Teleportation & The Blue Butterfly In My Garden

TheMadFool

Teleportation is the hypothetical transfer of matter or energy from one point to another without traversing the physical space between them

Faster Than Light Travel is impossible.

The million dollar question is, does teleportation break the light barrier?

I was smoking outside a while ago in my office garden when a butterfly caught my attention - the topside of its wings were bright blue but the undersides were dirty brown. I was looking at it from an elevation and the ground was covered with dead leaves and was itself brown. As it flew by the beautiful butterfly produced an illusion of teleportation: visible (blue topside of its wings) -> disappear (brown underside of its wings blending with the ground) -> visible (blue topside of its wings) -> disappear (brown underside of its wings blending with the ground) ->...and so on. I immediately thought of teleportation because that's what it looked like.

However, if we know the speed of the butterfly, the distance between the two spots it's visible in, and the time taken between them, we can easily determine that this isn't teleportation. Say, the butterfly's speed is 2m/s. Say it's visible at spot A at time 0s and it then "disappears" and "reappears" at spot B at time 2s, the distance between A and B being 4m. If the butterfly maintains a constant speed, the distance between spots A and B (4m) should be covered by the butterfly in exactly 2s and that's exactly what's happened. In other words what looks like teleportation can be explained in terms of mundane, everyday concepts of speed, distance, and time.

Imagine now that someone claims an object X has been teleported across a distance D in time T. If X had physically traversed this distance like normal objects do, its speed should be D/T. Any value for G/H (the speed of X) which doesn't exceed the light speed barrier is open to the butterfly teleportation illusion interpretation i.e. the object X could've undergone certain changes that camouflage it, making it undetectable against the background, but the point is it traversed the distance D in the same way as normal objects do. No teleportation or if you insist that teleportation has occurred, it's an illusion.

Kenosha Kid

Yes. But smoking is bad for your health so stop it!

Teleportation as per that definition isn't FTL, rather the exact equivalent of infinite velocity. In the EPR paradox, for instance, information doesn't traverse the two-body wavefunction in finite time.

Funnily enough, I briefly looked at solving the Dirac equation for two entangled particles, one of which would be "measured" by a magnetic field. Not ashamed to say I gave up solving the Dirac equation which is tough, but my hypothesis was that the information that causes collapse is carried by the phase information of the wavefunction.
(Phase information affects interference.) This has no speed upper limit, even in relativity. In fact, the phase velocity is tachyonic: infinite for a system at rest, slowing down to c as the system is accelerated to c. My professor thought my idea very stupid, but my other ideas he thought stupid turned out right, so....

tim wood

↪TheMadFool

Two points, possibly irrelevant.

1) Following Bell's theorem, something strange is happening, and the more likely account just is FTL transmission.

2) Much that is blue in nature isn't. It's just the way the surface structure reflects light.

TheMadFool

Two points, possibly irrelevant.

1) Following Bell's theorem, something strange is happening, and the more likely account just is FTL transmission.

2) Much that is blue in nature isn't. It's just the way the surface structure reflects light. — tim wood

I went through the Wikipedia page on teleportation and it says that teleportation would violate Newton's laws but I don't know how and it really doesn't matter because so long as claims about teleportation are concerned, if it doesn't break the light speed barrier, it fails to impress, right? After all, the object may have simply transformed into energy (sound? light?) and though it might appear to have teleported, it in fact traversed the distance in some form.

Given things that travel through space seem to have a fixed speed (sound: 330 m/s; light: 300,000 km/s), we might even be able to identify what the object that teleports transforms into. All this assuming teleportation isn't instantaneous.

tim wood

In fact, given the fact that things that travel through space seem to have a fixed speed (sound: 330 m/s; light: 300,000 km/s), we might even be able to identify what the object that teleports transforms into. All this assuming teleportation isn't instantaneous. — TheMadFool

A maximum speed in a given medium. And "instantaneous" requires at the least what it means to be instantaneous, and for what observer.

TheMadFool

A maximum speed in a given medium. And "instantaneous" requires at the least what it means to be instantaneous, and for what observer. — tim wood

:ok:

tim wood

↪TheMadFool

And instantaneous not easy. The light from that mountain range to your eye took a measurable amount of time - as you measure it. But for a clock moving along with the light itself, how much time elapsed? Subject to correction, I am under the impression that no time elapsed. That for the photon, the trip was instantaneous. But that would make time simply a matter of clocks in relative motion. But what does that make of space-time? Which gives me a headache, or would if I allowed myself to stay too long with it.

magritte

However, if we know the speed of the butterfly, the distance between the two spots it's visible in, and the time taken between them, we can easily determine that this isn't teleportation. — TheMadFool

Cool. When it sits motionless on a tree branch that butterfly is moth-like dirty brown and nearly invisible. Illusions of nonexistence and existence are not uncommon in nature and appearances unlike matter-energy can move faster than light. Astronomical shadows move with the speed of light radially but can be much faster when moving transverse. This could be narrated as teleportation of shadows.

Teleportation & The Blue Butterfly In My Garden

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