Teleporter

Teleportation is the movement of objects from one place to another, more or less instantaneously, without traveling through space. The concept has been widely used in science fiction. It should not be confused with quantum teleportation.
Similar is apport, an earlier word used to describe what today might be called teleportation; and bilocation, when something or someone described as being a magician is said to be able to occupy two places simultaneously. The word "teletransportation" (which simply expands Charles Fort's abbreviated term) was first employed by Derek Parfit as part of a thought exercise on identity.
Contents
==Etymology==
The word was coined in 1931[1] by American writer Charles Fort to describe the strange disappearances and appearances of anomalies, which he suggested may be connected. He joined the Greek prefix tele- (meaning "distant") to the Latin verb portare (meaning "to carry"). Fort's first formal use of the word was in the second chapter of his 1931 book, Lo! "Mostly in this book I shall specialize upon indications that there exists a transportory force that I shall call Teleportation." Though, with his typical half-serious jokiness, Fort added, "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."[2] Fort suggested that teleportation might explain various allegedly paranormal phenomena, though, typically, it's sometimes difficult to tell if Fort took his own "theory" seriously, or instead used it to point out what he saw as the inadequacy of mainstream science to account for strange phenomena.
==Scenarios==
There are several hypothetical methods of transporting matter from place to place without physically travelling the distance. Some are seriously proposed and studied by scientists (Quantum teleportation), while others exist mainly in fiction.
One proposed means of teleportation is the transmission of data which is used to precisely reconstruct an object or organism at its destination. The use of this form of teleportation as a means of transport for humans still has considerable unresolved technical and philosophical issues, such as exactly how to record the human body, particularly the brain, with sufficient accuracy and also be able to reconstruct it, and whether destroying a human in one place and recreating a copy elsewhere would provide a sufficient experience of continuity of existence. Believers in the supernatural might wonder if the soul is recopied or destroyed, and might even consider it murder. Likewise, someone with a materialistic view of the world might also see the disintegration of a given corpus as the killing of a human being. The reassembled human might be considered a different sentience with the same memories as the original, as could be easily proved by constructing not just one, but several copies of the original and interrogating each as to the perceived uniqueness of each. Each copy constructed using merely descriptive data, but not matter, transmitted from the origin and new matter already at the destination point would consider itself to be the true continuation of the original and yet this could not logically be true; moreover, because each copy constructed via this data-only method would be made of new matter that already existed at the destination, there would be no way, even in principle, of distinguishing the original from among the copies. Many of the relevant questions are shared with the concept of mind transfer.
It is not clear if duplication of a human would require reproduction of the exact quantum state, which necessarily destroys the original, or whether macroscopic measurements would suffice. In the non-destructive version, hypothetically a new copy of the individual is created with each teleportation, with only the copy subjectively experiencing the teleportation. Technology of this type would have many other applications, such as virtual medicine (manipulating the stored data to create a copy better, or perhaps radically different, than the original), a sort of suspended animation (by creating a copy many years after the information was stored), or backup copies (creating a copy from recently stored information if the original was involved in a mishap.)
Dimensional teleportation is a mechanism often shown in fictional works, particularly in fantasy and comic books. It involves the subject exiting one physical universe or plane of existence, then re-entering it at a different location. This method is rarely seriously considered by the scientific community, as the currently predominant theories about parallel universes assume that physical travel is not possible between them.
Another form of teleportation common in science fiction (and seen in The Culture and The Terminator series of films) sends the subject through a wormhole or similar phenomenon, allowing transit faster than light while avoiding the problems posed by the uncertainty principle and potential signal interference. In both of the examples above, this form of teleportation is known as "Displacement" or "Topological shortcut" (Scientific American)[citation needed] which implies that this kind of teleportation may be similar in mechanism to time travel[citation needed].
Displacement teleporters would eliminate many probable objections to teleportation on religious or philosophical grounds, as they preserve the original subject intact — and thus continuity of existence.
Teleportation by means of the mind or innate personal abilities are sometimes referred to as p-Teleportation, "psychoportation", or "jaunting"; named after the fictional scientist (Jaunte) who discovered it in The Stars My Destination (originally titled Tiger! Tiger!), a science fiction novel by Alfred Bester. This method could hypothetically work through any of the mechanisms proposed above, but are usually portrayed in fiction as displacement-type or dimensional teleportation to simplify its use in the story.
