LONDON: Ever felt like watching yourself from the sidelines? Scientists have just replicated that feeling in the lab. Neuroscientists have created an out-of-body illusion in people placed inside a br8ain scanner and used that illusion to perceptually 'teleport' the participants to different locations in a room.

Scientists from Sweden's Karolinska Institutet have shown that the perceived location of the bodily self can be decoded from activity patterns in specific brain regions. Studies in rats have shown that specific regions of the brain contain GPS-like 'place cells' that signal the rat's position in the room - a discovery that was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.

To date, however, it remains unknown how the human brain shapes our perceptual experience of being a body somewhere in space, and whether the regions that have been identified in rats are involved in this process.

In a study published in the scientific journal Current Biology, the scientists created an out-of-body illusion in fifteen healthy participants placed inside a brain scanner. In the experiment, the participants wore head-mounted displays and viewed themselves and the brain scanner from another part of the room.

From the new visual perspective, the participant observes the body of a stranger in the foregr8ou8nd while their physical body is visible in the background, protruding from the bore of the brain scanner.

To elicit the illusion, the scientist touches the participant's body with an object in synchrony with identical touches being delivered to the stranger's body, in full view of the participant. "In a matter of seconds, the brain merges the sensation of touch and visual input from the new perspective, resulting in the illusion of owning the stranger's body and being located in that body's position in the room, outside the participant's physical body," said Arvid Guterstam, lead author of the study.

In the most important part of the study, the scientists used the out-of-body illusion to perceptually 'teleport' the participants between different places in the scanner room. They then employed pattern recognition techniques to analyse the brain activity and show that the perceived self-location can be decoded from activity patterns in specific areas in the temporal and parietal lobes.

The scientists could demonstrate a systematic relationship between the information content in these patterns and the participants' perceived vividness of the illusion of being located in a specific out-of-body position.

"The sense of being a body located somewhere in space is essential for our interactions with the outside world and constitutes a fundamental aspect of human self-consciousness," Guterstam said.

Teleportation or teletransportation is the theoretical transfer of matter or energy from one point to another without traversing the physical space between them. It is a common subject in science fiction literature, film, video games, and television.

Since 1993, energy and particle teleportation has become a hot topic in quantum mechanics.

Contents

  [hide] 

·         1Etymology

·         2Fiction

·         3Science

·         4See also

·         5References

·         6Further reading

Etymology[edit]

The use of the term teleport to describe the hypothetical movement of material objects between one place and another without physically traversing the distance between them has been documented as early as 1878.^[1][2]

American writer Charles Fort is credited with having coined the word teleportation in 1931^[3][4] to describe the strange disappearances and appearances of anomalies, which he suggested may be connected. As in the earlier usage, he joined the Greek prefix tele- (meaning "distant") to the root of the Latin verb portare (meaning "to carry").^[5] Fort's first formal use of the word occurred in the second chapter of his 1931 book Lo!:^[6]

Mostly in this book I shall specialize upon indications that there exists a transportory force that I shall call Teleportation. I shall be accused of having assembled lies, yarns, hoaxes, and superstitions. To some degree I think so, myself. To some degree, I do not. I offer the data.

Fiction[edit]

Main article: Teleportation in fiction

The earliest recorded story of a "matter transmitter" was Edward Page Mitchell's "The Man Without a Body" in 1877.^[7]

See also the movie The Fly (1958) and 1957 story of the same name.

In episode 20 of the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson children's programme, Fireball XL5, produced in 1962 before the advent of Star Trek and its 'transporter', the Nutopians have a "matter transporter" used to dematerialise and rematerialise people between the planet and an alien ship not unlike the later transporter of Star Trek fame.

In the Star Trek transporter, which brought the concept of teleportation into popular knowledge, two essential stages of the process are dematerialization and rematerialization; created in an era before any CGI was possible. The visual effects communicating these processes to the spectators "were created by dropping tiny bits of aluminum foil and aluminum perchlorate powder against a black sheet of cardboard, and photographing them illuminated from the side by a bright light. [...] In the studio lab, after the film was developed, the actors were superimposed fading out and the fluttering aluminum fading in, or vice versa."^[8] According to an informal survey carried out by Lawrence M. Krauss on his campus "the number of people in the United States who would not recognize the phrase 'Beam me up, Scotty' is roughly comparable to the number of people who have never heard of ketchup."^[9]

In his book, The Physics of Star Trek, after explaining the difference between transporting information and transporting the actual atoms, Krauss notes that "The Star Trek writers seem never to have got it exactly clear what they want the transporter to do. Does the transporter send the atoms and the bits, or just the bits?" He notes that according to the canon definition of the transporter the former seems to be the case, but that definition is inconsistent with a number of applications, particularly incidents, involving the transporter, which appear to involve only a transport of information, for example the way in which it splits Kirk into two versions in the episode "The Enemy Within" or the way in which Riker is similarly split in the episode "Second Chances".^[10]

