Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Is Teleportation Possible?

Episode Date: November 29, 2018

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Maximize your edge by shopping at Lenovo.com during their back-to-school sale. That's Lenovo.com. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.

Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot.

He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want or gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Daniel, do you ever wish you could be in one place at one moment and then being a totally different place the next moment? Well, since I live in Southern California.

I'm definitely often stuck in traffic and want to get somewhere faster. But are you talking about getting like a Lamborghini Uber? Yeah, like an Insta Uber. Insta Uber, yeah. Be myself across town instead of having to sit on the 405. That would be wonderful. Well, you know, I imagine a lot of the people listening to this podcast are listening to it in their cars, maybe subway, or walking to work or walking to class.

All those intermediate times, right? Otherwise wasted if you weren't listening to such an awesome podcast. Yeah, that's right. We were helping you not waste time. Wouldn't it be great if we just pop over from one place to the other? That would be wonderful. Do you think that's even possible? I don't know. You're the physicist. Tell me, do you think something like that is possible? Or do you think it ever will be possible?

Listen to this episode and you'll find out. Hi, I'm Jorge. And I'm Daniel. And this is Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, where we explain everything in the universe and outside of the universe. The impossible and the possible. The universe, the multiverse, the single verse, the non-averse, every verse. The Uberverse.

The Lyftverse. The Verseverse. Today we're talking about whether or not something is impossible, It's technology that everybody wants, at least everybody who's out there sitting in traffic or is wasted time in an elevator or climbing upstairs has wanted to get somewhere faster. Is it possible to get somewhere instantaneously? Is teleportation actually possible? So as usual, before we dive into this question and try to answer whether or not this incredible idea from science fiction could actually be science one day, we went out and we asked people on the street, do you think teleportation is possible? Here's what they had to say.

I'm not sure my gut says yes there's a physical law that prevents it so maybe no I'm sorry no that seems farfetched to me even far in the future

even now I think people are already coming up with ideas of it but I just think that people are keeping it hidden and maybe secretive and fear of other countries or companies or other people just monetizing it before they do

or something so what do you think of people's answers, Jorge. So nobody seems to think that it's possible. Yeah, people seem to think like, wow, that's too far for even science to get to. I like the one that said, I'm sure somebody's working on it, but they don't want to tell anybody. I know. That person has watched too many movies where the scientists are really smart and also evil. I've noticed this trend, by the way, excuse me, for a digression of a rant, that in recent movies, scientists are always evil. There's no good science characters. They're always like out for the pursuit of knowledge, you know, regardless of the

consequences. And they just have to know this is a great opportunity. And I really want to develop this technology no matter what harm comes to humanity. And that frustrates me because, you know, as scientists, we're out there trying to help people out, trying to improve the world. We're not just here to make weapons. They certainly think highly of themselves in their lab coats and glasses. Yeah, I wonder where that stereotype came from, Daniel. I don't know. All the scientists I know are very humble. We're all excellent at being humble. We're all excellent at being There's no hubris here. All the awesome scientists and me and my friends are, we're all very humble.

But, you know, there is a complex relationship between scientists and science fiction, or, you know, the public in general, where the public thinks things like, oh, I wish we could have, you know, transponders, or we could talk into a little thing, or flying cars or the internet. Televisions or the internet, yeah. A lot of these things came out of either popular imagination or science fiction, and then scientists picked it up and said, well, let's see. Maybe that is possible, though.

Let's try to make it work, right? Have you seen those YouTube videos where somebody actually made like a real working Iron Man suit? Oh, my gosh. Have you seen those? No, that sounds terrifying. This guy's strapped like little turbine engines to his back, to his arms, to his legs, and he's like literally flying around. Well, in the movies, that totally changes the balance of power in the world

and has massive geopolitical consequences. And also rescues Robert Down Jr.'s acting career. That's right, yeah. But often when scientists come up with this technology, it does have consequences, right? It does change the way society functions and it changes the way politics work. And certainly when you develop a new kind of weapon, right? And the ideas for those weapons can change the way the world works. So it's fun to think about how ideas come from the public and then end up in science

and then go back and change the way society works. So sometimes people think of stuff and we can't actually make it happen. Well, I would say probably teleportation is right up there with flying. Like, if they could get one superpower, most people would pick flying or teleportation. Laser eyes. Come on, man. It would be laser eyes. Everybody wants laser eyes. Is that really practical, though? Your looks could kill. Okay, we're talking about superpowers, not about practical stuff here, Jorge. Well, you know, I was walking to school the other day with my son. And he's like, he asked me, like, which superpower would you like to have?