In religious, occult, and esoteric literature, teleportation is the instantaneous movement of a person or object from one place to another, by miraculous, supernatural or psychic means rather than technological ones. For instance, in Acts 8:39-40, after Philip evangelized an Ethiopian official: "When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing. Philip, however, appeared at Azotus and traveled about, preaching the gospel in all the towns until he reached Caesarea."
==Religious traditions==
Accounts of miraculous teleportation occur in a number of religious traditions, such as Tay al-Ard ("folding of the earth") in Islam; Kefitzat Haderech ("the shortening of the way") in Judaism, Adhrusya sakthi (అదృశ్య శక్తి) in Hinduism. Teleportation is also known in Tibetan Buddhism. Maudgalyayana was most accomplished of all the Buddha's disciples in the various supernatural powers. These abilities included being able to move with a speed comparable to the speed of light. One of the special powers or siddhi of many yogi was the Vayu Gaman Siddhi. Through this Siddhi a person can become capable of flying in the skies and traveling from one place to another in just a few seconds. In the Mahabharata Version the concept is called Prāpti: having unrestricted access to all places.
==Alleged examples==
There have been many alleged accounts of teleportation, including Gil Pérez, Sister Mary of Agreda, and the Moberly-Jourdain incident.
==Gil Pérez==
On the evening of October 24, 1593, a Guardia Civil, Gil Pérez, is said to have appeared suddenly in a confused state in the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City, wearing the uniform of a Philippine regiment. He claimed that moments before finding himself in Mexico he had been on sentry duty in Manila at the governor’s palace. He admitted that while he was aware that he was no longer in the Philippines, he had no idea where he was or how he came to be there. He said the governor, Don Gomez Pérez Dasmariñas, had been assassinated in his wine cellar with an axe.
When it was explained to him that he was now in Mexico City, Pérez refused to believe it saying that he had received his orders on the morning of October 23 in Manila Philippines and that it was therefore impossible for him to be in Mexico City on the evening of the 24th. The authorities placed Pérez in jail, as a deserter and for the possibility that he may have been in the service of Satan. The Most Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition questioned the soldier, but all he could say in his defense was that he had traveled from Manila to Mexico "in less time than it takes a cock to crow".
Two months later, news from the Philippines arrived by Manila Galleon, confirming the fact of the literal axing on October 23 of Dasmariñas in a mutiny of Chinese rowers, as well as other points of the mysterious soldier’s fantastic story. Witnesses confirmed that Gil Pérez had indeed been on duty in Manila just before arriving in Mexico. Furthermore, one of the passengers on the ship recognized Pérez and swore that he had seen him in the Philippines on October 23. Gil Pérez eventually returned to the Philippines and took up his former position as a palace guard, living thenceforth an apparently uneventful life.
This account has received wide circulation, but historian Mike Dash notes [3] that there are some problems with the story which call its accuracy into question. Perhaps most importantly, he notes that the earliest extant accounts of Pérez's mysterious disappearance date from more than a century after the supposed events. Though Pérez was supposedly held for some time on suspicion of witchcraft, no records of his imprisonment or interrogation have been found.
==Sister Mary of Agreda==
Sister Mary of Agreda was a seventeenth-century Carmelite nun in Spain who claimed that, while deep in prayer at her convent, she was mysteriously transported to New Mexico, where she converted the Jumano Indians to Christianity. When Spanish missionaries reached the Jumano in 1622, they found that the Indians were already familiar with Christianity, which they claimed was brought to them by a "lady in blue."
==The Moberly-Jourdain Incident==
Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain were two English schoolteachers who visited Versailles Palace on August 10, 1901. While seeking the Petit Trianon, they claimed to have been transported back to the seventeenth century. They published their experience in a book called The Trianon Adventure.
==Experiments==
Several alleged government experiments, such as the Philadelphia Experiment and the Montauk Project, have involved teleportation. In the Philadelphia Experiment, the USS Eldridge was said to have disappeared, and transported over 215 miles. In the Montauk Project, scientists have purposely experimented with different forms of teleportation.
