Quantum teleportation

"Quantum mechanics says you can't do the fax machine bit," Lee says in chapter six. ".you can't scan something closely enough to duplicate it. You disturb the information before you can extract everything you need to make the copy."

Lee is talking here about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which states that you can't be precisely sure about both the position and velocity of subatomic particles. This is not an intuitive idea, since we know from classical physics that the position of our planet relative to the sun, for instance, can be predicted by using direct observation and measurements. We expect that if we had good enough technology--a precise enough MRI machine, for instance--we could scan anything. But an outcome of quantum mechanics is that small particles like electrons don't have a true position in space. That until the particle is directly observed, it could be here, or it could be there, and so on. And since observing the particle disturbs it in some small way, we can't ever know its true position before this disturbance occurs. Hence, scanning a human being precisely enough to make an exact copy would seem to be impossible.

But not so fast. Albert Einstein was not a big fan of this loss of determinism in measurement, and in 1935, he, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen proposed an idea that became known as the EPR paradox. The EPR idea was a thought experiment that showed how changing the properties of one particle could instantaneously affect the properties of some distant, entangled particle. If quantum theory considered this a valid idea, they said, then the theory itself must be flawed or incomplete. But later experiments proved that entanglement does occur, and in 1993 a team of scientists at IBM proposed a way to use the idea to teleport particles from one location to another. More recently, physicists at the University of Innsbruck in Austria verified their ideas experimentally by teleporting photons.

But of course it's one thing to teleport single photons and something else altogether to do it with the innumerable particles in something as complex as human. "The information transmission alone is mind boggling," Lee says, and this is no exaggeration. In Rift the process only takes forty-five minutes, but in reality with any foreseeable technology it would take forever. Literally.

And lastly, in quantum teleportation the original particle is not left intact, so if that's really what NeuroStor had used, there wouldn't have been an original Cameron left behind.

For more information about quantum teleportation and entanglement, try these links:

IBM's research

A fun talk on teleportation by Samuel Braunstein

National Geographic story

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