And I was like, oh, I would love to fly. And he's like, I want to teleport. He said that? So I can be it's cool right now. Yeah. Did you offer him laser eyes? I mean, does he understand that's on the menu? I think we need to go back and make sure he's fully informed. Yeah.

Well, time travel is probably another popular one. So I could go back and ask him. See, but there's a big difference between flying and teleportation. The difference is that you can see other things flying. It's obvious why flying is something you want to do. You see birds fly all the time. It looks awesome, right? But teleportation is a weird one because you've never seen anything teleport.

Nobody's ever seen anything teleport. for it. Where does the idea for it even come from, right? Why is it that we can imagine these things that could be impossible? Because they did it in movies, right? Movies and TV shows, it's super easy to fake teleportation. You just cut. Right, but that's the opposite, right? They portrayed it in TV shows and in movies after somebody had the idea, maybe this could be possible, right? That's the depiction of it, but where does the idea come from? I always think it's fascinating when, as humans, we think of a concept, which is impossible, right? We think of an idea, an idea, which is, it can only exist in the abstract, you know, that we've never actually seen.

It's come from inside our own heads. My theory is that this idea of teleportation came directly from laziness. So I'm pretty sure there was, you know, caveman or cavewoman sitting around and they're like, man, I'm really hungry. I need to go to that tree to eat, but I'm really lazy. I wish, I so wish I could just be there without having to make the effort to walk there, you know? I see. I see.

So teleportation is to live. laziness the way time travel is to procrastination, right? Yeah. It's like, oh, I wish I could go back in time and do this sooner or something. Yeah, yeah. So I think it's very natural, right, to imagine yourself just being there without having to expend effort to get there. It's totally unnatural.

It doesn't exist in nature at all. There's no natural example. I mean, maybe it's understandable, but it's like some weird extreme version of flying or something. Anyway, I think that's fascinating. I actually did a bit of reading to figure out, like, when, did teleportation first appear in science fiction or in literature? Wow. What did you find?

Oh, it's ancient. I don't know if it goes all the way back to cavemen, but it appears in Greek mythology and all sorts of stuff, people appearing here and disappearing there. So it's an old, old idea. It's basically magic, right? It's basically magic. Somebody snaps their finger and they're gone.

That's right. So science has had 5,000 years to work on this idea. Where have we gotten? Is teleportation possible? We've got jet packs. We've got handheld little powerful computers. We have flying cars. Well, you have a flying car? Where is it teleportation, Daniel?

Come on. Can I come over? Where is this flying car I want to hear about? Yeah, so is teleportation actually possible? It depends a little bit on what you mean by teleportation, right? So let's get a little bit technical. Like, if by teleportation you mean, take me, my physical body and all the atoms that make me up, have me disappear and reappear somewhere.

else that we can pretty clearly rule out that breaks a bunch of laws of physics like what do you mean well if i'm going from here then where am i atoms going right like the energy from those atoms can't just disappear there's no physical process that makes somebody disappear capture their their energy and move it somewhere else but is it impossible or is it just very unlikely it's impossible yeah you can't move energy or mass from one place to another instantaneously And not even at the speed of light. But maybe, you know, I was thinking like if you were just one single particle and there's a certain uncertainty about you, isn't there?

Like, you can be here one incident and you can be somewhere else in another instant, right? So why couldn't that apply to a whole bunch of particles all at the same time? One minute they're here and then the next moment, there's somewhere else. That's true and that can happen. But that's not really teleportation, right? Teleportation says you're here and that's very definitive and then you're there and that's very definitive. What you're talking about is, I don't really know where you are now, and then I don't really know where you are later.

