Quantum Teleporation

Quentin Nokov said:

My question is could teleporting be explained through quantum mechanics or would there be flaws?

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IMO it's not the best explanation. It depends on how you want teleportation to work like. The most rational explanation I know of is the wormhole, which has been used many times of course. I think the whole quantum thing will be beyond most readers anyhow, so it might as well be magic if you're taking that route.

Quentin Nokov said:

Second, this probably belongs in some astrophysics board, but would there be any flaw in using black-holes as a prison for my evil spirits? That's were I plan on keeping them by time the story is over so them escaping isn't even an idea, but could quantum teleportation explain how they were put there?

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Who are you, Xenu?

Souls are tricky.... Are you saying souls have mass? If so I suppose you could imprison them in a black hole, though recent research shows that some matter does escape from black holes. It's called burping, you can look it up if you need more info.

Why teleport them in there though? Why not just put them in a metal box (or one of those ghost-traps the Ghostbusters use) and fire them into the middle of the black hole? Getting things IN is not a problem.

If souls have no mass then black holes won't do you any good. But then again if they have no mass how are you even going to teleport them? Your quantum teleportation idea should only work on atoms by the way. Are your souls made up of atoms?

Quentin Nokov said:

I need some help. I'm no physicists; I have no background in it, not even in quantum mechanics. Instead of relying on 'magic' I'd like to have scientific explanations and one explanation is how my characters can teleport.

I have always been fascinated with quantum theories and know that 'quibits' can be transferred across short space instantaneously, but what's teleported is more like information not an actual solid substance (to the best of my knowledge).

My question is could teleporting be explained through quantum mechanics or would there be flaws? It's fiction so I suppose there would be room for theories or plausible tweaking.

Second, this probably belongs in some astrophysics board, but would there be any flaw in using black-holes as a prison for my evil spirits? That's were I plan on keeping them by time the story is over so them escaping isn't even an idea, but could quantum teleportation explain how they were put there?

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Through this point, I thought that you were thinking about a scientific way to teeport, and quantum is a good choice. As for using the black holes as prison, that's a great idea. If you research black holes, then you will learn that there are escapes, but that's fine.

A few things is my characters teleport without machines; they just *poof* and that's it. It's more fantasy than science-fiction, really but I still like scientific explanations rather than blaming everything on magic.

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This is a different matter, and I have mixed feelings about it. There are good reasons for thinking that some people in meditative states operate on the quantum level, but you should think about it carefully. You should look into quantum mechanics before you use it. It has many possibilities, but you can look silly with it pretty easily.

You could just avoid going into detail about it.

Quentin Nokov said:

I've looked into quantum mechanics but I don't have a good understanding and my father learned it on his own and he isn't sure how it would work; he has a better understanding than I do. I don't plan on going in massive detail, just enough to sort of explain how it would be possible. Like being able to transport qubits but on a more massive level, but as you pointed out, I don't want to appear silly, especially if it's obviously impossible.

I sort of had my heart set on quantum physics, but I'm afraid I might have to drop it.

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There is a finite for any particle to be anywhere at any point in time, so the quantum notion is not absurd in itself. For a time in the 1930's the idea that tere actually is only one electron, and that single particle filled all the places where there iare electrons by moving back and forth in time was a serious contender. I think that t was put aside because it seemed absurd, and the universe need the mass hat the electrons gave it, but the mass would be the same whether there were many electrons or only one that moved back and forth in time. Then ther eis the question of whether the wave function collapses - an open question. There is also the question of whether there is anything outside of this time -space continuum. One theory is that the physical universe is rather like a movie projected into a specialized region of the Totality. That last is paralleled in Qabbalism.

There is considerable agreement between quantum theory and some mystical thoughts.

There is an Australian physicist who wrote an interesting book of the nature of time whose book I would suggest, if I could remember his name. Yoou might read up on time and time travel, the books by actual physicists, and you will get some great explanations of parts of quantum theory. Those guys are doing serious research into time travel, wormholes, and similar; and they expect positive results.

Within my world, teleportation is doable, but very complicated. The person teleporting has to picture where he is going, the time of season and stars locations, and a few other things. If he/she gets it wrong they could end up inside a mountain, as part of the mountain, or even in another time period at the right location. For this reason, my magic users are very cautious about using it except in an emergency. My dragons on the other hand can teleport at will as it is part of their natural abilities.

Within my magic system, teleportation is a shifting of planes from the prime material, to the ethereal and then back to the prime. Not sure this qualifies for quantum physics, but I don't really care too much.

Since you are using elements of christian belief though, I am not sure Christians would see it as anything other than witchcraft and therefore evil. Christ might have walked on water but I don't recall he ever teleported anywhere...wink, wink.

Quentin Nokov said:

My question is could teleporting be explained through quantum mechanics or would there be flaws?

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Of course there are flaws - that's what makes it fiction rather than science.

You could just mutter 'wormhole' (which is a common 'out') ... but is it possible that you don't have to explain the reason?

