Unicorn Teleportation, Quantum Information, and Ponies in Socks · 4:53pm Jan 15th, 2021
How does Twilight Sparkle's method of personal transport work?
Although we see Twilight vanish from one location and reappear in another fairly often from early in season 1, it wasn’t until season 4 that this was referred to as ‘teleportation’. By this point the fandom had been calling it that for so long that nobody noticed. In theory, the script writers could have given it another name. It’s not a horse gait that exists in our world, so many fantasy writers would feel finding a suitable verb for it is all part of world-building their universe. The G1 unicorns ‘winked in’ and ‘winked out’. However, when we saw Twilight doing it, the word that immediately came to fans’ minds was ‘teleport’. Thanks to science fiction, this has been part of the English language for years. The earliest quotation in the OED for teleport (noun) is from the Times of India in 1878.
To twentieth century writers wowed by the telegram, telephone, and television, it must have seemed entirely plausible that the teleport would be technology of the future. You can imagine scanning a body to read every atom, transmitting the data, then using some futuristic nanotech to rebuilt it. But there are some technical challenges. In The Physics of Star Trek, Laurence Krauss gives a detailed analysis of the difficulties of building a device to ‘beam me up’. Your scanner would need a lens of diameter 50,000km and storing all the data would need a hard disk 10,000 light-years tall. Even allowing for the fact that computer technology has moved on since the days of dial-up internet when the book was written, we are no closer to building a functional teleport than a warp drive.
And there is a more fundamental problem. The inherent uncertainty of quantum mechanics means the scanning process would disturb the object being scanned making it impossible to extract all the information. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that the precision to which we can measure pairs of physics quantities are linked. We cannot measure both the position of a particle and its velocity to absolute precision. The more accurately we know one, the less accurately we know the other. This is not just a limitation of our instruments, but is how reality works. The Star Trek scriptwriters understood this and fixed it by introducing the ‘Heisenberg compensator’. When a journalist asked how the Heisenberg compensator works, the answer was: “It works very well, thank you.”
For years, teleportation was regarded by physicists as likely to be impossible. However, in 1993 a group of researchers at IBM showed a way in which it is possible to ‘teleport’ a perfect copy of a particle. This process uses a piece of quantum weirdness – entanglement – that was the subject of a big philosophical discussion from 1935: The Einstein Podolsky Rosen (EPR) paradox.
As I explained in Quantum Mechanics, Schrödinger's Cat, and the My Little Pony Movie Trailer in the uncertain quantum world, particles are described by a wavefunction whose value at a given location gives the probability of observing a particle there, but we don't know the result of a measurement until we make it. This leads to the unsettling result that a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time.
In many quantum processes, two particles can become entangled so the state of one is tied to the state of the other. Imagine an atom emitting two photons in opposite directions, one polarized Up and one Down. They could travel thousands of light-years apart, but if you measure one as Up, you know the other must be Down. Quantum mechanics says until they are measured, they exist in a quantum superposition of both Up and Down. When you measure one, the wavefunction collapses, and the state of both becomes fixed. This suggests that it has somehow sent a signal through space to its partner, which would go against the theory of special relativity that tells us that information can’t travel faster than the speed of light. Einstein disliked this ‘spooky action at distance’ and believed that this meant our understanding of quantum mechanics was not complete and there must be some ‘hidden variables’ behind the wavefunction.
This paradox was examined further by John Bell, who in 1981 published his paper Bertlmann’s socks and the nature of reality. He illustrated the common-sense interpretation with an individual known for always wearing non-matching socks. Bell chose Professor Reinhold Bertlmann, a researcher at the CERN laboratory known for his individual fashion choices, but the thought experiment works just as well with a sock-loving pony.
If we catch sight of a sock on one of Minty’s hooves, we immediately have some information about the socks on the other three hooves. If we see one is pink, the others must be not pink. When talking about wearing socks, this seems entirely acceptable common sense and does not imply a superluminal transfer of information. But it is a problem for philosophers of physics as everything we know about quantum mechanics says that the state of a particle is not fixed until it is observed.
Professor Bell showed how this could be experimentally tested for entangled particles. These experiments have now been done many times and shown that measurements of particles separated by long distances are correlated in a way that can’t be explained by classical physics. It seems that quantum mechanics is right and Einstein and common sense are wrong. The wavefunction is indeed fundamental. The act of observation can have non-local consequences, although we can’t use this to send information instantaneously any more than we could do so by mailing one of Minty’s socks.
