Director Doug Liman (inset) did some DIY jump-cut teleportation in his office before digitally zapping Hayden Christensen around the world. (Images courtesy of 20th Century Fox)Teleportation has long been the object of real-world desire—not to mention sci-fi speculation, from Star Trek to The Twilight Zone to Heroes. Though scientists have actually had some success in the lab, the fact remains that you can’t spontaneously disappear and travel wherever you want. And that, according to director Doug Liman, is the sole fallacy of physics he accepted when filming Jumper, featuring Star Wars vet Hayden Christensen as a kid with a genetic anomaly that allows him to skip through wormholes across the world. “What if somebody had this power?” Liman asks. “That’s the only leap of faith that I took in the movie. Everything else is grounded in the real physics of our world.”
The Director’s Take
After guiding Matt Damon through amnesia in The Bourne Identity and now getting set for a modern-day, DIY recreation of the Apollo missions for his next film, Liman is happy to call himself a science geek—honest portrayals are the key to his films, even since playing it indie cool during his Swingers years. “I wanted to keep the physics everywhere else as honest as possible,” he tells PM. “Other films that have had super powers say, ‘Well, now that there’s a super power—we’re going to ignore every law of physics on the planet.’ That’s why you end up with Spider-Man existing in a [place] that feels nothing like our world, [where] everybody else can do extraordinary things. Gravity doesn’t even seem to apply because there [are] people zipping around on anti-gravity boards. Those things feel like cartoons to me.”
So Liman did his own prep work on the circumstances around a jump, experimenting with its look and its scientific premise at the same time. “[I] basically started with someone sitting in my office and pointing a video camera at them and being like, ‘Okay, I’m going to teleport them out of the chair’—starting with the most rudimentary, which is you pause the camera and they leave the frame and you start the camera again,” he says. Then came the physics: With a character’s weight shifting off the chair, the air vacuum and surrounding environment in a teleportation scene would be more crucial than the jump itself. “The jump is extraordinarily unimpressive,” Liman admits, “because I felt anything that powerful and that violent would happen in a split second, which means you basically can’t see it.” Indeed, we get no wormholes, no slo-mo—just some post-teleport scars, from frost on a windshield to oil floating on the surface of water.
Liman was also preoccupied with what would happen when ordinary nonjumpers were exposed to the wormholes left behind by the likes of Christensen and Samuel L. Jackson. “If you opened a temporary wormhole between two places, before it closed up, that would be something extraordinarily violent and dangerous,” he says. “One of the rules of science is that everything that we do in this world, there’s a price to be paid—nothing comes for free. And one of the prices to be paid is that, if you jump, you leave this wormhole behind. That wormhole is dangerous for people who might stumble across it before it evaporates.”
The Physics Reality
Dr. Max Tegmark, a physics professor at MIT who recently participated in a teleportation panel discussion with Liman, says he was impressed by the filmmaker’s ambition to get the physics right. “It was very good to see a movie director trying to make things as realistic as he could, at least within the confines of the script,” Tegmark says of Jumper, which is based on a Steven Gould sci-fi novel. Some of Liman’s leaps of scientific intuition, such as environmental disruption based on air pockets left by the jumper, “make perfect sense,” Tegmark says.
And make no mistake: While Liman and his team just assumed that humans can’t jump in real life, teleportation does exist—just not the way it’s portrayed on screen. The physical particles don’t move, but their quantum information does—essentially cloning them at a distance. So electrons and ions have “teleported” before, and last year scientists beamed data from photons almost 90 miles between two of the Canary Islands. But even teleporting one particle at a time—say, an electron—is not a simple process. It requires three electrons—the one you want to teleport, and a pair of entangled electrons that split. One electron learns information about the electron to be teleported while the third receives that information at the destination, creating a perfect clone down to the electron’s quantum state; the information about the original is then destroyed. “You don’t want to teleport yourself unless you’re really confident that it’s going to work,” Tegmark says.
Physicists, meanwhile, aren’t sure that traversable wormholes are even possible. “I think Liman had in mind that there was supposed to be some kind of wormhole through space-time, and that’s how it was supposed to work,” Tegmark says. “The ones we know of in physics don’t just appear out of nowhere, and they’re very unstable. If you try to fly through them, the whole thing collapses into a black hole. It’s still an open problem in physics—whether all wormholes are unstable or whether by putting dark energy in them you can make them stable, and whether or not traversable wormholes are actually possible.” Regardless, he says, stabilized, traversable wormholes aren’t coming anytime soon.
One real world physics conundrum the script leaves out, Tegmark says, is energy conservation. “As you convert yourself into pure energy, you correspond to many, many megatons of energy,” he explains. “If you unleash that in an uncontrolled way, it would look like a giant nuclear bomb—and you didn’t see anything like that in the movie.”
One thing’s for certain: It will be a long time before we’re teleporting humans, “not because it’s impossible, but because there’s not much incentive to do it,” says Tegmark, who pinpoints information transfer as the most apt use for teleportation. “If you send an encrypted message over the Internet from the White House to the Pentagon, you’re always worried that someone’s going to eavesdrop on you,” he says. “But if you teleport your information through fiberoptic wires, we know from the basic principles of quantum mechanics that no one can eavesdrop on you. No one can get to that message without the message self-destructing.”
Regardless of whether or not Liman has his science right, Tegmark applauds the film. “I think it’s great that Hollywood makes you think about what’s possible in physics and what’s not,” he says. “In my experience as a scientist, it’s not always about finding the right answer but finding the right question.”
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment