PORTKEYS
J.K. Rowling brings together many technologies in the Harry Potter series, one of which stood out to our group and piqued our interest- portkeys. Those in the wizarding world are able to teleport themselves to various locations by simply holding on to an object. This led us to question the technology of teleportation. Is teleportation possible? What are its limitations? Our group set out to find out!
In our last post, we touched upon the ethics of teleportation. If we transport ourselves, there is a moment when all of our information is stored in a very powerful computer, until that information is transmitted someplace new. The question raised is if the person transmitted is the same person, or a clone of the teleported person. The initial person was essentially broken down into information and then disappeared, so that person no longer exists. A new person is created out of the information that was stored. Is the new person the same person that was initially transported (Asmussen)? Also, due to the long amount of time and data it would take to teleport a person, 2.6x1042 bits of data and 4.85x1015 years (Yglesias), some say that the person created is, in fact, a new person because the old one would be dead by the time he or she is teleported (Plafke). Therefore, we have simply allowed the person to teleport himself to a later time, similar to time travel. Physicist Michio Kaku has also raised ethical concern over teleportation. When a person is teleported, the person’s atoms are broken down and recreated in a new location. In breaking down the molecules of the person, have we destroyed that person? Is teleportation causing death? (Kaku). Although we will never know the answers to these questions, these are issues that would emerge if teleportation became a reality.
Although is is not feasible to teleport humans anytime soon due to time, energy and data storage constraints, the transportation of smaller particles such as photons has been achieved already. This has been done through a process called entanglement. This process uses a pair of particles and “entangling” them so that they share the same information (Beck). One of them is then send to a destination away from the other particle through a cable while the information of the other particle was sent or teleported to the transported particle immediately (Beck). Then the original photon was destroyed so that the copied transported photon was left. This is a simple example of how teleportation works; by turning the substance or object into pure information, transporting it to the destination through a cable or through radio waves and then creating an exact copy while destroying the original.
Not only are there ethical concerns with teleportation, there are, of course, many constraints in the field of physics that become a barrier when trying to teleport an object. One, that has been mentioned, is the large amount of information required to teleport a person. The amount of data it would take would be equivalent to 30 times all of the data currently stored on Facebook (Carlsen). Also, the use of quantum physics in transporting photons is far from perfect, about 1% success. New approaches have increased this number to 40%, but the technology still remains unreliable (Buchler). Furthermore, in our last post, we mentioned that the movie The Fly reveals some possible glitches that could arise some teleportation. However, in real life, the computer would have to sift through more than just the fly and the human, it would have to sift through all of the bacteria and microorganisms that live on or in our body. That’s 9 trillion organisms (Carlsen). That’s a lot of organisms that one person could potentially get confused with if something were to go wrong. Adding to that, the amount of energy stored within our body is enough to blow up a continent with a hydrogen bomb, which makes it very risky to attempt to break apart the atoms of a person (Carlsen). Now that’s not something worth risking...
If the time that it would take a person to teleport does not drastically decrease, our initial thoughts on the benefits of teleportation would change. In the first post, we discussed how teleportation could be utilized to make transportation more efficient and help first responders get to emergencies quicker. When we thought about these benefits, we were thinking of teleportation from the Harry Potter perspective. In Harry Potter, touching a portkey instantaneously transports a person to another place. If we translate that idea to the real world, we are looking at a very complex process, not nearly as simple as using the spell portus and utilizing an object to transport us. Since actual teleportation is not instantaneous, teleportation would also be a means of time travel until it the time was cut down, which may not be possible.
While we know that teleportation is a real concept, as demonstrated by the use in transporting quantum information (Buchler), the feasibility of teleporting any living being seems quite low (Kaku). Although Kaku is willing to share his many thoughts on the impossible becoming possible, he does mark some concepts as impossible due to completely defying laws of physics. Mr. Kaku could very well be right, as he is a seasoned thinker, but he could also be overlooking concepts that would make the impossible, possible, as no physicist knows absolutely everything. Some theories and laws that scientists believed in were later unraveled and found to have flaws. In our lifetime, we will likely never see a successful teleportation of a human, but it will always be unknown whether it is possible or just needs more research to work. We can not live long enough to find out about everything in the world. Human teleportation even seems outlandish due to the amount of time it would take and the possibility of risk. While humans may not be involved in experimentation, no doubt animals will be the first live specimen we use to try to break this barrier. Still, there are always people who find devotion to a cause or wonder, regardless of risk or ethics. In that case, we still would never find out what happens if it really ends up taking 4.85X1015 years for that person to be reconfigured (Yglesias).
Our group came together very well when conducting research. We were able to collaborate on a Google document and share our research while typing individual paragraphs. We also communicated effectively in order to bring our individual thoughts together into one post. We began by simply discussing our own ideas on the practicality of teleportation for our first post. In doing this, came up with interesting thoughts about some potential problems behind teleportation, such as the lack of privacy. For the second post, we did thorough research on the science itself and came across some very interesting information and ethical concerns behind teleportation that had not occurred to us initially. Each of us did our own individual research and wrote individual paragraphs. We then collaborated online to share our research and bring our paragraphs together. Lastly, we elaborated more on our previous research for our third post with the goal of tying all of our ideas together. Through this collaborative effort, we were able to share our interesting finds and discover the feasibility of portkeys.
See! Even Sheldon Cooper agrees!
Works Cited
Asmussen, Joen. “The Ethics of Teleportation.” Noscope. 9 July 2008. N.p. Web. 19 October 2013.
Beck, G. (n.d.). Will we just teleport from place to place in the future? Retrieved October 18, 2013,
from Science Museum:
Buchler, Ben. “Teleportation Just Got Easier- But Not For You, Unfortunately.” Phys.org. 21 August
2013. Phys.org. Web. 18 October 2013.
Carlsen, Nathan. “6 Realities of Teleportation Star Trek Didn’t Warn Us About.” Cracked. 12 January 2012. Demand Media. Web. 19 October 2013.
Kaku, Michio. Physics of the Impossible. New York: Doubleday, 2008. Print.
Plafke, James. “Human Teleportation Would Take So Long, It’d Be More Like a Death Ray.” Extreme Tech. 2 August 2013. Ziff Davis, Inc. Web. 18 October 2013.
“The Big Bang Theory- The Problem With Teleportation.” CBS. Youtube. 8 April 2008. Web Video Clip.
18 October 2013.
Yglesias, Matthew. Bad News, These Physicists Say That Teleportation is Unworkable. 4 August
2013. Web. 18 October 2013.
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