That's not exactly teleportation. That's like if you wanted to say, oh, I want to go across town and you wanted to use Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, but you'd be like, well, we're not really sure where we're going to get you. You're going to be somewhere near the 405, but we can't really tell you. And then you end up in traffic and you're dead. And then there's lawsuits, and it doesn't end well. Okay, I have another idea.

Okay. What if? Because quantum particles can just appear out of nothing. right? Not just out of nothing. They can, energy from the vacuum can get turned into particles, which have mass. Yeah. And the converse is true.

Like, particles can just disappear. That's right, yeah. So isn't there in the infinity of probability the chance that all of my molecules could suddenly disappear and all of them could suddenly appear somewhere else in the same exact order? Would they be the same molecules? Oh. We're talking about the same physical particles that make you up disappearing and appearing somewhere else, right? those same molecules, actual teleportation of the stuff that makes up Jorge.

That, I think, is impossible. But you raise an interesting question, which is like, what is teleportation? What if we could disassemble you and they rebuild you somewhere else out of other particles that were in that other location? You want to go to Alpha Centauri. There are electrons over there. There are protons over there. We can make you out of that stuff over there if we just know what the recipe is for Jorge. Like if my molecules are here now, and then...

they're in Paris the next moment, how do we know they're the same molecule? Yeah, exactly. Like molecules don't have little IDs on them, right? They certainly don't, right? All electrons are identical. You can't tell one from another. Wow.

And as you say, particles are disappearing and appearing all the time. So it's not even really a well-defined question to say, like, what is the stuff that makes up me? You know, these particles are me. So in that sense, teleportation is really just the transformation of the arrangement of the particles. I see. You know, you can think about the thing that is you,

about you is the arrangement of the particles. I mean, I was thinking about this the other day, like, you know, if you are out there, you're the listener you weigh, I don't know, 70 kilos, right? I don't know, I don't know what that means. I can't do the math. It's a flattering number for every person. Yeah, it's felt, right?

Yeah, our listeners are really good looking. Anyway, say there's this 70 kilos of you, okay? Now, what is the recipe for making you? Well, it's protons, neutrons, and electrons. And the recipe is actually pretty simple. It's one-to-one-one. Same number of protons and neutrons and electrons to make up Jorge. Now, what's the recipe for making up 70 kilograms of ice cream?

Well, it's still one-to-one protons, neutrons, and electrons. It's just differently arranged. Unless it's radioactive ice cream. That's right. Unless it's really far off the isotopic diagram. Heavy ice cream. But basically the difference between Jorge and a big pile of ice cream is just the arrangement of those particles.

So what you're saying is like what makes me me is my arrangement of molecules, not the actual molecules. It's sort of a philosophically bold thing to say. But yeah, basically that's the only difference between you and ice cream is a bit of tweaking. So when we're talking about teleportation, people are really wondering if it's possible to send my current arrangement, have that arrangement appear somewhere else? Sort of. I mean, that would be a bit of a hard sell, though. I mean, what if I told you, hey, Jorge, I'm going to chop you up in little bits and remake you somewhere else, right? you'd wonder, are you killing me and then creating me?

And is that really the same as teleporting me? Is that really what you want? What you want is a smooth, continuous experience. You want the experience of traveling somewhere with minus the traveling, right? You meaning like my current arrangement in my brain of all my neurons and all the thoughts process, you want that frozen, and then you want that to appear somewhere else so that your thoughts are sort of continuous. That's right.

I think you want a continuous conscious experience, right? You want to get in the teleportation box, press the button, and then get out of the teleportation box on Alpha Centauri or in the Valley or in St. Louis or whatever, and be there. I don't think you want to get in the teleportation box, press the button, and die, and then be born somewhere else, right? I think you're giving my current arrangement of neurons a bit of a headache here, thinking about these things.

