Over the decades, the copious science fictional “explanations” of how Star Trek‘s beaming technology really works, or might some- day be able to work, have undergone dis- cernable paradigm shifts. The original notion was that of the dematerialization-rematerialization, matter-to-energy conversion and back physical transporter. This was followed by the concept of the blueprint formula-like, cloning- or information-based digital transporter. Finally came the idea of the “entangled photon pairs” quantum teleporter, which holds the most promise as a real techno-scientific research direction, and has already been built experimentally by physicists for light particle “passengers.”
Canonical reference works of futurity or hyperreal techno-scientific details, such as the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, describe the classical physical transporter. The sophisticated machinery “graphically” scans the subject or object to be transported with absolute exactitude into a pattern image, either at the subatomic quantum level of resolution for life-forms or the molecular level for cargo. It converts or energizes the subject’s material substance into a plasma-like matter stream using phase transition coils. The main executable thread delegates to subsystems such as the Heisenberg Compensators to calculate requisite precision data. It then vectorizes the matter stream within a cylindrical, traveling annular confinement beam that is transmitted to the destination coordinates by a “beam emitter array pad” located on the starship’s hull. The technology reconverts and rematerializes the energy stream back to its original tangible form, using the saved pattern image details as a layout reference matrix and for data integrity verification.
Where much research and development effort will still be required to get the digital or informational transporter working is in the area of instantaneous industrial abiogenesis, or the molding of the golem creature from the sludge material. The discardable source location clone can easily be disposed of in a low-grade combustion and aeration procedure.
From the viewpoint of computing, a server application or suite of servlet controllers running on the digital transporter’s parallel processors does concurrent loads of three modular software objects or distributed beans: my genetic data and core memories; the vectors of the target location; and the polled micro-encephalogram of my buffered, unstored memories and real-time intentions, emotions, concerns, and organ coordinates. The software program then parses the various input data streams and synthesizes a formatted output data stream which it passes to the abiogenetic subsystem along with the instruction to cook up another metabolic unit of the “me” series.
Gene Roddenberry’s original modernist conception of a physical transporter did not suggest any real threat to prevalent ideas about human subjectivity because the mental picturing of the transmission of a person’s phased matter stream or “energy” within the force field of the annular confinement beam still evoked traditional associations and images of the point-to-point transportation of an intact bodily self. The newer postmodernist digital transporter and hypermodernist quantum teleporter gesture towards a paradigm shift in the predominant definition of what it means to be human. Within this posthuman paradigm, it is conceded that a copy of myself, either created from the same model informational digital pattern or emanating from an initiatory quantum mechanical techno-scientific coupled entanglement, is identical to me. Formulated in terms of the implied new relationship to mortality, it will be a question of accepting the death of the original subject just one single time when the inaugural, startup clone of myself is manufactured. This “death,” moreover, will be fortuitously rationalized by the technoscience-driven conquest of cool as a small price to be paid for the acquisition of a useful and generalized cybernetic prosthesis. Who will not agree to the minor inconvenience of his own “departure” or not be willing to ignore the minor philosophical technicality of “who is really me?” in economic exchange for being able to travel instantly from Paris to New York? Who will not consent to a system of cloning when it grants me a sort of immortality? It is worth noting, however, that this is not the view of Star Trek‘s seminal stories about the transporter like The Enemy Within or The Next Generation episode Second Chances. In the stories themselves, Star Trekis complexly ambivalent, resisting, and critical towards the presuppositions and values of techno-culture.
The already accomplished technology of quantum teleportation goes even further in shaking up the fundamental significations of identity, difference, and metamorphosis for human existence. A crucial characteristic of quantum mechanics known as entanglement occurs under certain experimental conditions. Subatomic particles become “inextricably linked” in such a way that a change to one of them is instantly “reflected in its counterpart,” no matter how physically separated they are. (Amir Aczel)
Quantum theory postulates a “superposition of states” that destabilizes the intuitive sensorial notion of spatial separation. Entangled particles transcend space and remoteness. They belong to a “shared” system that acts as a single entity. The distance that divides the particles no longer plays any influencing role that would lead them to be regarded as having distinct identities.
