Beam Me Up Scotty! - How Can Teleportation Be Possible?

Teleporting is among the favorite talents or invention options in many science fiction stories. Star Trek is one of the most well-known examples. This concept, which continues to be popular among the answers given to the famous question "If you had a superpower, what would you want it to be?" has also attracted the science world. Scientists also liked this fictional reality pretty much and have been researching it until today. Well, what is this teleportation, let's talk about it first.

Beam us up, Scotty!

Teleportation, beaming up… In Latin, 'Tele' means far and Portare means to carry. In other words, it is the event that a substance disappears from its environment and emerges in another place, as a whole, with the same properties.

You may have heard of the Philadelphia experiment, which was shown as one of the first experiments on teleportation in history. Rumor has it that a teleportation experiment was conducted by the American navy in 1943. The 1,240-ton military ship with a crew of 104 allegedly appeared at the Norfolk naval base, about 600 km away, after disappearing in a green mist. Of course, these are the testimonies of eyewitnesses. However, after a while, everyone named in the experiment mysteriously disappears or is found mysteriously dead. We don't know what happened in that part of the incident, but the teleportation part interests us for now.

The Philadelphia experiment was originally just an invisibility experiment. In this experiment, based on Einstein's 'Unified Fields Theory', they aimed to create a very strong electromagnetic field and bend the rays to provide optical invisibility. So that they would not be visible to the enemies. However, they encountered an unexpected result and the ship appeared elsewhere. Official authorities deny this situation…

If you are interested, you can take a look at the 1984 movie 'Philadelphia Experiment', which is about these incidents.

This mysterious ship incident was only the beginning, of course. Years later, research began to approach this topic with a different technique. This approach seems like the best way to me. Quantum teleportation…

Quantum, which means 'quantity' in Latin, is defined as the smallest possible unit of energy or matter. Quantum teleportation, on the other hand, refers to the ability of matter to be transformed into energy, to move in space, and re-embodied in another place or time.

One of the best examples that prove quantum was given by Northern Irish physicist John Bell. According to the experiments carried out at CERN, two particles interacting with each other can no longer be identified independently. Two entangled photons are moved away from each other by placing them in environments that do not interfere with their polarization. By simply changing the direction of rotation of one of the photons, it is observed what happens to the other, and Ta-Da! The other photon also changes its spin direction, even though there is no outside interference. This is what we call Quantum Entanglement. And with this experiment, information is teleported for the first time.

A growing number of studies on this subject have begun to perform teleportation of atoms. For the first time, Eugene Polzik and his colleagues achieved the bulk transport of large numbers of atoms. At Delft University, atoms were teleported 3 meters away.

In other words, if atoms can be teleported and everything we see around us (including humans) consists of atoms, the idea of teleportation turns from being a fiction into a scientific reality.

If we gradually pass into the material dimension, we will first need to transform the object we want to teleport into energy. Because, according to quantum, subatomic consists of pure energy. We then need a vehicle to transmit this energized information. Consider a kind of network that beams information like the entangled photons we talked about earlier. And finally, we need to be able to collect this information to reach the other side and transfer it from the energetic dimension to the matter.

Actually, that sounds a little scary. It may be normal for an inanimate object, but how a person can be converted into energy, and what a person would experience in this process is a complete mystery. Because you will decompose into molecules, atoms, and photons, respectively. We're talking billions of particles here. In other words, we need a lot of energy... The transfer of information may be possible with developing quantum computers (they must be very advanced so that they can carry so much information without error), but unification is a completely different process. All these parts have to come together in exactly the same way. This brings up another question. Will the person appearing at the teleported location be the same as the original? Because in theory, we actually clone the teleporter. We copy a collection of information with the same characteristics to another place. And we destroy the original.

In other words, the teleportation process seems quite dangerous as well as its cost and complexity.

Anyways. Let's go back to the experiments on this subject. In the most recent development, in 2017, China took a big leap forward in quantum teleportation, beaming a piece of the photon to a satellite called Micius, which orbits 1,400 kilometers from Earth. Thus, by breaking new ground, he established the 'first quantum network'. Since data transfer is carried out without physical contact, it is thought that a historical development can be experienced with the quantum internet. This is also the longest-distance quantum teleportation ever made.

For now, although this breakthrough seems to be useful for the internet rather than teleporting people, it is emphasized that it can also be used in the field of medicine. It is thought that the organs will be copied and stored as data using irradiation, and the organ parts in these warehouses can be used in treatments when necessary.

Sooo… Still can't teleport? Quantum entanglement didn't give us that much hope so far, although it has occasionally excited us. Then what else do we have?

Another theory comes from the comic book/TV series The Flash. The breach, the portal, the wormhole…

Some may know, but let me explain briefly to those who don't. The series I am talking about begins with an explosion that occurred as a result of the particle accelerator experiment carried out in STAR laboratories. People affected by this explosion have some changes in their physiology and gain various supernatural features.

One of the people who got his share from the explosion is our protagonist, Barry Allen, who turns into a speedster after being struck by lightning. Developing this ability in the future, Allen is the first of the one to be able to open a portal.

As our young Barry improves himself and levels up at opening portals, he discovers that he can travel in time, and turns the timeline upside down by going to the past. The consequences of this hit Cisco Ramon, one of his lab mates, along with many others, and turn him into a Vibe. Thus, a new portaler is born.

Is it possible that such a crazy lab doesn't develop a technology that can open a portal? Of course not. Therefore, another portal opener becomes this technology.

By moving at high speed and using the resulting vibrations, Barry can open a breach. Cisco does the same job by changing dimensional energies. This breach is just like a door. Differently, the back of the door opens to wherever you want. In other words, we are talking about the wormhole we know. So what is this wormhole?

Wormholes are short paths, or passages, formed by the bending of space-time. This idea, based on the General Relativity Theory by Einstein and Nathan Rosen, suggests that there are some bridges in the universe that shorten the distance and travel time.

According to British physicist Stephen Hawking, there are black holes and white holes at the entrance and exit of wormholes, respectively. As you know, black holes arise as a result of the death of massive stars accompanied by a supernova. It is said that the gravitational force increases and time slows down as we fall under the effect of a black hole. As everything in the universe has an opposite, black holes also have an opposite. We call them white holes. Unlike black holes, white holes don't attract, they repel. They are literally an entry and exit door duo, aren’t they?

Of course, it sounds good, but don't jump into the first black hole you see, wondering where you would get out of it. You can experience sudden collapses inside, being exposed to high radiation, and dealing with exotic materials.

So should we look for a black hole to teleport? No. The question we need to search would be, “Can we create our black hole and white hole then open a portal like Barry and Vibe?”.

Theoretically, if we can create a black hole or something similar and determine where the sister white hole will open, in seconds, we can enter from one door and exit through another door to reach where we want. Moreover, without disintegrating down to our photons… A wormhole, like a space-bending pipeline, would be performing this function for us. We would just walk through that short tunnel in one piece.

At least for now, a black hole has been created in the artificial environment. In an experiment conducted in the USA with very powerful X-Ray lasers, a few electrons were ejected from the largest atom of a molecule, creating a vacuum that engulfed the rest of the molecule. It was a very small model of this black hole, and its lifespan wasn't that long. Still a start, though.

Imagine that certain stations would be established in each city, and you can open the door of that city you want to go to and then pass through the door. Sounds good, doesn't it? Although, bus companies may not be happy about it.

Let's finish with one of my favorite lines from The Flash then… Run, Barry, Run.