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The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
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Standing on the Ledge with Jumper
January 21st, 2008
So there’s a new movie coming out next month, Jumper, based on an sf novel by Steven Gould, whose writing I’ve admired over the years (“Peaches for Mad Molly” is a truly original story).
I just came across this story about the director Doug Liman and lead actor Hayden Christensen of Star Wars infamy visiting MIT to talk about the movie and the science behind it with physicists there.
WTF? The “science?”
And what’s worse, I think the MIT guys are buying into it with what I believe are misleading statements and loose language. I’ve kept up with quantum “teleportation” and the term is BS. What happens is that you use the action of quantum “entanglement” which means that two particles (for instance) share a relationship of particular properties (e.g., spins) and you move them apart very careful so they don’t interact with their surroundings. Then, you measure the spin of one of them. Simultaneously, the spin of the other “collapses” into the corresponding matched state. This has been referred to as the teleportation of information. The only thing traveling infinitely fast is the state of the other particle. We’re not actually teleporting any actual object or particle of any kind.
This quantum teleportation is nothing like the transporter beams of Star Trek or the “Bamfs!” of Nightcrawler.
But the MIT scientists, even with their minimal qualifying statements, don’t exactly say it isn’t in very clear terms. It could be the person writing the article putting their own spin on it, to make it as exciting and relevant as possible, which given the state of science writing (and we’ve got a showbiz article here), is very likely.
I haven’t jumped off the ledge quite, but Christensen’s statement about how a movie like Jumper with its unexplained teleporting will make kids want to grow up to be scientists is troubling to me. I mean, it might. But where’s the science in Jumper? A tenuous link to some lab experiments that aren’t actual teleportation? It might as well be Kirk Cameron making wild claims of proving the existence of God with bananas. At least Christensen gave Star Trek credit for inspiring kids to become scientists (arguably true in my case), and not Star Wars. The science in Star Wars…do not want.
I’m all for inspiring kids, but why not put some real science in movies instead of trying to justify it after the fact? Authenticity beats the veneer of authenticity any day. And will keep me from jumping.
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Simultaneously, the spin of the other “collapses†into the corresponding matched state.
Can’t you get much the same effect with a deck of cards? Shuffle them, divide them into two piles, carry one pile to Singapore and the other to Rio. As soon as you look at one set, you know what cards are in the other (Of course you don’t know how they are ordered [1]).
1: Considers scam involving poker and the popsci version of quantum mechanics. “Obviously”, entanglement means that you should be able to tell from your cards what everyone else is holding and for a (enough to get me to some nation without extradition) I will show you how to do this.
Does the Mob honour extradition treaties?
The quantum mechanical entanglement case is actually different from the deck of cards example (although I pick Rio for my half). The equivalent would be that when you split the 52 cards into two piles and don’t look at them, they only gain an identity when you look at them later, and when you do the other set collapses to become the matching half. This is a subtle but important difference. Einstein suggested an idea like the card example and called it “hidden variables” and worked out an experiment that could distinguish between the two cases. He didn’t like the magic, instantaneous communication inherent in the quantum explanation. When the experiments were finally done (by Aspect et al.), the quantum explanation triumphed.
I think the movie “What the Bleep do we know?” is a scam that misinterprets quantum mechanics. Also, what quantum “teleportation” will give us is never teleportation, but perfect spy-proof communication. Any eavesdropping will break the entanglement and can be detected.
Obviously, you have not seen the movie JUMPER, so if you are so scientific minded about it all, what qualifies you to judge! And you are no physicist, correct? In other words, until you see the film, you have no real knowledge of how the subject is portrayed.
Unlike you, I travel around and attend special events at major universities that deal with particle physics, quantum mechanics, etc. Teleportation is being done, and even though we use a photon (for one example) and this seems insignificant, any real world physicist will tell you it opens a big door to future possibilities. None of the physicists I have heard associated with the film have said we can do anything, except teleport a photon! And my kids were VERY excited to hear even a photon could be teleported. But this is why filmmaking is very important, because at the least, the film JUMPER will raise awareness of this subject, which indeed, is very exciting. This is the stuff that Einstein was made of — IMAGINATION! Why should science throw out imagination. As Einstein himself wrote, IMAGINATION IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN KNOWLEDGE.