A pair of twinned particles of light is generated from a single ultraviolet photon after a laser beam is passed through a beta barium borate or lithium iodate crystal in a spontaneous parametric down-conversion process. In less preferred variations of the maneuver, the fated photon pair is brought forth from a calcite prism, polaroid sheet, atomic calcium beam, “squeezed vacua,” or via the “atomic cascade” method. Using a “laser gun,” a tiny portion of the intense light aimed at the transparent nonlinear crystal is made to generate linked photon pairs instead of passing through to the other side. Once the entanglement state is established, the subatomic duo stays forever bonded. The two particles will always have either precisely opposing or “elegantly complementing” relative values of key quantum properties such as polarization direction, regardless of how far apart they travel from one another. As a photon under engineered control, one of the twinned pair may be sent out at the speed of light to a distant remote location, while its counterpart particle remains locally behind.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle precludes the possibility of taking any useful direct readings of the properties of an isolated photon. To avoid the collapse of the quantum wave function, one must stay strictly away from “knowing” these properties. An ingenious workaround technique has been devised that jointly measures a third photon, which is the one earmarked to be transported, in conjunction with the local member of the entangled photon pair. This interferometric procedure or Bell-state analysis determines certain properties of the independent photon to be teleported and one of the entangled photons, such as the horizontal or vertical alignment of their relative electrical field oscillations. The polarization measurement, sometimes carried out using a semireflecting mirror, has a decisive effect. The remote entangled particle, which could be sitting inside an arrival chamber at the far end of the solar system, immediately takes on the property values of the third photon, either as an exact replica or in a gracefully symmetrical way that is adjusted without difficulty at the receiving end. The second case occurs about 75% of the time. The remote particle is aligned into its “identical” equivalence with the original particle through a crystalline refraction process guided by the output data from the sending station’s “joint measurement” operation. This information specifying what must be done to the remote particle to complete the metamorphosis to identity is forwarded via a conventional “light speed” communications channel. The “immediate impact” connection between the entangled photons is referred to as the “EPR channel,” after a famous 1935 theoretical physics paper by Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen that tried to debunk quantum theory by describing hypothetical states of entanglement that were believed to be impossible.
The technology that has been brought to realization by quantum physics experimenters at IBM, Cal Tech, the University of Innsbruck, Austria and elsewhere is more than a mere remote control transaction of duplicating a micro particle’s quantum properties at a different location. It is genuine teleportation because, as Viennese physicist Anton Zeilinger says, “particles of the same type in the same quantum state are indistinguishable even in principle.” A visible-light photon is nothing else but its quantum state. Its state is its identity. Nothing more of relevance can be known about it, or said to be objectively real about it. This scientific postulate cuts straight to the chase of what so disturbed Einstein about the ramifications of quantum theory. It is not sufficient to endlessly repeat that Einstein thought that quantum mechanics must be invalid if it leads to such bizarre effects (“God does not play dice”). Now that entanglement has been experimentally verified, we could safely dismiss Einstein’s skepticism as “disproven.”
Einstein told Werner Heisenberg: “It is the theory which decides what we can observe.” In the wake of the remarkable set of ideas that emerged from the “pragmatist” Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics, science would henceforth be about the codifying of what it is possible for us to know about the subatomic world or nature, rather than knowledge of external reality itself. So far, so good. But the fruits of this neo-science, which had so much led us to humbling awareness of what we cannot know, would inevitably be worked up into technologies that impose configurations, patterns, models, and mathematical descriptions of what it is that we do know about reality onto the reality that we might have learned that we can never know. We will have failed to learn to respect or to leave to its own devices that “nature” which stood up to apperception in the very moment of quantum physical discovery. It is a “nature” that we will never know to fulfillment to which we might give the name of nothing or in-significance. Heisenberg and Bohr’s emphasis on a quantum world of potentialities happily goes beyond the fixation with “knowledge of reality,” but it is still a fixation with knowledge of something.
