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U.S. Air Force Takes a Look at Teleportation
By Bill Christensen
posted: 03 November 2004
06:44 am ET
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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.)
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