This work has led to the development of the field of quantum information, including quantum cryptography, quantum computers, and quantum teleportation. The team at IBM discovered that it is possible to use an entangled pair of atoms to ‘teleport’ the quantum state of a particle. The particle is scanned using one part of an entangled pair. This measurement disturbs the original, but the data can be combined with the other half of the entangled pair to create a teleported replica of the original particle. This has been demonstrated in experiments with entangled photons, and this is now finding application for secure quantum-encrypted communication. Last year Chinese researchers demonstrated this to send encrypted data 1200km via a satellite.
It seems likely that this technique could be used to teleport larger molecules in the future. But what about something bigger, like a human or pony? There is no fundamental law ruling it out, although no one has a clear idea how you could build a machine to do this, and the colossal amount of data that would need to be stored and transmitted would rather exceed the bandwidth of anything we can currently imagine.
And what about unicorns? If Twilight’s spell uses quantum entanglement, then presumably it creates some sort of a pair of entangled empty unicorn shells. One interacts with the original Twilight, causing the other to adopt the same pattern, and when this is combined with the classical scanned data, it creates a teleported Twilight in a pink flash.
The original is destroyed by the measurement, as expected from the no-cloning theorem that forbids the creation of an identical copy of a quantum state. It will not be news anyone to learn that Pinkie Pie violates the laws of physics.
And thus raises the age old question, does teleporting another pony (as Twilight is known to do) amount to ponyslaughter?
If you look at the origional full diagram of Einsteins light cones, they project backwards, to give all possible pasts that give rise to the present, but people forget quantum superposition means that all possible pasts sum to a given present because only when you observe the past can you more closely fix the range which count. But those can only be the ones that give rise to the current present thats observing them.
Why keep trying to transfer All the quantum information? You dont need to make a perfect copy, only one thats approximately equivalent enough that the result is within the error bounds of positional and signaling variations of the origional, making it the origional,albight in a duplicatedposition, which it then ajusts for, makingit nolonger an identical copy.
Take magnetically confined argon plasma from an electron beam welder, inject a high enough frequency that the resulting charge seperation results in a Bose Einstein COndensation. Wrap the object you wish to teleport in such plasma. Wrap the location you wish to recieve the object in such a plsama.
Now Telepod/Teleport the resulting single quantum particle?
The body of a human doesnt contain that much information, depending on medical advances? All teh cells are supposedto carry the same basic DNA sequence, so that some billions of copies you dont need to specifically encode, same with whole blocks of cells etc whose positional descriptors come from the DNA anyway?
The big trick is trying to work out just how many actual bytes of data a human contains, after holographic and fractal algorithms are recursively applied? I still think it should fit on a floppy.
Then again, I have seen LS120s, so thats 20 percent a CD?
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Could this be the big culture war of the next century?
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It might be a little bit difficult to find customers willing to buy a teleport that promises to achieve the best speed and efficiency by compressing all your physical existence onto a floppy. Or a CD.
A fun thought-exercise!
To add a further complication, I'd like to make the observation that Twilight often changes the pose of her body between the time she disappears and when she reappears. Therefore time must pass during transit, so it can't be simple transmission of the information of her original state.
And while I'm at it, the flash of magic and concussive sound as she reappears is understandable. Her body must suddenly displace air as it arrives. But there's also an outward flash as she disappears, when there ought to be an inward rush of air to fill the void she leaves behind. I have yet to figure out the mechanism that would explain all the observable phenomenon.
Of course, I may be over-thinking this a wee bit.
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I'd say no, because the ponies change the position of their bodies during transit. They're still alive and moving as they are teleported, therefore: continuity.
Minor nitpick, Twilight referred to it as teleportation in the second clip you show, just before her battle with Tirek in season 4.
5436541 I'm in the "Twilight is opening a wormhole and travelling through it" camp, and the flash is the opening/closing of the wormhole. Because magic. Also works with her re-positioning, since she is aware of space-time enough to take advantage of her passage through it.
So really, when she changes position from one side to the other, she truly is just showing off.
Also, assuming the opening is the same size as the closing, unless there's a pressure difference between them (such as high altitude to low altitude, or vacuum to atmosphere) there would not (seem to) be a significant displacement of air.
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I believe the more interesting point is this: since a teleporting unicorn is a piece of pony-meat contained in "some sort of a pair of entangled empty unicorn shells," then that means that technically...
Twilight is a ravioli
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There is solid evidence for that:
i.ibb.co/CPwKZtP/Teledancing.gif
5436645 This scene just makes me smile, and I guess I can forgive her for appearing to show off, since she's obviously having so much fun. And I love how she's still moving when she appears, and her tail is whipping all over the place.
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Was popping down to say this exact same thing. A minor detail, but I so rarely have fun things to contribute.
