
Physicists Say That Teleportation is Unworkable - wikiburner
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/08/04/physics_of_teleportation_it_doesn_t_work.html
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haldujai
This is worse than all those horribly incorrect political articles..

This joke of a paper is from 2012. They address satellite communication speed
and power requirements without even considering the fundamental issue of we
can't synthesize life yet.

Additionally their statement 'A cell contains enough information to replicate
any other type of cell in the body' could not be more incorrect. Clearly they
have never heard of epigenetics or other molecular changes unique to specific
cells.

Also, even if the above were possible, why would we waste time communicating
in this ridiculously horrible way? We could just send a hard drive containing
the genetic information of billions of people in a tiny rocket rather than
whatever communication method they propose.

All this would be okay if they were at least trying to make a statement or
explore some futuristic dream seriously, but they're not. All they do is
calculate the time it would take for 6 billion bits to be sent on a 0.5 GHz
band with error checking, absolute crap. This is the scientific equivalent of
linkbaiting.

Source:
[https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/article/view...](https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/article/viewFile/558/380)

Edit: I now see why this was published. This is a fake undergraduate journal
at the University of Leicester. Where undergrads write bull articles like this
so they can pad their resume for graduate school applications. It's absolute
disgrace to write an article about this. This isn't even peer reviewed by
faculty, students peer review each other. These aren't experienced
researchers, they haven't even gotten their degrees yet.

~~~
vacri
When you're criticising others for making simple errors, you probably
shouldn't make them yourself. I am, for instance, unaware of any hard drive
that can hold one human's data at the specified magnitude of 10^42 bits, let
alone 'billions of people', let alone you saying that they need to use more
data to describe the human.

Hrm... also, the hard drives we have at the moment are in the order of
10^12... so you'd need 10^30 drives... at which point, it's cheaper (and no
slower) to just send the person in their place.

~~~
shalmanese
There's no reason to assume the 10^42 bits is an accurate measure. Most
likely, there's significant compression that can be done on the data, both
lossless and lossy that can bring the storage requirements down to a much more
reasonable level.

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Xcelerate
Funny, I was thinking about this exact thing today.

Quantum teleportation essentially _is_ teleportation as long as you avoid the
philosophical issues (e.g., is a reconstructed person the same person
anymore?) and just stick to the scientific questions.

The Bekenstein Bound is a very high upper bound on the maximum information
contained within a given volume. Black holes are maximal entropy objects, and
since entropy is just the log of the number of states of a system (states =
information), roughly speaking, that's how the bound is calculated.

But everyday life isn't nearly as high in entropy as a black hole, so it's
likely that the amount of information representing a person is significantly
less than what the bound suggests. However, I have doubts about whether you
can actually use that bound on something that _isn 't_ a blackhole. A
wavefunction (which is, theoretically, all the information necessary to
completely describe a system) is a multi-particle function (more specifically,
a function of a configuration space). For example, you can talk about the
wavefunction of an electron, but that's just an approximation. To completely
describe the electron's behavior, you need the wavefunction as a function of
the electron and its surrounding particles. The further away the surrounding
particles are, the less of an influence they will have on the behavior of the
electron, but the influence is still there. So really, you'd need a
wavefunction of everything extant to exactly describe the electron... Anyway,
the question of whether there is a "universal wavefunction" seems to be
debated among physicists, and I'm not one anyway, so who knows...

Getting back on topic, I'll just assume that the wavefunction of all particles
constituting a person is enough information to completely specify them and
proceed with that as a given. That being the case, there is something called
the "no-cloning theorem" that forbids the duplication of a quantum state. So
the good news is that there's no way for teleportation to screw up and create
two of you! Quantum states can only be moved, which is what quantum
teleportation is. The problem is that this teleportation also requires a
classical channel (aka an optical fiber) to complete the transfer of state.
So, you still can't teleport anything faster than the speed of light. Which
isn't much of a problem on earth, but you still can't get to Pluto instantly.
This assumes of course that someone far in the future has figured out a way to
quickly ascertain the quantum state of macroscopic objects, which is unlikely
to ever happen.

~~~
jes5199
yeah, but is quantum state really necessary to replicate an indistinguishable
copy of a human being? There's probably some sort of lossy way to represent a
human brain-state and body-state that's good enough. As a thought experiment:
how much subatomic noise could you introduce into your own body before you
damaged it significantly? Irradiation, electric shocks, temperature changes,
introduction of various chemicals - and yet you're still you. Your "self"
could probably survive some pretty spectacular waveform transcription errors.