Teleportation is the movement of objects from one place to another, more or less instantaneously, without traveling through space. The concept has been widely used in science fiction. It should not be confused with quantum teleportation.
Similar is apport, an earlier word used to describe what today might be called teleportation; and bilocation, when something or someone described as being a magician is said to be able to occupy two places simultaneously. The word "teletransportation" (which simply expands Charles Fort's abbreviated term) was first employed by Derek Parfit as part of a thought exercise on identity.
==Etymology==
The word was coined in 1931[1] by American writer Charles Fort to describe the strange disappearances and appearances of anomalies, which he suggested may be connected. He joined the Greek prefix tele- (meaning "distant") to the Latin verb portare (meaning "to carry"). Fort's first formal use of the word was in the second chapter of his 1931 book, Lo! "Mostly in this book I shall specialize upon indications that there exists a transportory force that I shall call Teleportation." Though, with his typical half-serious jokiness, Fort added, "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."[2] Fort suggested that teleportation might explain various allegedly paranormal phenomena, though, typically, it's sometimes difficult to tell if Fort took his own "theory" seriously, or instead used it to point out what he saw as the inadequacy of mainstream science to account for strange phenomena.
==Scenarios==
There are several hypothetical methods of transporting matter from place to place without physically travelling the distance. Some are seriously proposed and studied by scientists (Quantum teleportation), while others exist mainly in fiction.
One proposed means of teleportation is the transmission of data which is used to precisely reconstruct an object or organism at its destination. The use of this form of teleportation as a means of transport for humans still has considerable unresolved technical and philosophical issues, such as exactly how to record the human body, particularly the brain, with sufficient accuracy and also be able to reconstruct it, and whether destroying a human in one place and recreating a copy elsewhere would provide a sufficient experience of continuity of existence. Believers in the supernatural might wonder if the soul is recopied or destroyed, and might even consider it murder. Likewise, someone with a materialistic view of the world might also see the disintegration of a given corpus as the killing of a human being. The reassembled human might be considered a different sentience with the same memories as the original, as could be easily proved by constructing not just one, but several copies of the original and interrogating each as to the perceived uniqueness of each. Each copy constructed using merely descriptive data, but not matter, transmitted from the origin and new matter already at the destination point would consider itself to be the true continuation of the original and yet this could not logically be true; moreover, because each copy constructed via this data-only method would be made of new matter that already existed at the destination, there would be no way, even in principle, of distinguishing the original from among the copies. Many of the relevant questions are shared with the concept of mind transfer.
It is not clear if duplication of a human would require reproduction of the exact quantum state, which necessarily destroys the original, or whether macroscopic measurements would suffice. In the non-destructive version, hypothetically a new copy of the individual is created with each teleportation, with only the copy subjectively experiencing the teleportation. Technology of this type would have many other applications, such as virtual medicine (manipulating the stored data to create a copy better, or perhaps radically different, than the original), a sort of suspended animation (by creating a copy many years after the information was stored), or backup copies (creating a copy from recently stored information if the original was involved in a mishap.)
Dimensional teleportation is a mechanism often shown in fictional works, particularly in fantasy and comic books. It involves the subject exiting one physical universe or plane of existence, then re-entering it at a different location. This method is rarely seriously considered by the scientific community, as the currently predominant theories about parallel universes assume that physical travel is not possible between them.
Another form of teleportation common in science fiction (and seen in The Culture and The Terminator series of films) sends the subject through a wormhole or similar phenomenon, allowing transit faster than light while avoiding the problems posed by the uncertainty principle and potential signal interference. In both of the examples above, this form of teleportation is known as "Displacement" or "Topological shortcut" (Scientific American)[citation needed] which implies that this kind of teleportation may be similar in mechanism to time travel[citation needed].
Displacement teleporters would eliminate many probable objections to teleportation on religious or philosophical grounds, as they preserve the original subject intact — and thus continuity of existence.
Teleportation by means of the mind or innate personal abilities are sometimes referred to as p-Teleportation, "psychoportation", or "jaunting"; named after the fictional scientist (Jaunte) who discovered it in The Stars My Destination (originally titled Tiger! Tiger!), a science fiction novel by Alfred Bester. This method could hypothetically work through any of the mechanisms proposed above, but are usually portrayed in fiction as displacement-type or dimensional teleportation to simplify its use in the story.
