Quantum Teleportation Rant

This month's Scientific American has an article lambasting SF writers for getting quantum teleportation wrong. And though I'd like to be able to defend my colleagues, I have to say that my first reaction to the article was a hearty cheer.

I cannot count the number of recent SF novels I've read in which writers got quantum teleportation wrong. And I don't mean sort of wrong. I mean totally, unmistakably, irredeemably, inexcusably, unfudgeably wrong. The kind of wrong that no amount of goodwill or benefit of the doubt can help a writer out of. The kind of wrong that once caused a college friend of mine to get a mathematics exam handed back to him with the following sentence written on it in lieu of a grade: How did you become so terribly lost?

There seem to be three basic varieties of 'lost' wandering around out there. First, come the writers who simply use the words "quantum teleportation" as magic incantation. These writers appear to believe that quantum teleportation works something like beaming people up in Star Trek. Not much needs to be said about that, I think. Although -- funny story -- the guys who actually made quantum teleportation happen were big Star Trek fans and their early examples all have Spock, Kirk, Scotty et al beaming around the universe. So maybe it is sort of their fault. But, come on, guys. This is not new science. It's been over twenty years. Let's get it right already!

Then we've got the writers who use "Bose-Einstein condensates" as an FTL sky-crane. I have a queasy feeling that I may be partially responsible for this, but let me state once and for all for the record:. Bose-Einstein condensates do not magically allow causality violations. They're simply a substance that exists in an interestingly coherent quantum state which seems like it might be potentially helpful in managing quantum teleportation of large chunks of information. I speculated in SPIN STATE that BECs might make it possible to "broadcast" people through subatomic wormholes in the spinfoam -- essentially using quantum encryption to turn a short-lived, messy, unreliable FTL channel into a safe and reliable means of transportation. But if you take the spinfoam wormholes out of the picture you've just got a really massive quantum computer, not FTL travel.

Last but not least comes my pet peeve: painstaking descriptions of spaceships "dragging entangled electrons apart" at sublight speed so that later messages can be sent instantaneously. I know this may sound like it makes sense when you write it, but if any of your readers actually know their physics they will just feel bad for you because you obviously worked so hard to get it wrong. It is not the entangled electrons that you need to get past the lightspeed barrier. It is the information that you want to send via the entangled electrons. More specifically, it is the classical component of the message - the one that can't go by entanglement. And that component of the message can only be sent -- not to belabor the point -- when you send the information. So, yes, you could spend aeons dragging entangled electrons to distant planets. And you could manipulate the spin states of those distant electrons. But in order to extract any information from those spinning electrons you would still have to wait for a second classical message to arrive -- through non-causality-violating channels. In other words, even though you can send a 'message' instantaneously between entangled electrons, you can't read the message until the slow boat from China comes chugging into port.

Now don't get me wrong. I am not against using quantum teleportation as an FTL workaround. Nor am I against the kind of technological hijinks that we SF writers like to call "speculative science" and the rest of the world calls bullshit. The thing is, bullshit is an art form. And if you're going to commit art, then you owe it to your victims to at least commit good art.

In the SciAm article, Jeff Kimble tells writers: "I have some advice. Just don't talk about teleporting people in your story." Wise words. And I have to admit that some of the more interesting SF I've read lately avoids the whole FTL issue by positing non-FTL-based interstellar civilizations. That said, quantum teleportation is just too cool an idea not to use. So where can writers go if they do want to use quantum teleportation in speculative FTL applications in an intelligent way? Well, actually ... read this. It will take you about ten minutes. And though it won't make you an expert, it will certainly keep you from making the really truly boneheaded mistakes I've described above.

And now if you are wondering how so many writers could screw up something that you can get right by spending ten minutes on-line reading about it . . . well, you said it, buddy, not me!