~~~
Xcelerate
> Lossy human compression

Uh-oh, this is not something I would want to be a part of

~~~
jes5199
I think you might be better off with a lossy copy, actually! We could lengthen
your telomeres - come to think of it, how attached are you to that DNA? We
might as well patch up your genes on the way. In fact, should just build you a
stronger skeleton and musculature from first principles, rather than xeroxing
the one in your current body. As long as we get the gross neuron structures of
your brain - and your encoded memories (which might simply be stored as binary
code in some proteins as described in
[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120309103701.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120309103701.htm)
), then I say that you're as "you" as two copies of firefox are "the same
program".

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regal
Worth noting that teleportation also necessitates the destruction of your
previous "you" along with creation of a duplicate "you." Even if it was
workable without the massive amounts of time or energy stated in the article,
there'd be some obvious ethical dilemmas - the process kills original you in
the process of copying and recreating original you.

Interestingly, in the long run this probably doesn't "matter" for anyone else
or even your role in the universe, because there's still a perfect copy of you
doing exactly what you would have done, so it's _like_ you didn't die. But you
_did_ still die... and dying is rather scary for most people.

~~~
miguelrochefort
The worst part is when they create two copies of you. What happens to the
contracts you signed? Are both of you engaged to your wife? Can both of you
keep your job? Who owns your house?

Teleportation (and duplication) makes me realize that maybe we should change
how we understand private property.

~~~
informatimago
Some consequences of unintended cloning are explored in the movie "The 6th
Day".

But if some "transportation" is required, it may be easier and cheaper to just
send information, and to use the energy and matter found at the destination to
build the copy.

Ethically, it may be preferable to keep the original copy, even if legally it
is a problem. But ethics should prevail on legality.

Is Startrek civilization more legalist than ethic?

Otherwise, what we'd really want, is not tele _transportation_ , but updating
of space coordinates without using any transportation.

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chavesn
I'll take my teleportation without serialization, thank you.

I am ridiculously unqualified to comment on this topic, but the article seemed
to start out on the wrong hypothesis from the beginning. It seems to me that
if teleportation is going to work, it has to be an actual transfer of matter.
I can't foresee us ever understanding the "state" of a human being enough to
serialize it to "information" and convert it back.

It seems far more likely that we'll discover a means of moving matter than we
will of de/rematerializing.

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rosser
While avoiding the question of whether or not teleportation is a possible
thing — I'm most certainly not qualified even to speculate meaningfully — the
headline of this article reminds me very pointedly of an Arthur C. Clarke
quote:

"If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he
is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very
probably wrong."

~~~
wikiburner
I submitted this, but I completely agree with you. To be honest, I was mostly
interested in the discussion I knew it would generate on HN.

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mistercow
Arguing that something is unworkable based on the upper bound is incredibly
terrible logic. It would be like me saying "a gallon of milk weighs less than
10,000 pounds, so asking someone to lift it from store shelves to their cart
is unworkable."

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DrStalker
The article assumes we can develop a way to convert a person into the
information needed to recreate that person as well as a way to reassemble that
data into a person while keeping data transfer speeds at today's rates.

We've got a long way to go before we can start having conversations like "I
can't teleport over, I only have 2.6x10^38b left on my mobile plan!"

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mathattack
I assume that the research article is slightly tongue in cheek. It's about
applying Physics in a creative setting.

If we followed the information bottleneck, we wouldn't be able to move at all.
Since we can move faster than teleportation suggests, then I think it's fair
to say that there can theoretically be other means of doing it.

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squozzer
What about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle? Isn't that why Picard always
had to order O'Brien to run a diagnostic on the Heisenberg compensators every
third episode?

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diminoten
I'll settle for replicators, which I think is where "teleportation" would head
anyway, right?