In religious, occult, and esoteric literature, teleportation is the instantaneous movement of a person or object from one place to another, by miraculous, supernatural or psychic means rather than technological ones. For instance, in Acts 8:39-40, after Philip evangelized an Ethiopian official: "When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing. Philip, however, appeared at Azotus and traveled about, preaching the gospel in all the towns until he reached Caesarea."
==Religious traditions==
Accounts of miraculous teleportation occur in a number of religious traditions, such as Tay al-Ard ("folding of the earth") in Islam; Kefitzat Haderech ("the shortening of the way") in Judaism, Adhrusya sakthi (అదృశ్య శక్తి) in Hinduism. Teleportation is also known in Tibetan Buddhism. Maudgalyayana was most accomplished of all the Buddha's disciples in the various supernatural powers. These abilities included being able to move with a speed comparable to the speed of light. One of the special powers or siddhi of many yogi was the Vayu Gaman Siddhi. Through this Siddhi a person can become capable of flying in the skies and traveling from one place to another in just a few seconds. In the Mahabharata Version the concept is called Prāpti: having unrestricted access to all places.
==Alleged examples==
There have been many alleged accounts of teleportation, including Gil Pérez, Sister Mary of Agreda, and the Moberly-Jourdain incident.
==Gil Pérez==
On the evening of October 24, 1593, a Guardia Civil, Gil Pérez, is said to have appeared suddenly in a confused state in the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City, wearing the uniform of a Philippine regiment. He claimed that moments before finding himself in Mexico he had been on sentry duty in Manila at the governor’s palace. He admitted that while he was aware that he was no longer in the Philippines, he had no idea where he was or how he came to be there. He said the governor, Don Gomez Pérez Dasmariñas, had been assassinated in his wine cellar with an axe.
When it was explained to him that he was now in Mexico City, Pérez refused to believe it saying that he had received his orders on the morning of October 23 in Manila Philippines and that it was therefore impossible for him to be in Mexico City on the evening of the 24th. The authorities placed Pérez in jail, as a deserter and for the possibility that he may have been in the service of Satan. The Most Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition questioned the soldier, but all he could say in his defense was that he had traveled from Manila to Mexico "in less time than it takes a cock to crow".
Two months later, news from the Philippines arrived by Manila Galleon, confirming the fact of the literal axing on October 23 of Dasmariñas in a mutiny of Chinese rowers, as well as other points of the mysterious soldier’s fantastic story. Witnesses confirmed that Gil Pérez had indeed been on duty in Manila just before arriving in Mexico. Furthermore, one of the passengers on the ship recognized Pérez and swore that he had seen him in the Philippines on October 23. Gil Pérez eventually returned to the Philippines and took up his former position as a palace guard, living thenceforth an apparently uneventful life.
This account has received wide circulation, but historian Mike Dash notes [3] that there are some problems with the story which call its accuracy into question. Perhaps most importantly, he notes that the earliest extant accounts of Pérez's mysterious disappearance date from more than a century after the supposed events. Though Pérez was supposedly held for some time on suspicion of witchcraft, no records of his imprisonment or interrogation have been found.
==Sister Mary of Agreda==
Sister Mary of Agreda was a seventeenth-century Carmelite nun in Spain who claimed that, while deep in prayer at her convent, she was mysteriously transported to New Mexico, where she converted the Jumano Indians to Christianity. When Spanish missionaries reached the Jumano in 1622, they found that the Indians were already familiar with Christianity, which they claimed was brought to them by a "lady in blue."
==The Moberly-Jourdain Incident==
Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain were two English schoolteachers who visited Versailles Palace on August 10, 1901. While seeking the Petit Trianon, they claimed to have been transported back to the seventeenth century. They published their experience in a book called The Trianon Adventure.
==Experiments==
Several alleged government experiments, such as the Philadelphia Experiment and the Montauk Project, have involved teleportation. In the Philadelphia Experiment, the USS Eldridge was said to have disappeared, and transported over 215 miles. In the Montauk Project, scientists have purposely experimented with different forms of teleportation.