But what's the difference, right? Is there a difference to being disassembled and reassembled somewhere else with the same memories? I have so many questions for you, but before we dive in, let's take a short break. Ah, come on, why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, ultra-light, ultra-powerful, and built for serious productivity, with Intel core ultra-processors, blazing speed, and AI-powered performance.

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all on one device. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot.

He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them.

I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend, really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys.

Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the T-Duff. AWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back.

In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even hard. harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So if we were to define teleportation, which is what I think you're trying to do is, it's the wish that you could have a continuous experience of being one place and then being in another place in this next moment. That's right.

And I don't think we know enough about consciousness to know whether what I just described would accomplish that. Take the particles I make up Jorge, tear them apart to learn where they are, reassemble them somewhere else in exactly the same configuration. Would that new reassembled Jorge version 2 think it's the same Jorge? Would it know that it's been reassembled?

I don't think we know enough about consciousness to know. But boy, would that be a fascinating experiment, right? So you're saying that physical interpretation is impossible, like me, my myself, the exact molecules that make up me right now, making them appear somewhere else is impossible. But you're saying maybe we can recreate the arrangement somewhere else. And then you get into all these philosophical questions about whether that's really me or my consciousness is continuous. But that's one way you see teleportation being possible is if you recreate my

arrangement somewhere else. That's the only way I see it being possible. Yeah. Because the physical teleportation of objects, as far as I understand, is totally impossible. Even the person we interviewed on the street who believes that somewhere there's a scientist who's figured it out and is looking to make money off of it. Sorry, I think that part is actually impossible. But, you know, the second bit is pretty good, right? Beaming the information and recreating you, that could work. That could really accomplish what we want. Well, let's think about that. So, like, if you were to tell me, hey, Hor, I'm going to deconstruct you, save you to a hard drive or a flash drive, drive that using an UPS truck to the other side of town

you know insert the USB thing hold hold on a second if we're going to put you in traffic anyway what was the point just climb in the UPS truck Jorge seriously no the idea is decode you into information beam you across on a laser beam or the internet at least right so it's really fast

and then rebuild you somewhere else okay so that's one way teleportation would be possible but then that's a crazy thing to reconstruct the exact state of all of my atoms and molecules and neurons, what sort of technology would you need? You need like a crazy 3D printer. Yeah, you certainly would. But let's do the particle physics approach to this.

Let's figure out how to do it first for one particle and then for two particles and then try to generalize to however many particles make up a person or a hamster. Because if it's not possible for a single particle, then it definitely won't be possible for a whole person. But if it is possible for a single particle, then it's just sort of an engineering question for how to do it for lots of particles. Okay. So, and you're talking about beaming the information down to the quantum state, right? That's important.

It's not just like, I have an atom of carbon here in my hand. Let's just make a carbon atom over there. You're talking about the actual exact quantum state of that carbon atom. That's right. We're talking about copying a person or a cat or a hamster or whatever. We want to capture everything about it. We want to get every atom, every molecule exactly correct, because we don't know which bits are.

important, right? Maybe the thing that makes you, you is in some particular arrangement of sodium atoms in your brain. And if we say, ah, whatever, we'll just put some sodium in there in the right mixture. We don't really care where it is or what the quantum state is, then we might get a different horre, right? One who's funnier or grumpier. Yeah, saltier. Exactly. Exactly. And so we want to get it exact, right? We want to perfect copies. Okay. Is it possible to take the one particle with all its quantum state, copy that somewhere else? So that is possible, and that has actually been done, right? People have teleported information about particles across more than a thousand kilometers.

They've teleported it up into a satellite in space and back. I'm going to say something which sounds incorrect, and then I'm going to tell you what it means. We can teleport single particles. We can teleport the information about it. Exactly. We can say, I have an electron over here. Let me capture all the information about that electron that I need to get another electron. over there to be in exactly the same quantum state, as you say,

which means it's a perfect copy, right? Because electrons are all the same, there's no difference between electron number one and electron number two. There's no difference between electrons. If I get an electron over there to be in exactly the same quantum state as it was over here, then I can say I've teleported that electron. You copied it. You created an identical copy somewhere else.

