Rudy Rucker's Teleportation Rudy Rucker wrote a book Postsingular describing a world in which a pervasive na no-machine network shapes

life and presents potential risks. It also includes a non-technological means of self-teleportation. In an article in Asimov's magazin e, Rucker put forward how he believes some of the speculative elements he descri bes are good science. The article can be seen at: http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0807_8/TE08.shtml In the article, Rucker explained how he believed the book's self-teleportation c ould actually work: "Teleporting can be done by making yourself uncertain about which of two possibl e locations you're actually in. In other words, I view teleportation as a threestep process. First you perfectly visualize your source and target locations and mentally weave them together. Second you become uncertain about which location you're actually in. And third you abruptly observe yourself, asking, "Where am I ?" Thereby you precipitate a quantum collapse of your wave function, which lands you at your target location." The article is entitled "Thought Experiments". As questionable as it sounds to m e, from a scientific point of view, we should not merely assume Rucker's idea is wrong without evidence of it being wrong. In science, "thought experiments" are most relevant when we lack the necessary means to carry out a real experiment. That is one of the things that makes me doubt this idea. Not only does it sound like mumbo-jumbo - but there's nothing preventing Rucker or whoever from carryin g out a real experiment to show us doubters that it works. What Rucker describes does not require any future technology we have to wait for . It doesn't require any technology at all - a cave man who doesn't even know ab out the wheel could do this. All that Rucker's three steps requires is the abili ty to mentally visualize the starting location and the destination, the ability to make yourself feel unsure about where you are, and then ask "Where am I?" Thi s doesn't seem to require any that special. A human must be awake and conscious, and (presumably) needs a minimum amount of intelligence (maybe equivalent to an average 5-year-old). Not only doesn't it require future technology, one doesn't need any future scien tific theories or understanding. To the extent his idea rests on any scientific theories, it is quantum theories that have already been around for decades. And there is nothing in Rucker's proposal that requires a person to be aware of thos e theories. The process of imagining the two locations, getting them mixed up an d then becoming aware at the other location sounds very much like what some anci ent shaman might have dreamed up as a means to use magic to travel. The fact that we don't require any future science and the method is as simple as making mental pictures of locations does not necessarily mean that absolutely a ny conscious person with a mind at least as good as a 5-year-old's can do it. Pe rhaps, some people can't make such clear mental pictures or such. While that's p erfectly plausible, it certainly seems that, say, 10% of the human race should b e able to do that. It's also possible that properly following Rucker's instructi ons may require some practice. But that seems to be as much as stands in the way of somebody doing what Rucker suggests. There should be millions of people on E arth today capable of completing Rucker's three steps for teleportation. So, I f ind it hard to believe it works, yet nobody has heard of anyone actually doing i t. Someone wanting to do an experiment to try it out on a number of people wouldn't even necessarily have to worry about funding. They might actually be able to ma

ke money in the process. Rucker's method sounds like the sort of thing New Age g urus get paid to lead classes on. Just make an announcement in some New Age foru m offering to teach people "Rudy Rucker's amazing mind-power teleportation metho d" and some folks will pay you to be part of your experiment. You'd have the adv antage that the people who sign up will be people who want to believe they won't be hindered by skepticism. To get the best results from an experiment to test out Rucker's idea, it might h elp to use people who should be even more capable than most at doing the three s teps. For instance, to maximize how well the people can visualize locations in t heir minds, one could use people with "photographic memories" or other extraordi nary memory or visualization abilities. To follow each of the steps carefully, f ully and without distraction, one could use people who also had learned mental d iscipline through meditation or other means. If people such as these were unable to teleport using Rucker's method, and neither could average people, we'd have good reason to treat Rucker's idea as doubtful. Of course, proving that somethin g will never happen anywhere, anytime for anyone is virtually impossible, but Ru cker would have had a chance to show us skeptics we were wrong. So far, we don't even seem to have hoaxers claiming they have been able to teleport. Perfect