Teleportation

Teleportation
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Teleportation is the process of moving objects from one place to another more or less instantaneously, without passing through the intervening space. (See transportation).

The word was coined in the early 1900's by American writer Charles Fort to describe the strange disappearances and appearances of anomalies, which he suggested may be connected. He joined the Greek prefix "tele-" (meaning "distant") to the latter part of the word "transportation". Fort's first formal use of the word was in the second chapter of his 1931 book, Lo! "Mostly in this book I shall specialize upon indications that there exists a transportory force that I shall call Teleportation." Though, with his typical half-serious jokiness, Fort added, "I shall be accused of having assembled lies, yarns, hoaxes, and superstitions. To some degree I think so, myself. To some degree, I do not. I offer the data."[1] Fort suggested that teleportation might explain various allegedly paranormal, though, as is typical of his proposals, it's sometimes difficult to tell if Fort took his own "theory" seriously, or instead used it to point out what he saw as the inadequacy of mainstream science to account for strange phenomena.

With present techniques, exact (quantum) teleportation is possible only with photons and atoms.[2] Inexact teleportation, where quantum states are not preserved, is possible by encoding information about an object, transmitting the information to another place, such as by radio or an electric signal, and creating a copy of the original object in the new location. The copy may be sufficient even though destruction of the original is not required in the latter case. Teleportation has also been proposed to explain various anomalous phenomena, and the concept has been widely used in science fiction.

Similar is apport, an earlier word used to describe what today might be called teleportation; and bilocation, when someone is said to occupy two places simultaneously. The word "teletransportation" (which simply expands Fort's abbreviated term) was first employed by Derek Parfit as part of a thought exercise on identity.