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"Teleport" redirects here. For other uses, see Teleport (disambiguation).

Teleportation is the idea of the transfer of matter from one point to another, more or less
instantaneously; similar to the concept apport, an earlier word used in the context of spiritualism.
Teleportation is used widely in works of science fiction and fantasy.

Contents
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 1 Antecedants
 2 Etymology
 3 Wormholes and dematerialising
o 3.1 Dematerialising
o 3.2 Wormhole or gateway
 4 See also
o 4.1 Science fiction
o 4.2 Literature and philosophy
 5 References
 6 External links
 7 Further reading

Antecedants
The concept of such travel long predates the modern term, and appeared in various myths, fairy
tales and philosophies. For example, in the tale of Alladin in the Arabian Nights the Djin is able
to travel instantly from China to Morocco and back, and even take a whole palace with him. The
Tarnhelm in Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen is a magic helmet conferring, among
other things, the power of such travel. Kefitzat Haderech in Jewish tradition and Tay al-Ard in
Islamic philosophy both referred to it.

Etymology
The word teleportation was coined in 1931[1][2] by American writer Charles Fort to describe the
strange disappearances and appearances of anomalies, which he suggested may be connected. He
joined the Greek prefix tele- (meaning "distant") to the Latin verb portare (meaning "to carry").
Fort's first formal use of the word was in the second chapter of his 1931 book, Lo!: "Mostly in
this book I shall specialize upon indications that there exists a transportory force that I shall call
Teleportation." Fort added "I shall be accused of having assembled lies, yarns, hoaxes, and
superstitions. To some degree I think so myself. To some degree, I do not. I offer the data."[3]
Fort suggested that teleportation might explain various allegedly paranormal phenomena,
although it is difficult to say whether Fort took his own "theory" seriously or instead used it to
point out what he saw as the inadequacy of mainstream science to account for strange
phenomena.

The word teletransportation, which simply expands Charles Fort's abbreviated term, was first
employed by Derek Parfit as part of a thought exercise on identity.

Wormholes and dematerialising

There are essentially two ways in which fictional teleportation devices work: "dematerialising"
and "wormhole".

Dematerialising

The "dematerialising" version is used in Star Trek or Doctor Who. In this idea, the person or
device "teleported" is dematerialised, possibly by an external device, and transmitted as data,
possibly to a receiving device, and reconstructed there. In the Star Trek universe the common use
of this device is to transport from orbit to a nearby planet, and faster-than-light transmission is
not necessary.

The use of this form of teleportation to transport humans would have considerable unresolved
technical problems, such as recording the human body with sufficient precision to allow
reproduction elsewhere. The uncertainty principle alone would appear to provide an
insurmountable barrier.

Within the fictional universes, little attention is paid to the obvious "in universe" problem of this
technology, namely that if a person is scanned and reproduced, they could presumably make
multiple copies. It would also present the philosophical problem of whether destroying a human
in one place and recreating a copy elsewhere would provide a sufficient continuity of existence.
In some novels, such as Surface Detail, the "scanned copy" may actually be alive - in the sense
of running on computer hardware rather than a biological body - in between materialisations.
Many of the relevant questions are shared with the concept of mind transfer.

The term teleportation became very popular with the transporter in the 1966 television series Star
Trek, where the idea was originally used as a plot device to avoid unfeasible and unaffordable
sets and model filming, as well as episode running time spent while landing, taking off, etc.

Wormhole or gateway

Main article: Wormhole

A wormhole is a hypothetical shortcut through space and time, which is proposed to allow transit
that is not locally faster than light (thereby saving conformity with accepted science) but which
nonetheless allows near-instant transport between points potentially many light-years apart.
Sometimes the fiction allows wormhole pairs to be created that allow instant transport between
them, but the "far end" of the wormhole still has to be transported at sub-light speeds in
accordance with the normal laws of physics, for example in The Stone Canal [4] or The
Algebraist.

In more esoteric fiction, the wormholes may even connect entirely different universes. Such a
mechanism may also be used in theories about time travel.

This kind of topological shortcut would eliminate objections to teleportation on religious or

philosophical grounds, as they preserve the original subject intact and do not raise the problem of
duplication.