Visualization There is one thing I'm suspicious about in Rucker's three steps. His first step is "you perfectly visualize..." What does he mean by "perfectly"? If a location is outdoors, do you have to visualize every blade of grass in its exact position and length? If you are visualizing such a destination and someone has picked on e four-leaf clover off the lawn since last time you saw it, does that mean you c an't "perfectly visualize" it? If that kind of perfection is needed, it sounds t o me like the old magic spells that required you to get a tooth from a mythic cr eature - and since you can't get a tooth from a mythic creature or "perfectly vi sualize", we are supposed to believe it is only because we haven't followed all the instructions that explains why it didn't work for us. If Rucker doesn't mean anything as minutely detailed as that for "perfectly visu alize", then "perfectly" is being used rather vaguely - making it hard for us to know whether or not we have met the requirement. The fact is, I don't see why visualization should be needed. Rucker claims that the collapse of a quantum wave function will cause you to simply be at your dest ination. If one's thoughts have any bearing on where you find yourself, why isn' t it just as good to identify a place conceptually rather than pictorially? Espe cially since I imagine a concept can be more specific about where a place is. I can think of the directions on how to get somewhere or how I would tell someone how to look for it. On the other hand, a picture doesn't necessarily distinguish two places. Perhaps, the best example would be two hotel rooms in the same hote l chain - but one is in Boston and one is in Philadelphia. They might look ident ical as far as a human's naked eye will show them. (And how can you visualize it better than your naked eye will show you?) A picture simply does not define a d istinct location as different from other locations. A concept can express a loca tion. If some secret part of your mind or some mysterious part of the universe is able to read your mind, see the pictures in your head, compare those pictures with e very possible place in the world, figure out which place it is and tell that to the collapsing wave function, why can't it do the same thing with me thinking th e words "observation deck on the Empire State Building"? The only difference tha t makes sense to me is that anyone can easily think a description of two places, so demanding "perfect visualization" gives an excuse why it doesn't work. Collapsing Wave Functions

Another issue is Rucker's supposed basis in quantum physics. Quantum theory cert ainly says that individual "particles" do not really have a single well-defined location until an observation occurs, at which time the wave function collapses and the physical evidence is then consistent with one particular location. Rucke r writes as if an entire human can be treated as having a single wave function t hat collapses by itself (not just as a result of a "particle" wave function coll apse having a series of consequences affecting the macroscopic world). I'm not c lear as to whether that is really consistent with quantum theory. A quantum wave function collapse follows an observation. Perhaps, Rucker's third step ("Where am I?") constitutes such an observation. I'm not sure it's really an observation of the person whose wave function is to be collapsed as opposed t o an observation of the location which is not the subject of the collapse. Suppo se you're on the sidewalk in front of the Empire State Building and you want to teleport to a hotel room in Philadelphia. If you observe the sidewalk, causing t he sidewalk to have a quantum wave function collapse, wouldn't it be the sidewal k that might end up in the hotel room? If making a mental picture of the hotel r oom can cause a wave function collapse of the hotel room, will it help you to ha ve the hotel furniture appear on the sidewalk? If there is any truth to Rucker's idea, I'd think the person would have to observe himself, not the locations. Ev en if we assume that while observing himself, visualizing the hotel room will ha ve some effect in choosing the result of the wave function collapse, what good d oes visualizing the current location do? To the extent Rucker's third step is an appropriate observation, it doesn't do s o more than every other moment of your life during which your eyes and/or ears a re telling you where you are. Every split-second of your waking life up to this moment, you've been seeing your environment which could be collapsing wave funct ions determining where the particles in your body are located. At least some of that time, you have been daydreaming about some other place, trying to recall ho w some other place looked, or otherwise visualizing some location. Presumably, t his has never resulted in you suddenly being somewhere else. Quantum theory says observation results in a collapse of the wave function - it does not say the observation or observer influences which possible result the wa ve function collapse causes to be realized. Physicists have what