“I flew out from L.A. this morning with Hayden Christensen and we are very excited to be here with the MIT professors and to have some of the science of the film ripped apart. I am someone that does not shy away from a challenge in my career,” Liman said. “Hayden and I were cramming the entire way out here over quantum physics realizing we should have read it before we started making the film. We might not have made the film if we knew quite how impossible these guys are going to tell us teleportation could be.”
Christensen — who gets to do in the new movie what millions of sci-fi fans have longed to do — joined Liman on a panel with MIT physicists Dr. Edward Farhi and Dr. Max Tegmark to discuss the teleportation depicted in the film and the science that is reality today. The panel sat before a slew of engaged MIT students ready to discredit any notion that Christensen’s portrayed ability to will himself from beneath the icy waters of an Ann Arbor, Mich., lake to within the stacks of the local library is anything more than good acting and advanced special effects.
“I wasn’t expecting such a lively group,” Christensen told attendees at the MIT event, which showcased four clips from the film set to open next month. Yet Liman said he anticipated the excitement around the science of teleportation because it drew him to make the film and to travel to 14 countries and 20 cities to lend credibility to the locations to which Christensen jumped.
Liman, who also directed “The Bourne Identity,” explained how he realized while he could train Matt Damon to fight like an assassin, he would not be able to get Christensen up to speed on teleportation abilities. But that didn’t stop him from wanting to make the film and to add as much science to the process as he could.
“There is a tendency in Hollywood to want to dumb topics down for the audience,” Liman said. But he visited a physics expert — who shunned his concept immediately — to try to make the impossible act of complete human teleportation seem plausible enough for the audience to suspend reality and accept that Christensen’s character and others in the film were able to teleport themselves.
“I wanted to figure out what it would look like if someone is in a chair and then suddenly not in a chair. I took a very scientific approach” by considering objects moving and climate conditions in the environment, Liman said, amid uproarious laughter from the audience. He then added good-naturedly, “When I speak other places I sound very scientific.”
Admittedly Liman didn’t have much of a chance of coming off knowledgeable about science in the company of Farhi and Tegmark, who separately discussed in detail the facts around teleportation that have their roots in quantum mechanics.
To start, Farhi explained that businesses have been able to teleport a single quantum particle — such as an electron or a photon — in laboratories over fiber-optic cable up to a distance of 2 miles. The process requires three particles, two of which could be an entangled pair of electrons. In its simplest explanation, the two electrons must be split and a third particle would destroy and copy the information from one electron and then send that data in a signal to the other electron, which in essence would be teleportation of the first electron, he explained. He added that it is not possible to send the signal over in less time than the distance divided by the speed of light.
“In quantum teleportation, there is no instantaneous transport of information. Everything is nice and consistent with the laws of relatively and quantum mechanics … which can be very strange but also happened to be true,” Farhi said.
Tegmark continued with a presentation that provided great detail as to why the world would not want to teleport Christensen; many reasons would be to prevent harm to the Canadian actor. But he also commented on the importance of the sci-fi genre of films driving scientific research to solve many of the questions raised by the creator’s imagination. While Liman said he came up with multiple movie ideas simply from listening to the physicists talk, Tegmark argued scientists do the same with sci-fi films.
“The hard part is finding the right question to ask, it’s not always the answer,” he said. And when asked by the audience the hard question that was bound to come up with Christensen in attendance — which sci-fi film depicts a science or technology more likely to become reality: Star Wars’ lightsabers or Jumper’s teleportation? — the MIT experts had to answer with the former.
“The lightsaber, but the hard part is getting the laser beam to stop,” Tegmark said.
And if any question remained, they both reiterated that human teleportation is not possible. But there is a practical application to the science of teleportation today: secure key distribution. Farhi explained that by sending quantum particles down channels, companies can ensure 100% secure communications and detect “eavesdropping.”
“Someday it could be possible to teleport millions of particles, they can teleport a single photon today,” he said.
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