he word “teleportation” was coined

in 1931 by American writer Charles
Fort to describe the strange anomaly
of disappearances and appearances,
which he suggested may be
connected. He joined the Greek prefix
tele- (meaning “distant’) to the Latin
verb portarelmeaning “to carry’). The
idea is that some individuals are born
with a rare innate talent; the mental
ability fo create a wormhole and use
it to transport themselves (and other
people and objects) elsewhere on the
planet, for example, to the flat spot
atop the head of the Sphinx in Egypt
for a picnic or to the interior of a bank
vault to make a quick withdrawal. The
topic is connecting this fanciful Sci-Fi
premise to the literature that preceded
it, and fo the real physics which are
relevant to teleportation.

Teleportation is nothing new in
the literature of religion. The New

Testament tells us in John 6:16-21

that, shortly after Jesus walked on

the waters of the Sea of Galilee to
join his disciples in a boat on storm-
tossed waters, he teleported the lot of
them, boat and all, to the safe harbor
of Capernaum, at the northern end

of the Sea of Galilee. Later, in Acts
8:38-40, we are told that Philip the
Evangelist, just after converting an
Ethiopian eunuch to Christianity, was
teleported from his location on the
Gaza-to-Jerusalem road to the town
on Azotus, about 15 miles away. Not
to be outdone, the Quran describes
the phenomenon of Tay al-Ard (folding
the Earth), in which you raise your

feet and wait while the Earth turns
under you until you reach your desired
destination. In Islamic believe, holy
Mohammad teleported from Mecca
to Medina (two major cities in Saudi
Arabia) in the blink of an eye

Within Science Fiction, teleportation
forms a recognizable plot-device and
theme. There are several popular

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movies about it, and the most famous
science fiction film about teleportation
is Jumper, which is based on the young
adult novels of Steven Gould. In the
film, the creation of the wormhole is
fast and almost seamless, but it leaves
behind a “jump scar’ that can be
reopened by others, if they act quickly,
making for tricky interactions between
the teleporting “jumpers” and their
ancient “paladin” adversaries. Other
examples of this subject can be found in

TRON, Harry Potter, The Prestige, and
Star Trek.

Quantum Teleportation

The most important part of this topic is
the physics perspective, thus | talked

to Dr. Erik Jensen, Professor and
Department Chair of physics at UNBC:

Do you think is it possible to transfer
objects via network?

In reality, no, because the amount of

memory-alpha.org

data required to transfer an object
(even just a small little solid object) is
huge. There is such tremendous data
associated with it that it is simply
inconceivable that amount of data
transfer could ever happen; | mean
that would be a kind of replication, and
really there is no need to destroy the
initial object. You can somehow read
out that information and then take

that information transfer and create

a new object. The original object

really would be like the duplicated
one, because you cannot transport

it itself. The idea would be you are
transporting information about this
state of the object to where ever you
would like it to be. But even transfer

of this information is an inconceivably
huge number, because any solid object
has such an incredibly huge number of
particles in the atoms and because the
atoms are so small and there are so
many atoms in it, the amount of data to
transfer is astronomical, it is not just an
order of magnitude in it. Sometimes we