5 ms·

Physicists Say That Teleportation is Unworkable

22 points by wikiburner 13y ago

haldujai 13y ago
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/viewFile/558/380 https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/article/view... 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.
- Xcelerate 13y ago
  I thought the article was just a fun thought experiment; I didn't realize someone was trying to pass it off as research?
  - haldujai 13y ago
    When they call it "The Journal of Special Physics Topics" and publish and blog/journalists on popular websites make the statement 'physicists state' this isn't a fun little thought experiment. Unless this is The Onion. A thought experiment would entail addressing a concept, some alternatives, having proper citations, and being more than a 2 page ramble of someone applying a basic data transmission rate formula. The only thing they cite in that are formulas, they don't even cite their factually incorrect statements about biology. To make it worse, this article is part of their DEGREE. They are being assessed on this. This is supposed to be scientific[1]. This is infuriating, this is what discredits young scientists everywhere. Obvious crap being published by undergraduate journals and those Intel Science Competition fakes that take the credit for what graduate students have slaved on for years and claim they did it in a 2 month summer. They rile the media about how some 16 year old kid cured cancer and make the public upset about how experienced researchers, HHMI fellows, and Nobel laureates with tens of millions in funding couldn't do what this miraculous 16 year old kid did in 2 months. [1] https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/about/editorialPolicies#focusAndScope https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/about/editor...
    - oblique63 13y ago
      While I don't have personal experience in this area (yet), everything here seems to be symptomatic of the issues within the structure of academia itself, and the students could very well just be victims of the machine. If so, bashing their misguided efforts like this doesn't seem like it would be constructive for anybody. Being passionate about a subject is all well and good, but it isn't always the best state for communication/cooperation/problem-solving, which seems to be ultimately what you want here.
- vacri 13y ago
  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.
  - haldujai 13y ago
    My apologies, I should have checked the math, I didn't look too carefully and in frustration posted that number. I was also directing this at the 'physical' reconstruction, where only 1.2 x 10^10 bits are required. Clearly this wouldn't be billions but it's still thousands. 10^42 is the Bekenstein bound, you cannot possibly require more data as that represents the quantum state of the system. A billion would be ~10.37 exabytes, or ~300 petabytes with lossless compression (ideally).
  - shalmanese 13y ago
    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.
- userulluipeste 13y ago
  I do not dismiss the blame you place on the article's author, but his take on the bandwidth requirement for teleportation may not be entirely useless. Consider "teleportation" in other context, like teleporting in other medium/nature in which physical transport would be too expensive or impossible. Say, a virtual world... We'd have no choice but to "waste time communicating in this ridiculously horrible way".
- theoh 13y ago
  Epigenetics is the least of the problems with the "reconstruct body from genome" concept. Bodies are grown in a complex environment which is totally external to the genetic code. The most obvious kind of thing you wouldn't capture would be an amputation, as a crass example, but every aspect of the body is contingent rather than described solely by the genome.
regal 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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 teletransportation, but updating of space coordinates without using any transportation.
Xcelerate 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
diminoten 13y ago
I'll settle for replicators, which I think is where "teleportation" would head anyway, right?
chavesn 13y ago
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.
DrStalker 13y ago
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!"
rosser 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
mathattack 13y ago
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.
squozzer 13y ago
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?
mistercow 13y ago
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."

22 points by wikiburner 13y ago

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/viewFile/558/380 https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/article/view... 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.

Xcelerate 13y ago
I thought the article was just a fun thought experiment; I didn't realize someone was trying to pass it off as research?
- haldujai 13y ago
  When they call it "The Journal of Special Physics Topics" and publish and blog/journalists on popular websites make the statement 'physicists state' this isn't a fun little thought experiment. Unless this is The Onion. A thought experiment would entail addressing a concept, some alternatives, having proper citations, and being more than a 2 page ramble of someone applying a basic data transmission rate formula. The only thing they cite in that are formulas, they don't even cite their factually incorrect statements about biology. To make it worse, this article is part of their DEGREE. They are being assessed on this. This is supposed to be scientific[1]. This is infuriating, this is what discredits young scientists everywhere. Obvious crap being published by undergraduate journals and those Intel Science Competition fakes that take the credit for what graduate students have slaved on for years and claim they did it in a 2 month summer. They rile the media about how some 16 year old kid cured cancer and make the public upset about how experienced researchers, HHMI fellows, and Nobel laureates with tens of millions in funding couldn't do what this miraculous 16 year old kid did in 2 months. [1] https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/about/editorialPolicies#focusAndScope https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/about/editor...
  - oblique63 13y ago
    While I don't have personal experience in this area (yet), everything here seems to be symptomatic of the issues within the structure of academia itself, and the students could very well just be victims of the machine. If so, bashing their misguided efforts like this doesn't seem like it would be constructive for anybody. Being passionate about a subject is all well and good, but it isn't always the best state for communication/cooperation/problem-solving, which seems to be ultimately what you want here.
vacri 13y ago
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.
- haldujai 13y ago
  My apologies, I should have checked the math, I didn't look too carefully and in frustration posted that number. I was also directing this at the 'physical' reconstruction, where only 1.2 x 10^10 bits are required. Clearly this wouldn't be billions but it's still thousands. 10^42 is the Bekenstein bound, you cannot possibly require more data as that represents the quantum state of the system. A billion would be ~10.37 exabytes, or ~300 petabytes with lossless compression (ideally).
- shalmanese 13y ago
  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.
userulluipeste 13y ago
I do not dismiss the blame you place on the article's author, but his take on the bandwidth requirement for teleportation may not be entirely useless. Consider "teleportation" in other context, like teleporting in other medium/nature in which physical transport would be too expensive or impossible. Say, a virtual world... We'd have no choice but to "waste time communicating in this ridiculously horrible way".
theoh 13y ago
Epigenetics is the least of the problems with the "reconstruct body from genome" concept. Bodies are grown in a complex environment which is totally external to the genetic code. The most obvious kind of thing you wouldn't capture would be an amputation, as a crass example, but every aspect of the body is contingent rather than described solely by the genome.

regal 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 teletransportation, but updating of space coordinates without using any transportation.

Xcelerate 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.

diminoten 13y ago

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

chavesn 13y ago

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.

DrStalker 13y ago

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!"

rosser 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.

mathattack 13y ago

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.

squozzer 13y ago

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?

mistercow 13y ago

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."