Also, speaking of Bell and fun, here's two great videos by 3Blue1Brown and MinutePhysics going into some more details on the absolute mockery of human intuition that is Bell's Theorem. I know I'm in way over my head, but it seems topical.
Link 1, Real World Example | Link 2, Le Math!
So ocalhoun was right and Blink is canon? :V
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That's the thing about intuition, it's based on broad appearances. Intuition would also tell you that the Earth is flat.
Interesting; thanks.
Thanks to thought experiments like the Twinmaker, I've never liked the idea of real-world teleportation. There's a horrible suspicion that the "you" who comes out is not the same "you" who goes in.
That said, I wonder if a version of teleportation could work in which someone simply moves through a hypothetical fourth spatial dimension? No need for atomic copying or disintegration-reintegration. Winking in and out could then just be as simple as sidestepping out of - and then jumping back into - a room through a different door, (well, "simple" plus the flash of light representing the higher energy expenditure involved).
The biggest downside is that it doesn't seem feasible with what we know. If we were living in a universe with a fourth spatial dimension, we'd notice things like smoke disappearing when it dissipated into said extra dimension. But none of the physical laws at the macroscopic level require a fourth spatial dimension to account for anything.
I've heard most of the extra dimensions required for things like string theory are crumpled up as small as the quantum level, so if this fourth-dimensional teleportation were to work... then we'd probably be back to explaining it with quantum mechanics either way?
Or else there's the hypothesis that Twilight is some kind of localized Alcubierre drive? I dunno. Seems a bit of a tacky one...
... Sadly I couldn't focus Too busy focusing on Twilight in socks
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Something which has been largely overlooked by science fiction is the amazing potential that teleportation offers for innovative choreography. No doubt the top unicorn dancers at the Canterlot Ballet must master the skill, and they must spend hours practising until they can vanish mid jump and reappear on the other side of the stage in perfect time to the music.
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It would be like dancing with portals. Now I'm imagining Gene Kelly and what he would make of it. Singin' in the Rain would be slightly different...
To reach that level of skill, those unicorns would need to be top students at the Gifted school, mastering both magic and dance. And now we've exposed one of Twilight's secret childhood fantasies, which no doubt was sparked from watching a Canterlot Ballet performance. Sadly, Twilight can't dance to save herself, so she keeps that dream to herself... mostly.
https://derpicdn.net/img/view/2018/12/24/1917414.png
Technically it only means you can't preserve both locality and causality. Bohm's pilot wave model abandons locality to preserve causality but its results are identical to the standard model and are mathematically more complex, making it functionally pointless.
2 important points here that you mention in passing but I want to emphasize: The original is destroyed so this doesn't violate the 'no clone' theorem. Also, this requires some sort of speed-of-light tranmission to give the results of the 'sending side' measurement, since if you measure the 'receiving' side to find the state, you will disturb the state. Hence it still is limited to speed-of-light. But the speed of light is really fast so this is only an issue for interstellar travel.
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That'd work for an embryo but once cell differentiation has occured there's a lot more than the DNA (which itself comprises 3 billion base pairs, each of which is actually in base 4 so you need 2 bits, requiring 6 gig-bits so... yeah only in the 100 megabyte range).
You can achieve quite a lot of compression since all the cells comprisinig a given organ's 'exterior' are functionally identical, and similar to other bits, but it's going to be more than floppy disk's worth. That's ignoring the nervous system. You'd presumably want to transfer the electro-chemical neural impulses at time of teleportation as well which adds a lot more complexity.
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The beauty of quantum teleportation is with 1 additional hypothesis it avoids the 'transporter paradox'. JS Bell's no-clone theorem shows that you can't actually copy quantum information per se. Quantum teleportation is instead 'moving' the information from one point to another. If (and this is the new hypothesis needed) consciousness can be defined as a quantum superposition (it need not actually be coherent, but that's another debate), then the teleported 'copy' actually is the original. That's a pretty big hypothesis though.
Wouldn't it be easier to create hole beteween two places than to destroy and make new body? I think unicorns can create wormhole.
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That explains this: https://www.euronews.com/2013/02/27/horsemeat-found-in-panzani-ravioli
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Relevant and sublime: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/1
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?
If it's a joke, I don't get it.
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It’s not, any more than life is a dark joke
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Thanks for the detailed comment (which saved me having to respond to one or two things). I didn't go into much detail about the current state of quantum information research, but the reading I did really made me realise how much progress is being made on the experimental side. While we're not expecting a functional teleport, I wonder if this could also lead to real progress in understanding the philosophy of physics sometime soon.
you use Quantum, but I use Relativity. We are probably both wrong.