It's not a copy. I've teleported it. The reason it's not a copy is that you can't copy a quantum state. in capturing the information you need to recreate it, you destroy that state. So you can't copy. You can only transfer. Oh, what?

Yeah. So if you want to teleport an electron from here across your living room, you have to give up that first electron. There's no backup copies. And so if you're thinking, hey, teleportation is a great way to make multiple copies of myself, you know, I can get so much work done because I can make 10 versions of me

and I can do 10 comic strips at a time. It doesn't work because, Copying the information also destroys the original. But it destroys it not like it disappears. It just collapses the quantum information. It changes it. Exactly. If the definition of being you is this arrangement of quantum states of all the particles in your body,

then it changes those states in a way that's no longer you, right? Oh, I see. So when you hear the words quantum teleportation, it actually doesn't mean that you teleport something using quantum technology. it means that you teleported the quantum information. Exactly. The information is sent using classical technology. You can get it on a thumb drive.

You can use a laser. You can use a telegraph. But you're teleporting the information about a quantum particle because we're all made of quantum particles. So you want to teleport me? You better teleport all my quantum particles with all their quantum information. And quantum information is different than regular information,

like ones and zeros because it's just quantum weird stuff, right? That's right. It follows totally different rules, right? There's uncertainty. You can know this and not that. It can be, yeah, and that uncertainty is maintained. I feel like physicists pull the fast one on the public there. You know, they call it quantum teleportation.

That's like telling people, hey, we can do teleportation if we use quantum stuff. But it's really just teleportation of quantum stuff. Right. And everything is quantum, so it's really just teleportation. Oh. I think you're trying to pull a fast one on us again. but you know let's make it concrete like people thinking oh what does this mean to be an electron like instead of an electron think of like a little black bag that has some marbles in it and you don't

know what the colors are right so because there's always something hidden about a quantum particle so you know say that your electron is a bag of marbles and you don't know how many blues and how many reds are in there teleporting the electron means creating another bag in another place that has the same probabilities of red marbles and blue marbles inside of it. Inside of it. So you want to capture the uncertainty of that quantum particle and recreate that

uncertainty. Somebody out there is thinking, oh, but you can't measure everything about a particle and then copy it. The quantum mechanics says you can't. You're right. Quantum mechanics says you can't. You can't measure the speed and position of a particle and recreate it somewhere else. That's impossible. And that's not what you want. What you want to do is copy the uncertainty of the particle

and copy that uncertainty somewhere else. So like a random electron that I have here and a random electron you have over there, they have different uncertainties. Yeah, exactly. Oh, okay. So then the goal is like, how do I make my electron have the same uncertainty as your electron over there? Because you can't just like look at uncertainty. If I look at the uncertainty, it's no longer uncertain.

That's right. If you open Schrodinger's box, you find out if the cat is dead or alive. That's not what you want. If you have a box with a cat in it that has a 70% chance of being alive and you want to teleport that box, what you want to do is create another box somewhere else with the same chance of being alive or dead. You don't want to open the box and say, oh, it's dead. Build a dead cat over there, right? That's not what you want to do. You want to transport the same unopened box with the same uncertainties. Yeah. It's like we're all sure that in your box,

but what makes me unique is the probability that the cat's going to be alive or dead inside of my box. And to copy myself over there means I have to create a box over there with the exact same probability as my box. The Daniel box is different than the Jorge box. That's right. Different dead cats inside Daniel than Horace. That's a way to sum up. That's a pretty picture right there. And so that's what quantum teleportation of a single particle means, right? And how you do it is pretty tricky and counterintuitive. You can't use classical ideas to do it because it's not a classical thing, right? And I want to talk about that some more, but first, let's take a quick break. Ah, come on, why is this taking so long?

This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, ultra-light, ultra-powerful, and built for serious productivity, with Intel core ultra-processors, blazing speed, and AI-powered performance. It keeps up with your business, not the other way around. Whoa, this thing moves. Stop hitting snooze on new tech. Win the tech search at Lenovo.com.

Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X1 Carp, powered by Intel Core Ultra processors, so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone.

Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet.

