🎓 On Teleportation & Understanding via Writing

How writing speculative fiction helps me create a mental model of complex concepts.

One of the reasons I like to write fiction is that it helps me solidify concepts — and personal memories — in my mind. Debating my college professors about whether a vampire really was a good metaphor for tolerance (“vampires really do prey on humans, though!” one professor said, as though people never have “real” reasons to fear immigrants or people of another race or gender — as though threats to culture and wealth and privilege aren’t perceived as real threats to people inclined to be intolerant of “other groups”) was an incredibly useful exercise for making me comprehend not only “how to write a story with a theme” but why fantasy stories really do illuminate ethical conundrums.

I no longer have to justify my ethics by citing prominent philosophers, but it matters to me that if I describe the environmental impact of magically destroying an upstream dam that I actually understand the environmental impact of dams. If you had asked me before I sat down to write a story involving destroying a large highland dam, I would have told you that I understood it. It seemed straightforward enough.

It was only once I got into the nitty-gritty details of actually attempting to describe the process, explain the impact, have characters deal with the consequences, that I realized all the things I didn't, actually, understand.

Storytelling Aids Learning

If I hadn't started writing a story that involved a pastoralist group of archers — who evolved into herders of giant, vegetarian spiders as I did more and more research — I never would have learned about the world's most vegetarian spider, Bagheera kiplingi, named for Rudyard Kipling. They mostly eat acacia nubs and were important to figuring out how pastoralists could maintain huge spider herds because, as it turns out, the reason it’s harder to harvest spidersilk than silkworm silk is because most spiders turn violently cannibalistic if their population density gets too high.

Stories are a unique method of learning for humans that is not replicated in other species. In fact, it's even more useful than leveraging location connections for memory, as with the Memory Palace technique — particularly for people like me. Last week I mentioned that I’m one of those people who can’t really picture an apple in my head; creating a mental image of a place is even harder!

But narratives combine the capacity for event comprehension, memory, imagination, language, with the capacity to invent. This is a really efficient form of learning. For example, story-based e-learning tools help students learn more effectively. They provide context for experiences because of the events in designed stories; it's similar to how I learned a ton about economics playing Neopets as a teen.

Storytelling isn't just valuable for learning, of course. In hunter-gatherer societies, good storytellers help encourage cooperation. Storytelling isn't just about telegraphing moral behavior and teaching people how to act; it's key for ensuring shared context. It allows for the broadcasting of social and cooperative norms to coordinate group behavior.

Group ethics really are conveyed by stories, and I wish this study proving it had been available when I wrote my capstone project. But more than that, stories allow us to understand things, not just “know” them.

I mentioned last week that I’ve been messing around with writing a comic script, but I didn’t really share anything beyond the title: The Dungeon Crawler’s Wife¹.

The very first scene involves teleportation. My mental model of teleportation was inspired by two main sources: the teleportation booths that show up in Larry Niven’s excellent Ringworld series and the movie The Prestige². It stars Hugh Jackman as Robert Angier and Christian Bale as Alfred Borden, rival stage magicians in Victorian London who feud over a perfect teleportation illusion.

I mostly considered it a fictional plot device until I discovered that quantum teleportation is a thing.

How Teleportation (Theoretically) Works

The interesting thing about quantum teleportation is that it is not the teleportation of matter but rather of state. The other interesting thing is that the state cannot be cloned; teleportation necessarily destroys the original state as it transfers it to the new particle​. There’s a bunch of caveats about the original quantum state being unknown (in which case how could you verify if it teleported?), rather like Schrodinger’s cat³ — which is to say, “any attempt to measure it changes it.” This is closely related to the Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle⁴ — not exactly the same, but part of the broader problem that in quantum systems, the act of observation irreversibly disturbs the system. This is why bugs that disappear when you try to measure them (say, by taking a video using your in-app recording tool) are called Heisenbugs.

Heisenbugs suck, but I digress.

Quantum teleportation relies on entanglement. When two particles are tangled, quantum teleportation transfers the state of the first one from one place to the other particle, without moving the physical particle itself and without violating physics.

I envision it a little bit like (but not at all like): waving a magic wand over two balls, individually bagged, inside a chest to metaphysically connect them, then giving one ball to someone (traditionally Alice) and sending her to one corner of the room, then giving someone else (traditionally Bob) the other ball and sending him to the other corner of the room. Then you say the magic words and all the properties of Alice’s ball swhoop into Bob’s ball. Alice’s ball becomes a decohered useless mass of ugly plastic.

But it’s actually a bit more complicated than that, because the real process involves Alice peeking into her bag, then telling Bob (out loud, with words) how to rotate his ball while her ball turns into the decohered mass of ugly plastic because she looked at it — sort of the opposite of Medusa if you will.

