. He is able to go back in time only to the point at which the time machine was built.
When it comes to the potential for time-travel, there is still fierce debate. In 1997, Bernard Kay and Marek Radzikowski of the University of York in England and Robert Wald of the University of Chicago showed that time-travel was consistent with all the known laws of Physics except in one place -- near the wormhole entrance. This is just where we would expect Einstein’s theory to break down and quantum effects (which work at the subatomic level) to take over.
The problem is that when we try to calculate radiation effects as we enter a time machine, we have to come up with a theory that combines Einstein’s General Relativity with the Quantum Theory of radiation. Yet when we naively try to do so, the resulting theory makes no sense. It yields a series of infinite answers which are meaningless.
This is where a "Theory of Everything" takes over. All the problems of traveling through a wormhole that have bedeviled physicists (e.g., the stability of the wormhole, the radiation that might kill you, the closing of the wormhole as you enter it) are concentrated at the horizon -- precisely where Einstein’s theory makes no sense.
[StealthSkater note: the Press has labeled the joining of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics as the "Theory of Everything". Some of the leading contenders include string/brane theory and loop-quantum gravity => doc pdf URL . But equally as important -- and blatantly missing from this unification -- is a theory of Consciousness . Matti Pitkanen's TGD-physics unites all three under the same geometrical umbrella=> doc pdf URL . (more on Consciousness at => doc pdf URL ) ]
Thus the key to understanding time-travel is to understand the physics of the black hole horizon. And only a theory of everything that unites Einstein’s Relativity and the Quantum realm can explain this. So the final resolution to whether all these science-fiction devices are possible will have to wait until physicists can finally develop a theory of the Universe that transcends even Einstein’s.
Beam Me Up
Perhaps the most tangible of the far-out technologies suggested by Einstein’s theories is teleportation. The key lies in a celebrated 1935 paper (doc) by Einstein and his colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen. Ironically, in their paper they proposed an experiment -- the so-called EPR experiment (named for the 3 authors) -- to kill off once and for all Quantum Theory’s introduction of probability into physics.
Quantum Theory requires probability because its formulas do not directly describe things like the precise position of particles. Instead, the formulas describe waves (known as Schrödinger waves). The amplitude of the waves at a particular location translates to the probability that a particle will be found at that point.
As the EPR experiment pointed out, according to Quantum Theory if 2 particles (electrons, for example) are initially vibrating in unison (a state called "coherence"), they can remain in wavelike synchronization even if they are separated by a large distance. 2 electrons may be trillions of miles apart. But there is still an invisible Schrödinger wave connecting them like an umbilical cord. If something happens to one electron, some of that information is immediately transmitted to the other faster than the speed-of-light.
This concept -- that particles vibrating in coherence have some kind of deep connection -- is called quantum entanglement. Einstein derisively called this “spooky action at a distance” and he took it to “prove” that Quantum Theory was wrong since nothing can travel faster than the speed-of-light.
But in the 1980s, Alain Aspect and his colleagues in France performed the EPR experiment using entangled photons emitted from Calcium atoms and 2 detectors placed 13 meters (40 feet) apart. The results agreed precisely with Quantum Theory.
Was Einstein wrong, then, about the speed-of-light’s being the speed limit of the Universe? Not really. In Aspect’s experiment, information did travel faster than the speed-of-light. But the information was random, hence useless.
Yet it is entanglement that opens the door to teleportation. In 1993, scientists at IBM led by Charles Bennett showed that it was physically possible to teleport objects -- at least at the atomic level -- using the EPR experiment. Precisely speaking, they showed that you could teleport all the information contained within a particle.
2 particles with the same information are identical. So teleporting the information is essentially the same as teleporting the particle itself. Since then, physicists have been able to teleport photons and entire Cesium atoms. Within a few decades, scientists may be able to teleport a DNA molecule or even a virus.
In these teleportation experiments, physicists start with, say, two atoms -- 'A' and 'C'. Suppose we wish to teleport information from atom 'A' to atom 'C'. We begin by having a third atom 'B' that starts out entangled with 'C'.
Now atom 'A' comes in contact with atom 'B' so that the information content of atom 'A' is transferred to atom 'B'. Because 'B' and 'C' were originally entangled, 'A's information has now been transferred to atom 'C'. Someone examining atom 'C' would be unable to tell any difference between it and the original atom 'A''.
The entanglement destroys the information within atom 'A' (so we don’t have two copies after teleportation). This means that anyone being teleported in this way would die in the process. But the information content of his body would instantly appear somewhere else. In other words, he would die in one place but be reborn in another.
In 2007, Ashton Bradley of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Quantum-Atom Optics in Brisbane proposed another teleportation method. Tapping another Einstein insight -- a state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate (or BEC) which is one of the coldest substances in the entire Universe.
A BEC is one-millionth to one-billionth of a degree above Absolute Zero -- a temperature found only in the laboratory. When certain forms of matter are cooled to near Absolute Zero, their atoms all tumble down to the lowest energy state. And so all of them vibrate in unison. The quantum waves of all the atoms overlap so that, in some sense, a BEC is like a gigantic superatom. Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose predicted this bizarre state of matter in 1925. But not until 1995 was it finally created in the lab.
Here’s how the Australian teleportation device works. Start with a collection of supercold Rubidium atoms in a BEC state. Apply a beam of matter (also made of Rubidium atoms) to the BEC. These atoms also want to tumble down to the lowest energy state, shedding their excess energy in the form of a pulse of light. This light beam is then sent down a fiber-optic cable.