CAN MUGGLES DEVELOP THEIR OWN FORM OF TELEPORTATION?

Wizards pop up in the weirdest places, don’t they? One moment they’re contemplating cauldrons in Diagon Alley, and the next they’re sipping a butterbeer at The Three Broomsticks. But then, getting about in the wizarding world is easy. There are so many instant travel options, such as brooms, Floo Powder and portkeys.

Maybe the most fascinating method of travel is apparition. This magical method of transportation is all about the three D’s: destination, determination, and deliberation. A travelling wizard must be determinedly focused on their desired destination, move with haste, disappearing from their current location and instantly reappearing at the desired location, but with deliberation. In short, apparition is a form of teleportation.

And, like future teleportation, its speed and ease of travel is somewhat balanced by the drawbacks. Not only does apparition come with a noise, ranging from a quiet pop to a loud crack, but it can lead to injury if botched. Whereas even house-elves can apparate, and skilled wizards and witches perform apparition without a wand, novice wizards can drop body parts when they practice apparating. This occurs when the wizard has insufficient determination to reach their goal. Some body parts simply fail to arrive at the destination with the wizard.

The other wizarding phenomenon similar to teleportation is the use of the vanishing cabinets. A pair of vanishing cabinets acts as a passageway betwixt two places. An object placed in one cabinet will appear in the other. They can transport wizards too. They were very popular during the first wizarding war, when, to hide from a death eater attack, a wizard would disappear to the other cabinet, until the peril had passed. But if one of the cabinets is broken, an object travelling between the two is trapped in a type of limbo.

So, how possible is teleportation? And what’s the lowdown on the topic in fantasy and fact?

A Brief History of Fantasy Teleportation

Teleportation has been a fantasy classic for many years. It’s the dream of being able to transmit matter across space, in an instant, and recreate it exactly, in another location. The notion is mentioned in an early Jewish myth, where it’s referred to as Kefitzat Haderech, which literally means “the shortening of the way,” or “short cut”.

This mythical term was adapted by American fantasy writer, Frank Herbert. In his 1965 novel, Dune, often cited as the world’s best-selling sci-fi novel, Herbert refers to the hero of the book as the Kwisatz Haderach, a genetically-engineered short cut to a human future and the creation of a homo superior.

Many myths and magical tales have people being spirited away, as if by teleportation. But these episodes are usually portrayed as mystical or divine gifts. The first exploration of modern teleportation came with the 1877 tale, The Man Without a Body, by Edward Page. In this short story, the scientist hero, after successfully disassembling his cat, telegraphs its atoms and then reassembles them. Alas, while trying to repeat the experiment on himself, a luckless, and badly timed, power cut meant only his head was transmitted.

This kind of teleportation mishap seems common. In The Fly, originally a 1957 short story but also made into three movies, the grotesque consequences of teleportation are explored in detail. A scientist, experimenting with teleportation, accidentally ends up fusing himself with a fly in what is meant to be a harrowing, but is in fact largely hilarious, sequence of events.

Over the years, teleportation has become a staple in fantasy tales. In the 1939 Buck Rogers serial, teleportation was the travel means of choice for moving characters from one place to another. Most people, of course, associate teleportation with the phrase, “Beam me up, Scotty”, from Star Trek. In this influential television series, it had been originally planned to have the characters land their spacecraft on planetary surfaces. But budgetary constraints on the special effects department meant a more creative solution was needed. The transporter was born.

And teleportation is fused with time travel in the Terminator series of movies, as well as the Stargate franchise, in which wormholes are used to help transfer from one space-time to another.

A Brief History of Muggle Teleportation

Teleportation in fantasy is often described using the language of quantum technology. Matter transmission of this kind would mean the original object or person being destroyed, and pieced together elsewhere. You can see this method might have attendant difficulties! What if the ‘piecing together’ doesn’t go according to plan? There are trillions of atoms in the human body. And that means a person would have to be broken down into individual ones before each were catalogued, digitized, and teleported. Then the whole process would have to be done in reverse, to assemble them in the new location. And where would the soul go, assuming such a thing exists. (This also raises the possibility of perhaps splitting the soul into constituent parts, though that’s another story.)

One way of avoiding the problem of piecemeal teleportation is duplication. In this schema, rather than the simultaneous destruction and recreation of the object or person, the teleportation simply generates an exact duplicate at distance. But then, this method has the different problem as to exactly who is the ‘original’.

Muggles have been slow to play catch-up on the fantasy. In 2002, Australian scientists successfully teleported a laser beam by scanning a specific photon, copying it and then recreating it at an arbitrary distance. Science teams in Germany and America then independently teleported ions of calcium and beryllium using very similar technique to one another. A further development occurred in Denmark in 2006. Here, scientists effectively teleported an object half a meter. Although miniscule in scale, the object in the Danish experiment was nonetheless constructed from billions of atoms.

Professor Michio Kaku of City University of New York, believes the technology to teleport a living person elsewhere on Earth, or even to outer space, could be available by the end of the century. Professor Kaku, known as a noted futurist who admits to optimism on the topics of real time travel and invisibility, has made a study of various fantasy technologies and determined some will one day happen.

Professor Kaku suggested, “You know the expression beam me up Scotty, we used to laugh at it. We physicists used to laugh when someone talked about teleportation and invisibility, something like that, but we don’t laugh anymore—we realized we were wrong on this one. Quantum teleportation already exists. At an atomic level, we do it already. It’s called quantum entanglement”. He described the process as one that allows connections, somewhat like an umbilical cord, to be formed between atoms, with their information transmitted between others further away. “I think within a decade we will teleport the first molecule,” Professor Kaku concluded.