In his dispute with Niels Bohr, Einstein wanted to hold onto the real. The originator of special and general relativity considered locality – the assumption that a cause here cannot immediately produce an effect there – to be a requirement for a correct description of nature. Violation of this local realism would be “spooky action at a distance.” Einstein was wrong. Entanglement of remote particles is an actual phenomenon in nature. But the acceptance of quantum mechanics has often been associated with the superseding of a deterministic worldview by a stochastic one. Does the “reformulation” of quantum physics in terms of entanglement, nonlocality, and a Star Trek-inspired teleporter change this? An inherently probabilistic worldview amounts to an attempt to restore the real. It is an upgrade from the real to the hyper-real. Having attained the insight that there is no objective “real world” independent of the observer, the idea of a universe of propensities is not an adequate alternative framework for appreciating nonlocal uncertainty or the “beautiful dance among the particles” that experimentalists like Michael Horne have discovered. The reign of statistics is the domination of the model over surprises and singularities, or the practice of control by anticipation. Statistical matrices predict futures which have a “strong propensity” to take place, taking away the qualities of choice and veritable uncertainty that constitute events. Among other things, quantum mechanics describes how subatomic particles “spontaneously appear out of nowhere then quickly disappear again. At it most fundamental level, nature is random and unpredictable.” (Jim Al-Khalili)
Quantum teleportation ultimately has consequences for the paradigm shift in what is meant by identity, difference, and alteration in existence. With regard to the hypermodernist “beaming” device, it is furthermore the case that the teleporting photon at the sending station is destroyed. This happens in the course of performing the transfer of quantum properties. The teleporting photon loses all state. Its information disappears. Only the teleported photon at the receiving station stays in existence, identical in both properties and essence to the original. In an earlier philosophical-cultural epistème, it might have been asserted that there is difference between the remote particle and the particle of origin. But for twenty-first century technoscience, there is a redressed identity that is also a fascinating transformation. The technology of instantaneous transport has been achieved, soon to be upgraded and refined for atoms, molecules, suitcases, lab rats, and posthumans.
Scotty has been hard at work assessing the operational condition of the transporter. He concludes that a “complete breakdown” has taken place. After Captain Kirk was beamed aboard, Lt. Hikaru Sulu sent up the canine animal native to planet Alpha 177. Two nearly self-identical instances of the doglike creature with spiked horn reappeared on the raised transporter platform, one shortly following the other. One of the nonidentical twins is gentle and timid. The other is wildly agitated and violent, and must be tied down in a specimen case. “We don’t dare send Mr. Sulu and the landing party up,” explains Mr. Scott. “If this should happen to a man…”
Given the nonuseable state of the transporter, Sulu and the three other men are stranded on the planet’s surface. They face the life-threatening prospect of oncoming nightfall, when they will freeze to death from extreme temperatures which drop to 120 degrees below zero. They have no heating equipment with them. Using the limited energy in their hand phasers to generate warmth in some rocks provides temporary relief. But every hour that goes by brings with it a further diminishing of the chances that they will still be alive when the only vehicle that can rescue them is at last repaired. The Enterprise has as yet no shuttlecraft available.
The probable catalyst of the transporter malfunction was interference from the soft yellow ore containing “unknown magnetic elements” with “highly unusual properties” that had coated Technician Fisher’s jumpsuit. The unfamiliar mineral substance wreaked havoc in the circuits of the “ionizer components.”
As suggested by chaos theory, a system like the transporter may persist in working fine so long as propitious circumstances shield its too limited conception as a controllable sealed off system from the disruptive vagaries set off by wider environmental factors. The quantum teleportation connection is delicate, and “must be preserved by keeping the particles isolated from their environment.” (Amir Aczel) An attempt is made through permanent vigilance to keep the system completely segregated and protected. But failure to sufficiently consider the impact of external changing quantities that interact with the managed causal system results in drastic disturbances. An “unaccounted for” outside variable enters into play as the provocator of an intrinsic accident. It reshuffles the complex system’s initial conditions and incites a reversibility of effects.