Applications of Quantum Mechanics to the Art of Teleportation

I think perhaps this short essay could use a little explanation: I originally started thinking about how quantum mechanics could be applied to teleportation as part of a discussion on the TPDIS mailing list maintained by Wendy Perkins. I was a recent physics graduate at the time and was probably a little over enthusiastic about applying my new found knowledge to one of my interests! The list isn't usually this intimidating and it's a great place just to reminise about the Tomorrow People.

This discussion is intended for a general audience and not intended as a serious scientific discourse. However I've tried to make sure that it is correct (as far as I know).

I've decided to explain how I'd apply quantum physics to the Tomorrow People in layman's terms. Tough but I'll give it a go. Feel free to tune out at any time.

Firstly, apologies to any other physicists out there. I'm not really going to break any rules, only bend them a little.

Before you can apply Heisenberg's uncertainty principle you have to establish what Jaunting or teleportation actually is.

Broadly speaking teleportation can be described by a large scale example of the Schrodinger's cat paradox. Schrodinger's cat was put into a hypothetical box with a bottle of poison and an atom of something radioactive. If the radioactive atom decayed the poison bottle would break and the cat would die, otherwise it would live. Since radioactivity is a purely random process until you get enough atoms to do statistics on, this arrangement means that until you open the box there's no way of telling if the cat is alive or dead.

What Schrodinger said was that UNTIL you look, the cat is BOTH dead AND alive simultaneously. It's the observer that "collapses the quantum waveform" or, in other words, forces the cat to be in one state or the other. It's all to do with probabilities. There's a finite chance that at any moment any of the electrons that make up your body is in orbit of jupiter instead of under your skin. The point is that until you actually look, it's both in orbit of jupiter AND under your skin.

This 'observer effect' is one of the six postulates of quantum mechanics.

Now: How this applies to jaunting or teleportation.

We're hypothesising that telepathy is a power that underlies the ability to jaunt. Telepathy is primarily a power that affects `perception'. Teleportation can be described as the ability of an individual to select which of the extremely unlikely quantum states that are possible they exist in. Given that there is a finite chance that each elementary particle of your body is in orbit of Jupiter, there must also be a finite chance that EVERY particle of your body is there at the same time. So a person who can jaunt is effectively their OWN observer. They can select the infinitesimally small fraction of their quantum state in which every atom of their body is in the place where they want to be and select that as the state their waveform is going to collapse into. Then they'll actually be there.

And finally, we get onto Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

If teleportation is a fundementally quantum process then it has to obey other features of the quantum world too.

One of these is the uncertainty principle first put forward by Heisenberg and later proved mathematically (trust me, you do not want to know how to prove it unless your're REALLY into maths).

Broadly speaking, there are certain pairs of properties of an object that are related to one another. (position, momentum) is one pair, (time, energy) is another. For each pair you can write an equation:

delta(energy) x delta(time) greater than or equal to h-bar x one half

What this actually MEANS is that if you know one of the pair really accurately you cant know the other accurately at the same time.

It also means that if you have an empty bit of space, say a vaccuum, then you can 'make' a small bit of energy or matter out of nothing as long as it doesn't last too long.

Another way of looking at this is to say you can take a small bit of energy OUT of our four dimensions (space and time) and into somewhere else (say hyperspace) for a short period of time before you bring it back.

A quick back-of-an-envelope calculation says that if a person is an average kind of a weight for a teenager (say 50kg, 110 pounds) then using Einstein's famous E=mc² equation, they have an energy of 4.5x100(16 more zeroes) Joules. This means they could only be absent from our set of dimensions for about 0.00(50 more zeroes)01 seconds! (i.e. 10^-53s)

THAT's why the echoing effect on the Old Series CD's has been bothering me. Okay, it's a bit sad to have thought this through but I really dont like the idea of the Tomorrow People being away for a second or more. This would suggest that the energy has stayed in our dimension rather than moving out of it.

If we're going to take this to it's logical conclusion you'd have to say that the jaunting belts in the old series do something to dissipate the energy at one end of the jaunt (raising the temperature of the surroundings slightly) and pull in energy at the other end to allow the person to re-form (cooling the room slightly). That would be why you rarely see adult teleporters (since they're generally heavier and therefore harder to jaunt).

By the new series, where there's no appreciable delay between vanishing and reappearing, the Tomorrow People have learnt to teleport more quickly and therefore dont need the belts to boost their powers by hnadling the energies.

Well, that's the basis of my theory anyway. I can't really vouch for its veracity, and we are, of course, discussing this in the context of science fiction. Nonetheless, I do think that - in the event that teleportation of sentient beings was observed - a macroscopic manifestation of the postulates of quantum mechanics would provide one possible explanation for the phenomenon.

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