is called the " Two Slit Experiment". A particle is fired at a barrier that has two slits the pa rticle might pass through. The fuzziness of the particle's location makes it unc lear which slit it will go through. If no observation occurs to check which of t he slits the particle passed through, the evidence looks as if it went through b oth slits. If we observe the slits, the evidence indicates it only went through one or the other. However, we have nothing to suggest that the observer can make the particle use the slit of his choice. So I don't see why Rucker's method wou ld lead to anything better than a random result in the location one found himsel f at. In the above experiment, the barrier has two slits. There is a very small probab ility a particle could simply appear at the other side of the barrier where ther e was no slit. However, in practically all cases the workings of physics cause t he particle to go through a slit or not get past the barrier at all. I don't thi nk we have a comparable situation in Rucker's three steps. I don't see why think ing of the two locations should make those two locations the only choices. As I said before, I have my doubts that we should really treat an entire human as hav ing a single wave function that is not dependent on the wave functions of indivi dual quanta. Certainly, all the reasonably probable locations the individual par ticles might be found at are no more than a microscopic distance from where the macroscopic human can be said to be currently located. But if we are to entertai n the idea that a person can somehow cause an entire-human wave function to coll apse so he finds himself in a new location, what limits the possible new locatio

ns to those visualized? The limitation of possible wave function results and obs erver choice are not mainstream quantum theory. The observer effect in mainstream quantum theories involves a person's observati on of something other than himself leading to the collapse of the wave function of that other thing. Therefore, if there is any real applicability of Rucker's i dea, the more direct application would be for a person to observe another object , causing that other object to teleport. Again, experiments to test Rucker's ide a in this way should be very easy, but we have no reason to believe anyone has e ver been able to do it. A Challenge I'd like to think of myself as being scientific, which means accepting the physi cal evidence. Regardless of how many arguments I can present on why Rucker's ide a should not work, those arguments must be ignored if there is physical evidence that Rucker's idea does work. As said above, there is no technology or other sc ience we need to wait for. It should be possible to fairly easily carry out expe riments today. As of this writing, Postsingular has been available for about a y ear, so presumably Rucker and others have had some time to practice. So let's se e somebody try to prove me wrong. Whether it is Rucker or I that is right is not just a matter of splitting hairs over who makes a better logical analysis. If Rucker were right, people wouldn't need to drive cars or fly in planes to get places. We might even be able to tele port products from factory to store rather than using trucks, trains and ships. This would greatly reduce our need to find energy sources and substantially cut the greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere. For these and other such reasons , if Rucker truly believes in his teleportation idea, it is his duty to humanity to prove it so we can use it to save the planet. Unnecessary One thing makes this even more perplexing to me. In Postsingular, Rucker describ es a world with advanced nanotech. There are nano-machines that can eat up the m atter around it and build entirely new objects from that matter, and the nano-ma chines have a global network for exchanging data and the nanos have a truly vast data capacity. Near the beginning of the book, nanos eat up humans and later ar e instructed to undo their actions - and the humans are perfectly re-created. It seems to me, it would be more plausible in this context to describe teleportati on via the nano-network. You could say the nanos eat up the person to be telepor ted, storing the vast amount of data describing the person being consumed. The d ata is then sent through the network to the desired destination. At the destinat ion, nanos construct a duplicate of the person using local matter and the data. Whether or not that would be entirely realistic, it would be in keeping with the rest of the story and would not raise as many issues as Rucker's mental / quant um idea. The nano method would also allow anyone to teleport not only those who could "pe rfectly visualize" or might have any other difficulty with Rucker's method. One might argue, "Why bother doing it with the nano-network if you can do it with yo ur mind?" I'd reply that if Rucker believes that nearly every human alive is cap able of properly completing his three steps, then the fact Rucker hasn't already teleported himself is good reason to think his method does not work.