U.S. Air Force Takes a Look at Teleportation
By Bill Christensen
posted: 03 November 2004
10:19 am ET
It seems that mere stealth technology is not enough; the United
States Air Force wants to get from here to there without even
traversing the space in between. Are they looking for a Star
Trek(TM) transporter? Or maybe even a farcaster from science
fiction writer Dan Simmons' awesome novel Hyperion, which lets you
step from one planet to the next?
Not quite: but, lest you think that our friends at DARPA are the
only ones interested in science-fictional possibilities, the USAF
recently took delivery of a new study regarding the military
potential of teleportation.
The Teleportation Physics Study was done by Eric Davis of Warp
Drive Metrics. Its purpose -
"This study was tasked with the purpose of collecting information
describing the teleportation of material objects, providing a
description of teleportation as it occurs in physics, its
theoretical and experimental status, and a projection of potential
applications. The study also consisted of a search for
teleportation phenomena occurring naturally or under laboratory
conditions that can be assembled into a model describing the
conditions required to accomplish the transfer of objects."
The author broke down the various possibilities in this way:
* Teleportation SciFi: the disembodied transport of persons or
inanimate objects across space by advanced (futuristic)
technological means (adapted from Vaidman, 2001). We will call this
sf- Teleportation, which will not be considered further in this
study.
* Teleportation psychic: the conveyance of persons or inanimate
objects by psychic means. We will call this p-Teleportation.
* Teleportation engineering the vacuum or spacetime metric: the
conveyance of persons or inanimate objects across space by altering
the properties of the spacetime vacuum, or by altering the
spacetime metric (geometry). We will call this
vm-Teleportation.
* Teleportation quantum entanglement: the disembodied transport
of the quantum state of a system and its correlations across space
to another system, where system refers to any single or collective
particles of matter or energy such as baryons (protons, neutrons,
etc.), leptons (electrons, etc.), photons, atoms, ions, etc. We
will call this q-Teleportation.
* Teleportation exotic: the conveyance of persons or inanimate
objects by transport through extra space dimensions or parallel
universes. We will call this e-Teleportation.
Even though I was disappointed with the outright dismissal of Star
Trek-style teleportation (sheesh!), I was briefly encouraged by the
fact that he offered solutions that meet the definition of
vm-teleportation:
"The first solution can be found from the class of traversable
wormholes giving rise to what I call a true stargate. A stargate
is essentially a wormhole with a flat-face shape for the throat as
opposed to the spherical-shaped throat of the Morris and Thorne
traversable wormhole, which was derived from a spherically
symmetric Lorentzian spacetime metric that prescribes the wormhole
geometry."
Unfortunately, despite a lot of very impressive math, he seems to
settle on p-teleportation as the most likely recommendation for
further study, saying
"P-Teleportation, if verified, would represent a phenomenon that
could offer potential high-payoff military, intelligence and
commercial applications. This phenomenon could generate a dramatic
revolution in technology, which would result from a dramatic
paradigm shift in science. Anomalies are the key to all paradigm
shifts!"
I know what you're thinking; more wasted government money. However,
a quick look at the distribution list thoughtfully included at the
end of the report shows that a copy was sent to Gregory Benford,
physicist and highly respected sf author. Maybe we'll get a good
story out of it.
In the meantime, read what it would be like to step through a
wormhole; check out Frank Herbert's description of a vortal tube
from his 1969 novel Whipping Star.
(This Science Fiction in the News story used with permission from
Technovelgy.com - where science meets fiction.)