So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the Iheart Radio app, podcast or wherever you get your podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys.

Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glad. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back.

In Season 2, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so how did it? What's the one you said they beam to space and back? Yeah, so the way you do it is you use something called quantum entanglement, right? And as we said before, particles can have uncertainty, right?

say, you know, electron is a 70% chance of being this and a 30% chance of being that, right? And so what you want to do is transfer that information, that uncertainty somewhere else. And the way you do it is by entangling two particles. Entangling means that the particles are related, right? Like the probabilities for them to be one thing or the other are connected to each other. Say, for example, you only have one red marble and one blue marble. And you don't look at them, but you put them in different bags. Now, if you look in one bag and you see it's red, you know instantaneously the other one has to be blue, right?

Or if you looked in your one bag and it was blue, the other one has to be red. So these two bags are entangled because you know there's only one red and one blue. Because you created a process that ties them together. Like you created a rule that says, if this one's red, then the other one has to be blue. That's what you mean by entanglement, right? Exactly. That's right. So now say you have one red marble, one blue marble. You don't look at them, but you put them in different bags.

You take one to China, right? And one you leave here in the U.S. Then you know instantaneously something about the one in China, even if it's really, really far. away. So, like, you know, you know before I know what's in my bag. That's right, yeah. And it doesn't matter how far away I am, right? Instantly, I know. You're thinking, all right, but it was either red or blue the whole time, right? It's just about what you know. That's true for the marbles, but in the case of quantum particles, they exist in these superposition of states, which means they are either red or blue, or they're red and blue. Whether they're actually red or blue is

not determined until you open the bag. It's Schrodinger's cat, right? It's both alive, and dead with some probability. And so in the quantum version of this, when you open your bag and you see the quantum blue ball, it was either red or blue until the moment you opened the bag, and then it became blue. The other bag, which is now in China, really, really far away, was also either red or blue.

But then when you opened the bag in the U.S. and found that it had a blue ball, the one in China had to be red. And so it went from being maybe both to only being red. And so that's quantum entanglement, right? You have the probability of these things, and then they collapse when you, you look at one of them, which also collapses the other one, which is really, really far away.

Essentially, the way it works without getting too technical mathy. Now, one thing you should know about quantum mechanics is it's always math because it doesn't make any sense. It just doesn't make sense. You can't use logic. You can't use your intuition. You can't use common sense to think about quantum mechanics because it doesn't follow common sense.

It only follows the math. If you want to teleport to Jorge Catboggs to China, you would take two cat boxes, entangled them, ship one of them to Shina, and then do something to them, right? That's right. Whatever the thing is that you want to teleport, you put that in the box with a cat. You have to entangle that with your set of entangled particles. Oh.

Okay. Yeah. And that will cause some information to be transmitted to the other box. So you learn something about the local cat box, and that tells you what you have to do to the other cat box to create the state that you want. Oh, so I need like a courier cat box that maybe talks to my cat box in a quantum way, and then you send that to China, and then you interact that one with the other cat box, and suddenly the original cat boxes are the same quantum mechanically.

Exactly. And there's a critical step there, which is you have to send the information to China because it's not instantaneous, right? These two objects, these quantum entangled objects, are connected via entanglement, and the entanglement does collapse instantaneously when you interact with one, but in order to do the teleportation, to recreate the original state that you want in another place,

you have to send some information about what happened with your entanglement over there. Okay. Right? And so that sending of information can't happen instantaneously. You beam it with lasers, or you send it via Pony Express,

you do something to get that information over there. You're still limited to the speed of light. So even though quantum teleportation is possible, meaning you can transmit the information necessary to recreate a quantum state somewhere else, you can't do it faster than the speed of light. Okay. Which is disappointing.

So we'll never have instantaneous teleportation. It's still limited by the speed of light. Still limited by the speed of light. Wow. Even if we had teleportation, it would still be as slow as the speed of light. That's right, which is, you know, a lot faster than L.A. traffic. But it would still take a long time to get to a neighboring star system, right?