After all - most people don't understand how electricity or digestion or fax machines really work ... but they are quite happy to use them in ignorance - and just assume that there are scientific reasons behind it.

Why would your characters be any different?

Mac

I don't see what's wrong with the whole wormhole route. Your characters (who seem to have some special powers already?) put their hands out in front of them, bend space, hop through, and then let it snap back into place. If done right, it would be more or less instant and no one else would even notice.

Also, since the teleporter wouldn't have to travel very far (and so not go very fast) you'd avoid all the usual issues of faster than light travel like length contraction and mass increase etc.

Timemaster by Robert L. Forward is an excellent example of how somewhat outre science could be used in fiction, and all of quantum theory is somewhat outre.

Without spending a huge amount of time on this (The P part of WIP ain't happening!), let me explain a couple of things...

Quantum anything means that instead of a continuum of something (like mass), it can only come in discrete chunks. If the smallest chunk was one kilo, you cannot mass 33.2 kilos. Even distance is quantized, so that smooth dance move you're doing with your lady friend is really a series of infinitesimal jumps from one quantized location in spacetime to the next.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle means you cannot simultaneously know both the absolute location and absolute momentum of something. There is product of the uncertainty is Planck's constant, which is a tiny, tiny number.

For example, as the temperature of something falls to absolute zero (implying zero momentum), it's location gets more and more uncertain, so that at absolute zero, it exists everywhere in the universe. Of course, it's damn near impossible to get there, but as we've gotten close, a fifth state of matter, called Bose Einstein Condensate, has been observed. Freaky stuff.

So, what can you do about this? Well, if you think of one's position as coordinates in a matrix (quantum extends to locations in space-time as well), then you could teleport by merely changing addresses in the universe's master computer (or in the mind of God).

As for imprisoning spirits, since I presume they are energy phenomenon, that would work, because even energy cannot escape a black hole.

Good luck

If its fantasy, I don't know that you need to explain teleportation all that much. It's magic and accepted as magic by most readers.

If your characters are based on angels or demons or other creature that have this natural ability, because its all part of their demigod like powers again, no need to explain.

Now, if your character is a magic user who has to learn this stuff, then yes, he will need an understand of how the magic works, which is why I mentioned on my world, teleportation is a shift of planes. All magic on my world is a form of telepathic ability. So much easier to explain than all the mumble jumble of explaining in deeper detail something I don't really believe in outside of fantasy.

Now if you are talking soft SF, then a brief explanation on how it works might be in order. Maybe the user does not understand it fully him/her self and just knows you turn this dial, press a button, step into the machine, count to ten and zap...

If hard SF, then yes, you better have all your explanations in order on how teleportation could work in your world...

Physicist here.

Quantum teleportation only works at the quantum level, on particles small enough to be driven by quantum effects. It's related to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle -- because you can't specify a particle's position exactly, there's a small chance that it is actually somewhere that it could not normally get to.

Needless to say, that doesn't work very well for large objects. The official Star Trek hand-wave to make their teleporters work was the 'Heisenberg Compensator', which allowed them to specify a particle's position exactly. (When a fan asked the writers how the compensator worked, the response was, "Very well, thank you.")

It's conceivable that all the particles in a large object could simultaneously quantum teleport to another location, but ridiculously unlikely. That's why most fiction with personal teleportation has used wormholes or has kept their science very soft, like Star Trek.

Qubits depend on entangled particles -- pairs of particles that can affect each other from a long distance. Large objects can't be paired in that way.

My advice would be to use soft science and not worry too much about it. With spirits in your world, you're not writing hard sci-fi anyway.

Quentin Nokov said:

I need some help. I'm no physicists; I have no background in it, not even in quantum mechanics. Instead of relying on 'magic' I'd like to have scientific explanations and one explanation is how my characters can teleport.

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You can't. It's magic. No such technology exists. It's like time-travel and faster-than-light travel, a trope of SF that aficionados of the genre just accept, without worrying about the "scientific details". Anybody who insists on a sound physical explanation for such a thing is not somebody who is likely to be reading in the genre to start with.

Write your story. Don't explain it.

caw

Remember Clarke's law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Like has been said, FTL and Teleporting and time-travel can't be explained, so they aren't much, and they don't need to be.

Quentin Nokov said:

You've helped me enormously. This is something along the lines that was suggested to me before but it wasn't as technical and very vague so I wasn't sure how it would work.

Many thank yous.

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You're welcome. But remember, you can't get something for nothing, either. So, if you transport from the surface of the Earth to high orbit (gain in potential energy), you're going to have to give up something else (all the planets get a few angstroms closer to the Sun). The totals of everything in the Matrix must remain the same.

So, how I would explain it to my young padawan would be something like this: When you teleport, you access the Master Object Locator and do a register shift for everything in this volume to that volume. And the same thing happens to that volume. So, we don't really care what the particles and photons are doing, it's instantaneous. And we can't teleport it into the mountain, for the volume of rock in the mountain suddenly appears where you used to be. So, teleport to the Moon, and a big cube of vacuum shows up here. Lots of noise, little grasshopper. Think of the fun of teleporting six feet under water.

