[tt] NYT: Quantum Teleporting, Yes; the Rest Is Movie Magic

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Quantum Teleporting, Yes; the Rest Is Movie Magic
New York Times, 8.2.5
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/science/05mit.html

By DENNIS OVERBYE

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- In a battle waged with popcorn, floodlights,
chalk and star power, science and art squared off at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology one night last month.

On one side of a vaunted cultural divide were Doug Liman, director
of the coming movie "Jumper," about a young man who discovers he can
transport himself anywhere he wants just by thinking about it, and
Hayden Christensen, the film's star.

On the other were a pair of the institute's physics professors,
Edward Farhi and Max Tegmark, experts on the type of physics the
movie was purporting to portray, who had been enlisted to view a few
scenes from it and talk about science.

In the middle were hundreds of M.I.T. students who had waited for
hours to jam into a giant lecture hall known as Room 26-100 and who
proved that future scientists and engineers could be just as rowdy
and star-struck as the crowds outside the MTV studios in Times
Square.

"I guess I wasn't expecting such a lively group," Mr. Christensen
said.

The evening was the brainchild of Warren Betts, a veteran Hollywood
publicist who has helped promote a number of movies with scientific
or technological themes, including "Apollo 13." Mr. Betts said he
had gotten excited after a Caltech physicist told him that
teleportation was actually an accomplished fact in the quirky realm
of quantum physics.

Mr. Betts arranged for clips from the movie, scheduled for a Feb. 14
release, to be shown, and then inveigled Dr. Farhi, an expert on
quantum computers, and Dr. Tegmark, a cosmologist, to participate in
a panel discussion. They agreed, as long as they could talk about
real physics.

"What do I know about movie production?" asked Dr. Farhi, calling
himself "clueless." He said, "If the students learn something, it's
fine, I'm happy."

The corridor outside M.I.T.'s venerable lecture hall was transformed
for the occasion into a red carpet -- sans the actual red carpet --
lined with television cameras and reporters. At the appointed hour,
Mr. Christensen, who played the young Anakin Skywalker in "Star Wars
Episode II: Attack of the Clones," and "Star Wars Episode III:
Revenge of the Sith," began to proceed slowly down the line.

Mr. Liman, the director, meanwhile, confessed to being nervous.
"We're about to see a couple of M.I.T. professors rip me to shreds,"
he said. "I hope they appreciate that I tried to respect the physics
of the planet we live on."

Mr. Liman, who directed "The Bourne Identity," and "Mr. and Mrs.
Smith," said he had been a "physics prodigy" in high school, which
had gotten him into Brown University despite a checkered
adolescence. He never took a physics class in college, however.
"Being good at it made it a little boring," he said.

He said he had fallen in love with the "Jumper" script -- adapted by
David S. Goyer, Jim Uhls and Simon Kinberg from a series of young
adult novels by Steven Gould -- because of its honesty. The first
thing the new superhero does with his powers is rob a bank. "The
story was as honest as it could be," Mr. Liman said.

He said he had spent a lot time trying to figure what teleportation
would actually look like, never mind what causes it. If a body
suddenly disappeared, for example, there would be a rush of air into
the vacuum left behind.

Physics, Mr. Liman said, is more connected to filmmaking than one
might expect. "I liked problem solving," he said. "A film," he
added, "is one big problem."

An hour later, Dr. Farhi and Dr. Tegmark, true to their words, let
the air out of the "Jumper" balloon.

In real experiments recently, Dr. Farhi told the movie fans,
physicists had managed to "teleport" a single elementary particle, a
photon, which transmits light, about one and a half miles, "a little
less exotic than what you see in the movie."

What is actually teleported in these experiments, he explained, is
not the particle itself but all the quantum information about the
particle.

To accomplish this is no small matter. Among other things, the
teleporters have to create a pair of so-called entangled particles,
which maintain a kind of spooky correlation even though they are
separated by light years. Both of them exist in a kind of quantum
fog of possibility until one or the other is observed. Measuring one
particle instantly affects its separated-at-birth twin no matter how
far away. If one is found to be spinning clockwise, for example, the
other will be found to be spinning counter clockwise.

In order to use this magic to "teleport" a third particle, Dr. Farhi
emphasized, you have to send a conventional signal between the
entangled twins, and that takes time, according to Einstein. "You
cannot get that thing over there faster than the speed of light,"
Dr. Farhi said, to cheers from the crowd.

The real lure, he said, is not transportation, but secure
communication. If anybody eavesdrops on the teleportation signal,
the whole thing doesn't work, Dr. Farhi said. Another use is in
quantum computing, which would exploit the ability of quantum bits
of information to have different values, both one and zero, at the
same time to perform certain calculations, like factoring large
prime numbers, much faster than ordinary computers.

As Dr. Tegmark said, "Nobody can hack your credit card, and then you
can build a quantum computer and hack everybody else's card."

One student asked the physicists if they rolled their eyes at the
scientific miscues in movies. That was too much like work, protested
Dr. Farhi, who said he was more interested in the acting and the
characters. Dr. Tegmark said that even inaccurate science fiction
movies could inspire scientists to think. You could see something
that you think is impossible, he said, but that might start you
thinking. "Why is that impossible? It can trigger a train of
thought," he said.

"The hard part of science is finding the right questions," Dr.
Tegmark said.

Asked if science mattered, Mr. Liman said that he always tried to
get to know the reality behind a film, but that it was not always so
easy. One professor he approached for advice about "Jumper" threw
him out of his office, he said.

He went on to describe his attempts to portray the teleportation
jumps realistically. Wind would rush to fill the vacuum left by the
departing body, he said, and papers would fly around.

"Yeah," Dr. Tegmark said.

Under some conditions moisture would condense out of the air into
clouds.

The physicists nodded. "In any other place, I would sound very
scientific," Mr. Liman said, to laughter and applause.

By now the divide between the two cultures was getting as fuzzy and
blurred as some quantum fog.

Dr. Tegmark asked what scientists could do to help the movie makers.

"Watch `Jumper,' " Mr. Christensen answered, "and then get to work
and figure out how to do it."