Hi everybody.

I have always been intrigued by the concept of teleportation and with the recent advances in quantum teleportation at the University of Innsbruck, the results are encouraging. However, it should be noted that this form of teleportation doesn't allow physicists to teleport the photon itself--only its properties to another, remote photon. Here is the site:

http://www.aip.org/physnews/graphics/html/teleport.htm


I'm an aspiring science fiction writer and what I want to do in my story is achieve teleportation by actually teleporting the people themselves, not their properties. So, I began thinking about how I was going to do that. I thought about creating a teleporter that works by converting matter into energy and reconverting the energy back into matter and being able to pass through walls and ceilings, sort of like radio signals.


1) Since we are talking pure theory here, is the matter/energy conversion process teleportation in the literal sense, at least theorically?


The thing that concerns me about this concept has some philosophical issues to address.


2) For starters, does conversion of matter into energy and vice-versa in this case imply the person undergoing the process has ceased to exist, only to be replaced by a replica who was literally born into existence once the energy was reconverted back into matter?


3) What other theories or ideas can I use for my story?


Whitestar

That #2 that you posed is interesting. I'd say that the person's continued vs interrupted existence hinges on the question of whether the machine teleporting them is practically automatic in completing the full process or not; that is, is the person's arrival inevitable, or does it require an entire second mode.

Because, if a person was getting transported any long distance that might involve interference or interruption, even to the other side of the planet (note satellite delays on TV), then they can only be reconstructed after the receiver approves a checksum so as to know that the correct error free transmission was indeed recieved.

Based on that, I'd have to say that yes, there was an interruption of their life, which was then reconstructed, or reborn, if you will.

This would become even more significant with attempts to sabotage the transmission to commit murder, or to copy the transmission to commit fraud. (Talk about the ultimate identity theft.)

And if chaos teaches us anything about information (or if information teaches us anything about chaos), it's that there's really no guarantee of just one discrete transmission. Not if you want the act of transmission to be usefully intrepid. Chaos wants to creep up into order, replacing and completely engulfing it, till the environment is information-saturated. That is the ultimate life insurance.

Speaking of accounting-y, legality type premises, you could have investigators following up on memory-loss claims filed by people who had been teleported. There have got to be dozens of cool legal / ethical possibilities there.

Hey, if you've got anything written online, point us a link to it.

This issue was already addressed one year or something ago on this forum. Use the "search" option to find it… To sum up things, I quoted a very good study about teleportation in the book "the physics of Star Trek". Basically, apart from the continuity of life and consciousness issue, the main problem is the amount of information needed to rebuild a human body. To make a complete "map" of the body, element by element, would take so much time and information that teleportation would take a very long time and a huge "hard drive" (the siez of the galaxy if I remember well) to store the information.

But If your problem is basically to write a science fiction novel… just assume they have the technology and write it ! Unless you'er into "hard science", it is not a problem.
If your concern is that teleportation has a too classic look, some star-trekish fifties flavour, you could imagine a more modern and exotic teleportation device that just a big flashy shower cabin. What about an alien blob that has the power of teleporting any living organism it digests into its twin blob on a distant planet ? Then you can be teleported - but only by accepting to be first digested alive…
Oh god that's such a great idea I swear I will sue you if you write a best seller using it !

To astrapol2:

I had never thought of the parallel before... What if the galaxy IS a giant hard drive? It's disk-shaped, full of intricacy and information, has a surface readable as on / off (star / void)......

Maybe conciuousnesses as complex as us are nonetheless just subroutines on a used / reconditioned hard drive in the bargain bin down at Circuit Universe.


To Whitestar:

As you'll probably be able to tell, I'm much less a rigorous theories person and much more a vigorous ideas person. Basically, where the science is unknown, or it's likely not to be in the very next discovery cycle, I say just make your own consistent rules.

Another premise idea: What if that universe's citizens avidly use teleportation already, but also know that there are related discoveries about parallel universes? What if so far, there is no way to get into, and no reason to get into these parallel universes...or so it has been claimed so far. You could have a protagonist that becomes paranoid that he actually IS in a parallel, because of an accident in his transmission that left him in a week-long coma. The world seems different when he wakes up, but is that just because of political turmoil and a misinformation gap causing a different point of view on this side of the sector? His job could be a war correspondent! Mix into the plot the fact that teleportation at its best has a tiny percentage of side effects involving amnesia and / or paranoia. And conditions are not at their best because this is a brewing war zone. Also, there is buzz that terrorists might be planning to sabotage teleports. So now, he's afraid to try to leave, but also afraid to stay!

Hey, you can feel free to use the idea. (I could be so honored.)