What People Misunderstand This Week: Teleportation
This week, people are getting it wrong about teleportation. Teleportation is a common science fiction trope, representing the movement of matter or energy from one point to another without traversing the physical space between them. Widespread claims of teleportation have been around since at least 1583, when occultist John Dee allegedly disappeared from his home in England and reappeared in Prague. The most recent report came from Gregg Phillips , appointed head of FEMA’s Response and Recovery Division in December.
In a January episode of the Onward podcast, Phillips said, “I was with my sons one day and I was telling them I was going to a Waffle House… this was in Georgia, and I ended up at a Waffle House about 50 miles away from where I was… they said, ‘That’s impossible, you just left here.’ But it was possible. It was real.”
Teleportation is a fairly common occurrence for Phillips. He recounted one instance in which he and his car were teleported 40 miles into a ditch near a Baptist church. “Teleportation is no fun,” Phillips concluded. Unfortunately, Phillips has no control over the teleportation, otherwise he could use it in his work.
Some explanations for people’s claims of teleportation
There are a number of possible explanations for Phillips’s story that go beyond claims like “he’s crazy” or “he’s lying.” About 10% of people report experiencing out-of-body experiences—the sensation that their consciousness has separated from their physical body. According to research published in the British Medical Journal , out-of-body experiences are often associated with a malfunction in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), the part of the brain that integrates sensory information for spatial orientation. If the TPP is disrupted—due to exhaustion, stress, or biological causes such as epilepsy or migraines—a sensory “glitch” can occur, in which a person loses their sense of connection to the physical space their body occupies. This isn’t teleportation, but if it happens to you, you might feel the same way.
Perhaps there’s a less esoteric explanation for Phillips’s teleportation: ” highway hypnosis .” Almost everyone can relate to the feeling of “zone out” while doing something monotonous; on a long car ride, you suddenly realize you’ve driven 50 miles without remembering anything about it. Upon “waking up” from reality, you might feel as if you’ve teleported, finding yourself in a new place with no conscious memory of how you got there, which could explain why Phillips’s car seems to teleport along with him.
Another possible cause: microsleep— a sudden, temporary episode of sleep or drowsiness in which a person stops responding to sensory stimuli and loses consciousness. Drowsy driving causes over 600 fatalities in the United States each year and may explain why a man ended up in a ditch in front of a Baptist church with no memory of how he got there.
Okay, what if it was teleportation?
However, all of this doesn’t account for Phillips’s entire story. He says he left his house and then suddenly found himself 50 miles away, much to the surprise of his family, who confirmed that he “just walked out of here.” So was it teleportation?
No one can prove otherwise, but as with the historical claims of John Dee , Gil Perez , Heraldo Vidal , and everyone else who has ever claimed teleportation, there were no reliable witnesses to Phillips’ incredible journeys. No one saw him disappear, and no one saw him reappear at the Waffle House. There’s no other evidence either, so I can confidently say that Mr. Phillips’s teleportation is extremely unlikely, but let’s consider the possibility.
The only (sort of) exception: quantum teleportation.
Teleportation is possible in the quantum world. In the world of the smallest particles—atoms, electrons, photons, and so on—the laws of classical physics don’t apply. Light can be a particle or a wave , theoretical cats can be alive or dead , and the cause-and-effect relationship we take for granted is just a roll of the dice. It’s a complex system, but it allows for a limited form of teleportation.
Quantum teleportation is a method of instantaneously transmitting information using two “entangled” particles. Measuring one particle instantly determines the state of its partner, regardless of its location in space—the particle could be a million miles away. But there’s a catch: the result must be read. The data required to complete the transfer must be sent via a conventional signal, such as radio waves or fiber optic cable. Since the speed of these signals, like everything else, is limited by the speed of light, from our perspective, it’s not instantaneous.
Scientists have successfully teleported individual photon states over distances, but this doesn’t work on a large scale for a number of reasons. First, there’s logistics. Here’s how Columbia University theoretical physicist Brian Greene described the problem of teleporting a person from New York to Los Angeles in an interview with Science Times :
“We would need a huge number of these entangled particles to create a human being, and for that human being to be mixed with this collection of particles that are entangled with the particles in Los Angeles… It’s the problem of the huge number of particles that prevents us from doing this.”
The word “enormous” isn’t enough: there are currently approximately 7 octillion atoms calling themselves “Gregg Phillips.” Monitoring the quantum state of each one would require computing power never before seen on Earth. By comparison, the best modern science has achieved is teleporting a single photon to a satellite over 870 miles away . This is unscalable to a 200-pound human.
Who is Gregg Phillips?
Therein lies the logistical problem. Teleportation poses a larger conceptual/philosophical question. In quantum teleportation, the original particle is destroyed to complete the transfer. The quantum state is read, transmitted, and reconstructed elsewhere, but the source vanishes. So who (or what) actually arrives at Waffle House?
A FEMA spokesperson commented on the situation in an interview with CNN, stating, “It’s so stupid it’s hardly worth paying attention to,” but the question of who’s actually leading FEMA’s disaster response isn’t stupid at all, because if Gregg Phillips really did teleport, then whoever’s leading FEMA’s disaster response now is n’t Gregg Phillips . A cluster of atoms that look and sound like Gregg Phillips appeared at a Waffle House, while the real Gregg Phillips disappeared down the highway.