So teleportation solves your traffic, problem and your laziness problem but doesn't solve the problem of trying to get to the stars faster and then the question is like what is it like to be you while you are a beamed information right we talked about the experience of consciousness right so you get in the box you press the button we decompose you entangle you etc etc and get the information needed to send you to a faraway place but that still takes millennia right what is that like are you do you experience if you're lightheaded Do you still make puns, even though you're on board as shit, you know?

Maybe you make quantum puns, which are sort of funny enough at the same time. Usually kills a cat. Always kills the cat. And the other thing is, you know, you need something over there to receive it. So you want to teleport things to Alpha Centauri. You have to build a receiving station with quantum entangled particles over there. And that... You need a phone booth over there.

Exactly. So somebody's got to get there the old-fashioned way first and build like a teleportation receiving station before you can go there. So we'll never have a Star Trek beam, like in the movies. Yeah, I was never really clear on that because in Star Trek, they need to be in the transporter room to get beamed, but they can get beam to anywhere, right? Or from anywhere. So why can't they beam from one place to another place without using the transporter room

as an intermediate? I never understood that. Well, then Scotty would be out of the job. That's right. Probably because that would fix too many of the plot holes. Okay, so for our listeners sitting in traffic or in the subway or bored at work listening to this, unfortunately, they might never teleport. I don't know.

I think we should summarize that it is possible. My summary of that is it's possible for non-fastened-in-light teleportation of individual particles. That's been done. It's been done over great distances. and over more and more complicated objects. The first thing they did was a photon and then an electron. Now they've done like an entire atom. Really?

So now the question is, yeah, the question is how much can you do, right? To do this kind of teleportation, you need to have the quantum state of an object entangled with something else. That's possible for tiny quantum objects like particles. It's harder to imagine how it might work for a hamster or a person. That doesn't mean it's impossible. There's no physical law saying you can't do this. But it just sounds extraordinarily complicated.

and would require massive amounts of energy. Well, you know what I usually tell my son, when he tells me he would love to teleport, I always tell him that teleportation is possible. It just kind of depends on your state of mind. You know, like this morning, I just teleported from Louisville, Kentucky. You know, technically, I walked into this giant metal box, sat down. I did what I usually did, which was sleep, right on my emails on my computer, watch some TV, and then the next thing I knew,

I was in Los Angeles, you know? Like, if you just kind of shift your mental state, teleportation is kind of a possible. You're saying if you're not really aware of your surroundings, then it feels a lot like teleportation. Yeah, I mean, you just kind of reorder the sequence of events in your head. That sounds like a typical dad answer. Was he satisfied with that?

Not at all. He's eight years old. Nothing you say is satisfied. But, you know, in a way, it's sort of, it just kind of depends on your point of view, you know? Like, if you were sitting in traffic while you were listening to us, you know, you were engaging what we were saying, and then suddenly you were in a different place. So in a way, I feel like teleportation, at least kind of mentally is possible.

That's maybe the lesson to you folks out there, sitting on the 405 or, you know, taking a long walk. Maybe you can use this podcast to teleport yourself from one place to the other so you don't notice the experience of your actual travel. You just get in, press play, listen to two hilarious dudes talking about science, and then all of a sudden you're at your destination. Yeah. It's not wasted time. if you don't waste it. That's right. Well, I'm going to go out and halt my

teleportation research program now because you've solved the problem. Yeah, we saved a lot of cats. Absolutely. And so until that day when teleportation becomes an option for you to zip across the valley, I hope you can just enjoy listening to our podcasts.

All right, well, thank you so much for listening to this. I hope you get to your destination in a timely matter. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line we'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com. In the heat of battle, your squad relies on you.

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December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order. criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts my boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now i'm seriously suspicious wait a minute sam

maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit well dakota luckily it's back to school week on the okay story time podcast so we'll find out soon this person writes my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot he doesn't think it's a problem but i don't trust her now he's insisting we get to know each other but i just want her gone oh hold up isn't that against school policy that seems inappropriate maybe find out how it ends by listening to the okay storytime podcast and the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts this is an iHeart podcast