Krauss writes that in order to "dematerialize" something in order to achieve matter teleportation, the binding energy of the atoms and probably that of all its nuclei would have to be overcome. He notes that the binding energy of electrons around nuclei is minuscule relative to binding energy that hold nuclei together. He notes that "if we were to heat up the nuclei to about 1000 billion degrees (about a million times hotter than the temperature at the core of the Sun), then not only would the quarks inside lose their binding energies but at around this temperature matter will suddenly lose almost all of its mass. Matter will turn into radiation—or, in the language of our transporter, matter will dematerialize. [...] In energy units, this implies providing about 10 percent of the rest mass of protons and neutrons in the form of heat. To heat up a sample the size of a human being to this level would require therefore, about 10 percent of the energy needed to annihilate the material—or the energy equivalent of a hundred 1-megaton hydrogen bombs."^[11]

Science[edit]

Main articles: Quantum teleportation and Quantum energy teleportation

Some scientists believe it is not possible to teleport macroscopic objects such as human beings, but there may be teleportation in the microscopic world. Three possible kinds of teleportation in quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics have been proposed: state teleportation, energy teleportation, and particle teleportation^{[citation needed]}.

In 1993, Bennett et al^[12] proposed that a quantum state of a particle could be teleported to another distant particle, but the two particles do not move at all. This is called state teleportation. There are a lot of following theoretical and experimental papers published.^{[citation needed]} Researchers believe that quantum teleportation is the foundation of quantum calculation and quantum communication.^{[citation needed]}

In 2008, M. Hotta^[13] proposed that it may be possible to teleport energy by exploiting quantum energy fluctuations of an entangled vacuum state of a quantum field. There are some papers published but no experimental verification.^{[citation needed]}

In 2016, Y. Wei proposed that particles themselves could teleport from one place to another.^[14] This is called particle teleportation. With this concept, superconductivity can be viewed as the teleportation of some electrons in the superconductor and superfluidity as the teleportation of some of the atoms in the cellular tube. Physicists are trying to verify this concept experimentally.

The experiment broke the previous distance record by more than three times.
When it comes to weird quantum effects, none is weirder than quantum teleportation. Scientists can—and have—used the unique and complicated physics of quantum mechanics to instantaneously teleport small particles across great distances. Now, a Chinese team has broken the distance record by teleporting particles to a satellite in space.

When we talk about teleportation, we should be clear about exactly what that means. Nobody's beaming people to space like in Star Trek. Instead, quantum teleportation is a complicated and delicate process involving sending information across space using entangled particles and reassembling it somewhere else.

We've written about quantum teleportation before, and a full explainer can be found here.

The hardest part of quantum teleportation is the entanglement. When two particles are entangled, they're essentially 'in sync' with each other, and they'll stay in sync no matter how far apart they are. But if one of the particles hits something else—like the air, or a beam of light, or literally anything—then the entanglement could be broken.

As you might imagine, keeping two particles entangled over large distances or for long periods of time is incredibly challenging. Until about a month ago, the farthest anyone had been able to separate entangled particles by was a few miles. But a Chinese team broke the record in June when they sent entangled particles to a satellite orbiting overhead, more than 300 miles away, while the particles they were entangled with remained on Earth.

Now, the same team has used those entangled particles to teleport photons from Earth to the satellite. Again, we need to be careful about what we mean when we say "teleport." In this case, the scientists are sending information—they're transferring information from a particle on the ground to a different particle in space, which takes on that information and essentially becomes the ground particle.

So, this isn't Star Trek. This can't be used to beam yourself into space or across the country, and faster-than-light communication is still impossible. But that doesn't make this technology useless. Someday, quantum teleportation could be used as a form of encryption—because if anyone intercepts the communication it'll mess up the entanglement—and to send results from quantum computers around the world.

Source: MIT Technology Review

A team of Chinese scientists has successfully teleported a particle to a satellite in space.

As Time reports, the scientists sent a photon nearly 300 miles to a satellite orbiting Earth, which is the farthest recorded distance for quantum teleportation trials thus far. The Tibetan team had been teleporting scores of photons up from their laboratory for roughly a month, of which 900 trials were successful.

Although quantum teleportation may sound like something out of a science-fiction film, the science behind the process is far from fiction. In fact, the entire process is based around the idea that quantum information— i.e. the state of an atom, photon or other particle— can be transmitted from one location to another by means of entangled communications between the sending and receiving locations.

Though the first successful quantum teleportation experiment occurred only a year ago, this latest success prompts many in the field of quantum physics and teleportation to believe that this could open the door for more advancements and achievements to be made— including some that could make a globally-accessible quantum-transmitted Internet service possible.

Top photo courtesy of Skye D./Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0

Natalie Wickstrom is a freelance writer based in Athens, Georgia. She most likely wrote this piece to the tune of a movie score whilst chewing gum.