SO…YOU stand to be corrected.
Kind regards,
Steven
I hope you’re being sarcastic, Steven, because I’m a University Professor with degrees in physics, electrical engineering, and astronomy. I get invited to give the talks you apparently go to see. And the jumps in JUMPER are apparently a psychic ability and not based on any technology or other realistic scientific explanation (which is fine for a science fiction fantasy).
And funny to quote Einstein — he was the one who didn’t even believe in entanglement. I stand by my statement that the phenomenon being discussed in the article by the MIT scientists is interesting, but not properly described as “teleportation.” While I’m at it, the “Big Bang” wasn’t big or a bang and black holes aren’t really black.
Imagination is important, but it doesn’t replace knowledge.
And if the reviews of JUMPER are good, I’ll go see it and post a follow up. I’m just not expecting to see much having to do with science.
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free quotes…
Excellent post. Keep it up!…
The wife and I went to see Jumper this past week and we enjoyed the story…and Samuel L farkin’ Jackson. Enjoyable. Gave us some points of conversation after the movie, even.
But “science?” What science? The only brief nod toward the field of science was the mention of “wormhole” as the God-fearing Paladin followed Mike through to the “lair.” And that was merely a nod.
What’s next? A visit by Samuel L “ENGLISH-MOTHERFARKER-DO-YOU-SPEAK-IT?” Jackson to the Boston School of Theology to discuss the “theology” in Jumper? Perhaps the sound-bite from Mr. Jackson’s address will be: “I hope my portrayal of a self-righteous bigot Hell-bent on destroying the lives of innocents in order to commit hate crimes encourages the life-long pursuit of Theological studies in young people everywhere.” It would be similarly relevant to Christensen’s MIT remarks.
Speaking of the theology in Jumper, Mr. Jackson’s character is incensed that jumpers have the power of being in “all places at all times”, which only God should have. Um…being able to jump from one PLACE to another PLACE at will is by definition NOT omnipresence but unipresence. Although I probably would not have entered into that debate with him once he unwrapped the knife to vivisect my uni-spacial guts.
So, yeah, I see with your WTF and raise you a OMG.
“So, yeah, I see
withyour WTF and raise you a OMG.”Ugh.
AFAIK, quantum teleportation is more than the wave function collapse. It’s the sending of the information about the quantum state without knowing what that state is. If you don’t know what basis to use to measure the state, the classical limit for getting that information right is 0.5 (or 0.67 for polarization). In quantum teleportation, though, you can do better than the classical limit; the theoretical limit is 1.
What you described was the (classically) prickly problem of entanglement itself, not the one of teleportation.
Yes, I am primarily explaining entaglement as that’s the first step in the process, central to the process, and one that people are least likely to understand. It is the collapse (measurement) in one location that literally sends the information (state) to the other location. To go on, is “teleporting information” the same as teleporting in any classical sense? At best quantum teleportation potentially provides an ansible, but in practice decoding the information requires additional information sent more conventionally limiting the rate of information sent to the speed of light. It’s just a way of sending information, as far as teleporting goes, and one that requires a lot of help. And moreover, to actually builder a teleporter, you have to move the entangled particle from one place to the other by conventional means. That’s akin to me asking you to believe that I can teleport a chair by carrying it across the room, which I guess it would be by some liberal definitions. This is not being sold for what it is — a piece of a particular type of teleporter at best, but teleportation. This is really going to be technology for perfect encryption, and not anything close to classical teleportation. I consider it a lie for someone to say that this process has ever actually teleported a particle — the particle is moved in quite a conventional manner with information about its state part of a shell game. Why not just move the particle without the shenanigans and claim it’s teleported? Do you see what I’m getting at? It’s a replica of a particle, which are already indistinguishable, with a copy of the quantum state. It’s a quantum state fax machine where you ship the paper between the sender and receiver conventionally.
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