What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Teleportation

This week, people are wrong about teleportation. A common science fiction trope, teleportation is the transfer of matter or energy from one point to another without traversing the physical space between them. Widely repeated claims of teleportation have been cropping up since at least 1583, when occultist John Dee supposedly vanished from his home in England and reappeared at the same moment in Prague. The most recent report comes from Gregg Phillips, who was appointed to lead FEMA's office of response and recovery in December.

On a January episode of the Onward podcast, Phillips said, "I was with my boys one time, and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House...this was in Georgia, and I end up at a Waffle House like 50 miles away from where I was... they said: 'That’s not possible, you just left here a moment ago.’ But it was possible. It was real.”

Teleportation is fairly common to Phillips. He recounted another instance where he and his car were teleported 40 miles into a ditch near a Baptist Church. "Teleporting is no fun," Phillips concluded. Phillips, sadly, doesn't control the teleportation, or he could use it in his work.

Some explanations for people claiming they've teleported

There are a number of possible explanation for Phillips' story that aren't "he's nuts" or "he's lying." About 10% of people report having had an out-of-body experience, the sensation that one's consciousness has separated from their physical body. According to research published in The British Medical Journal, OBEs are often linked to a glitch in the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), the part of the brain that integrates sensory information to orient you in space. If the TPJ is disrupted—by exhaustion, stress, or biological causes like epilepsy or migraines—a sensory "misfire" can result, where you no longer feel moored to the physical space your body occupies. It's not teleportation, but it might feel like teleportation if it happens to you.

There might be a less esoteric explanation for Phillips' teleportation: "highway hypnosis." Just about everyone can relate to your mind "checking out" while you're doing something repetitive; on a long car trip, you suddenly realize you've covered 50 miles with no memory of it. "Snapping out of it" can feel like you've teleported, as you're suddenly in a new place without conscious memory of how you arrived there, and could account for the fact that Phillips' car seems to teleport with him.

Another possible cause: microsleep, a sudden temporary episode of sleep or drowsiness where an individual fails to respond to sensory input and becomes unconscious. Drowsy driving accounts for over 600 fatalities annually in the U.S., and could explain ending up in a ditch in front of a Baptist church with no memory of how he ended up there.

OK, but what if it was teleportation?

None of that takes all of Phillips' story into account though. He says he left his house then suddenly was 50 miles away, much to the surprise of his family who confirmed that he "just left here a moment ago." So was it teleportation?

No one can prove a negative, but, like historical claimants John Dee, Gil Perez, Heraldo Vidal, and every other person who has ever said they teleported, there were no reliable witnesses to Phillips' improbable journeys. No one saw him blink out of existence and no one saw him appear at the Waffle House. There's no other evidence either, so I feel confident saying that Mr. Phillips is extremely unlikely to have teleported, but let's explore the possibility.

The one (kind of) exception: quantum teleportation

Teleportation is possible in the quantum world. In the realm of tiny things—atoms, electrons, photons, etc.—the laws of classical physics don't work. Light can be a particle and a wave, theoretical cats can be alive and dead, and the cause and effect we take for granted are a roll of the dice. It's a mess, but a mess that allows a limited kind of teleportation.

Quantum teleportation is a method of instantly transmitting information using two "entangled" particles. Measuring one particle immediately determines the state of its partner no matter where it is in space—could be a million miles away, the particle does not care. But there's a catch: You have to read the result. The data needed to complete the transfer has to be sent via a normal signal, like a radio wave or a fiber-optic cable. Since those signals are capped at the speed of light like everything else, it's not instant from our point of view.

Scientists have successfully teleported single photon states over distance, but it doesn't work at a larger scale for a number of reasons. First, there's the logistics. Here's how Columbia University theoretical physicist Brian Greene described the problem of teleporting a person from New York to Los Angeles to Science Times:

"We'd have to have a huge number of these entangled particles to bring a human being, and have the human being be co-mingled with this collection of particles that are entangled with the ones in L.A...It's the huge number problem that gets in the way of doing it."

The word "huge" isn't big enough: there are roughly 7 octillion atoms currently calling themselves "Gregg Phillips." Monitoring the quantum state of each of them would require more computing power than has ever existed on Earth. For context, the best modern science has done is teleporting a single photon state to a satellite over 870 miles away. You can't scale that up to a 200-pound man.

What, exactly, is Gregg Phillips?

That's the logistical problem. There's a larger conceptual/philosophical question to teleportation. In quantum teleportation, the original particle is destroyed to complete the transfer. The quantum state is read, transmitted, and reconstructed elsewhere, but the source is gone. So who (or what) really arrives at the Waffle House?

A Fema spokesperson responded to the controversy to CNN, saying, "This is so silly it’s barely worth acknowledging," but the question of who is actually running FEMA's disaster response is not silly, because if Gregg Phillips really did teleport, whatever is currently running FEMA's disaster response is not Gregg Phillips. A collection of atoms that look and talk like Gregg Phillips appeared at a Waffle House, while actual Gregg Phillips blinked out of existence back on the highway.