And even more complicated than that, because most cases actually involve three balls, with one having the useful state, one getting sacrificed to transmit the state, and one developing the useful state, but I’m pretty shaky on how and why that’s necessary.

The thing is, I am probably very wrong about a lot of what I just said. I did not do great in high school physics and my grounding in math is distinctly iffy. But the neat thing about being human is that while all models are wrong, some are useful. And teleportation is the ‘hook’ I’ve hung my grasp of quantum physics — which matters for quantum computing and the quantum internet — on.

But what’s interesting about quantum teleportation is that it isn’t instantaneous. It doesn’t exceed the speed of light. The only thing transmitted is information — which is not the same thing as photons or light. And information — like, for example, the exact details of all the molecules and photons and gravitational pressures of your body and brain — is incredibly important.

Imagine for a moment that you could build a scanner capable of encoding a record of your precise state of being.

It wouldn’t be instantaneous faster than life travel, no — but it could, for example, a single person to go from point A to an incredibly distant point without needing to deal with something like cryosleep. Forget generation ships, you just (lol) need a printer capable of replicating the state being sent to it — even if it takes a thousand light-years to reach point B, it’s not like the individual would experience those years. You’d still get to check out the planet your hopefully-tame robots terraformed while your encoding was being transmitted from point A.

Obviously, this is firmly in the realm of science fiction; even quantum signals get degraded over distances that large, even in vacuum — and even though space is big, it would be all but impossible to dodge all the space dust and bodies between point A and point B if we consider point B to be “a planet worth terraforming.”

But figuring out where the limitations exist for science fiction is a useful exercise for the project of understanding the physical world. In the physical world, the way quantum computers process quantum states as data means they can handle many possibilities simultaneously and therefore do some computing tasks much faster and better than normal computers. Or at least that’s the theory.

There’s data, and then there’s metadata. Quantum teleportation deals (metaphorically⁵) with the metadata of particles. Information speed and capacity depend not just on the medium (like photons, the particles that make up light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation) but how well we can encode, transmit, and decode signals with available technology. As far as I know, we aren’t (yet?) able to encode as much information into quantum transmissions as we do fiber-optic cables and radio… but it would be powerful if we could, in much the same way that machine learning research has turned out to be remarkably impactful.

Thinking about it too hard starts to feel like staring into the code comprising the Matrix, but I hate not understanding things. Shoving complicated technical concepts into shaky metaphors makes my more engineer-brained friends cringe (sorry if that’s you) but it’s also the only way I have to make sense of the world.

In 1947 John von Neumann said, “truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.” 14 years before that, Alfred Korzybski “A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.”

A story will always elide reality. But sometimes, lossy compression is a feature — not a bug. Maps, like memories, are lighter to carry than the ground we covered. And for me, portal fantasies involving teleportation gone wrong are a lot more accessible than physics labs.

I’m enjoying writing mine. What are you working on? Does it help you learn?

Further Reading

• Anyone Can Be Trained To Be Creative claims creativity is one of the most useful things one can be taught, because it leads to new solutions to problems. Teaching people to invent stories is presented as a key way to train it.

• I do not claim to fully understand these papers about quantum physics, but they were interesting anyway. Twenty Years of Quantum State Teleportation at the Sapienza University in Rome, Is Teleportation Possible?, Ground to Satellite Quantum Teleportation, Teleportation Systems Toward a Quantum Internet, High Fidelity Quantum Teleportation, Teleportation Over Fiber Optic Lines. Incidentally it’s funny to ctrl+f these for “Star Trek.”

1. If you’re curious to read the draft, you’re welcome to — I’ve pushed it (and my messy notes) to my Obsidian publish site. As of now, I’ve got about one issue sketched out, and it’s very messy.

2. Hollywood has a weird habit of releasing very similar films in the same year. For 2006, The Illusionist (starring Edward Norton) was The Prestige’s twin — but to be perfectly honest, I remember almost nothing about The Illusionist, but somehow the existence of a ‘Hollywood twin’ made The Prestige stick in my mind even more. When that sort of thing happens, I always wonder if it’s convergent evolution creating what the cultural gestalt is pushing the studios toward, sheer coincidence, or cutthroat jumping into an emergent trend.

3. I first learned about Schrödinger's cat in a remarkably mediocre Heinlein novel called The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, which has one of the worst endings in science fiction and which was unfortunately my first Heinlein novel. It’s a miracle I read his other books after that, especially given how much I also disliked Stranger in a Strange Land. That said, it did give me a pretty good understanding of the phenomenon and mental hook to hang the philosophical question on.

4. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle actually quantifies how precisely we can simultaneously know complementary properties (like position and momentum).

5. Quantum states are not metadata in the computer science sense — they are the actual data. But I’m using “metadata” as a metaphor for abstract, informational properties that define the particle's behavior.