Enjoy.

RemusShepherd said:

Quantum teleportation only works at the quantum level, on particles small enough to be driven by quantum effects. It's related to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle -- because you can't specify a particle's position exactly, there's a small chance that it is actually somewhere that it could not normally get to.

...
It's conceivable that all the particles in a large object could simultaneously quantum teleport to another location, but ridiculously unlikely.

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I think you are confusing 'quantum tunnelling' with 'quantum teleportation'.

'Quantum Teleportation' doesn't involve any particle actually being transferred - only information. Your description matches 'Quantum Tunnelling' perfectly though .. it is definitely due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

'Quantum Teleportation' & 'Quantum Tunnelling' are very different phenomenon ... even if the 'Teleportation' one is very poorly named!

Mac

Mac H. said:

I think you are confusing 'quantum tunnelling' with 'quantum teleportation'.

'Quantum Teleportation' doesn't involve any particle actually being transferred - only information. Your description matches 'Quantum Tunnelling' perfectly though .. it is definitely due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

'Quantum Teleportation' & 'Quantum Tunnelling' are very different phenomenon ... even if the 'Teleportation' one is very poorly named!

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Yes, I thought 'Quantum Teleportation' was the layman's term for 'quantum tunnelling'. If there's a real effect -- as in, not just a fictional trope -- called 'quantum teleportation', then I'm not familiar with it.

Hmmn, brief search shows me that it is a real term that has been given to communication via entangled particles. You're right, that's a very poor name. Sorry for my confusion.

Quentin Nokov said:

I was a little confused about the volume. You mean, one can only teleport where objects haven't taken-up space?

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I think it's a reference to conservation of mass/energy. What's "there" has to teleport "here" at the same time that "here" teleports "there."

Although he was talking about volume, not mass or energy, I understand.

What's wrong with magic? I say take the magical realism way of things: Do it and be done.

Personally, I don't like magic as sci-fi gobbledygook -- trying to sell what is clearly impossible phenomena as scientific in nature, rather than just call a magical spade a magical spade. Even Clarke stretched his much-quoted maxim so far. That Q stuff makes me sick.

As for the question of black holes, mass, and trapping: Light can't escape black holes, and light is massless. For the sake of argument, though, I'll assume it isn't. So what? You want massless ghosts trapped in black holes, have massless ghosts trapped in black holes -- it's not as if ghosts are real (and even if they are, so what?), and black holes are so powerful that they muck with time, for Pete's sake, so why not ghosts as well?

If you need to explain how this can be, you can do the sci-fi gobbledygook or tie your BHs to the mystical side of things -- stars as the eyes of God or something like that; BHs as the dead eyes of God, thus they have supernatural properties that affect ghosts regardless of whether ghosts have mass or not.

richcapo said:

As for the question of black holes, mass, and trapping: Light can't escape black holes, and light is massless.

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Actually, wrong on both counts. Light is made up of particles (photons) and does have mass.

Light has recently been shown to escape black holes. As I said earlier, look up the phenomenon of black hole burps (that's what they're called, I didn't name 'em) where a burst of x-rays is released from a black hole after it's 'eaten' a large mass.

Thanks. Yes, photons are elementary particles that, as I recall, have zero mass. Either way, my point stands: Massless or massive, why sweat it? And so on. As for burping, if I ever write a sci-fi piece about black holes, maybe I'll look that up.

Drachen Jager said:

Actually, wrong on both counts. Light is made up of particles (photons) and does have mass.

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I think you're confusing definitions here. You can assign a non-zero "relativistic mass" to photons that depends upon its wavelength, but that is not the same as saying it has mass.

Relativistic mass is an old definition of mass that hasn't been used for decades. It assigns a mass to every object, including light, defining it as m = E/c^2. This is inconvenient and pretty much never used anymore, as it is really just another way to define Energy.

It is a common mistake where people typically assume that because E = hf, then m = hf/c^2. The full relativistic equation is actually E^2 = (mc)^2 + (pc)^2, where p is the momentum and v is the velocity. Technically then, the "invariant mass" of a photon is just the invariant length of its four-momentum.

The fact that electromagnetic radiation is a long-range interaction with a 1/distance^2 dependence is considered to be sufficient proof that photons are massless given the accepted definition, since quantum electrodynamics would be in some trouble if it weren't. If it is a non-zero massive particle, the limit on its mass is so small as to not matter.

If you want some proof using gauge theory, I can provide it, but it's a little involved.

Light has recently been shown to escape black holes. As I said earlier, look up the phenomenon of black hole burps (that's what they're called, I didn't name 'em) where a burst of x-rays is released from a black hole after it's 'eaten' a large mass.

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This isn't accurate. The x-rays are not escaping from within the event horizon. As matter orbits the black hole in the accretion disk, it moves faster, generating heat. As it reaches the event horizon, the disk matter can reach temperatures high enough to produce x-rays. That isn't the same as saying x-rays escape from the black hole--not in the sense you're implying.