Profligate spending by the government is hardly news, but when it comes to government spending on the sciences, the story gets a little more complex. Headlines and editorials keep careful watch over whether science spending is up or down—the presumption is the higher the number, the better for America. (According to the Office of Management and Budget, the proposed 2006 budget would provide $132 billion in federal spending on science research, up 45 percent from 2001.)
But who knows where all that money is being spent? For example, in 2002, Las Vegas physicist Eric Davis was paid $25,000 by the U.S. Air Force Research Lab to discuss the scientific possibilities of teleportation. That's right, teleportation. Specifically, the purpose of his study was to collect "information describing the teleportation of material objects, providing a description of teleportation as it occurs in physics, its theoretical and experimental status, and a projection of potential applications."
In other words, was there any way we can beam our troops and weapons behind enemy lines and kick some butt? Well, that depends on your definition of teleportation, because Davis lays out five of them. Star Trek-style transporter beams he labels as sf-Teleportation ("sf" for science fiction) and promptly dismisses (though he's a fan of the show). Which is just as well: Davis later takes up the question of how you would digitally store all the atomic information of a human being and concludes that "it will take more than 2,400 times the present age of the universe to access this amount of data using commercially available computers. Top-of-the-line supercomputers will not reduce this time significantly."
"You really can't do it," he said by phone earlier this week. "Teleportation as we understand it does not involve dissembling or disintegrating chunks of matter and reassembling [them] in other locations."
But it may involve transferring quantum states from one point to another. Davis calls this q-Teleportation. Wormholes are another theoretical avenue for transporting you, me and our luggage instantaneously from one part of the universe to another. Then there are parallel universes. Finally, Davis surveys the literature on psychic teleportation, and even gives a favorable assessment of spoon-bending showman Uri Geller, whom many consider a fraud.
(Remember, this study cost $25,000.)
Nevertheless, Davis sites Chinese research that apparently demonstrated test subjects teleporting fruit flies and grasshoppers with their mind alone, and Geller is alleged to have taken a chunk of a crystal compound that was sealed off in a tube and "teleported it out of existence."
But if this research was out there, and has been around for a generation, shouldn't it have been accepted into the mainstream? "Politicians and bureaucrats have the dogmatic view that it is not possible," Davis says.
Davis has been affiliated with a few off-the-beaten-path scientific enterprises. While in Vegas in the late-'90s, he worked with the National Institute for Discovery Science, the nonprofit organization started by Budget Suites tycoon Robert Bigelow. NIDS conducts "research of aerial phenomena, animal mutilations and other related anomalous phenomena." He left Las Vegas last fall to take a job as a researcher with EarthTech International in Austin, Texas. EarthTech's founder, Hal Puthoff, ran the CIA's first remote-viewing program in the '60s. The institute is involved in some controversial research, including the possibility of free energy in the vacuum of space, which some have criticized as pseudoscience. At EarthTech, Davis and his colleagues are involved in research on the edge of physics, like faster-than-light travel, "to do Star Trek ... to make Star Trek real."
Davis is a cosmologist and astrophysicist by training, and a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the American Astronomical Society. "Mr. Davis was selected because of his previous work in the area of advanced concepts and his technical and academic expertise," says Larine Barr, a spokesperson at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio, home of the research lab.
Davis says there is a small subset of "real scientists" affiliated with institutions such as Princeton and Stanford who do this sort of esoteric research on consciousness and mind-over-matter phenomena. How does the rest of the scientific community view them? "I never talked to somebody on the outside of that group," he said. "I think the larger community just ignores this subset."
As for his own report, which runs 88 pages and is heavy on impressive-looking mathematical equations, he says the point was to bring together existing research on the various types of teleportation, so other scientists could use it as a springboard for new research. Davis says he had hoped his report would stir up some controversy in the government's secret research programs, but so far, no such luck.
I asked whether that was because people had concluded it was all pie in the sky. That was a possibility, Davis said, but for him it boils down to belief. "Every time you deal with the naysayers, they never really read a key seminal paper. Instead they make a snap judgment."
What did the folks at Wright-Patterson think? "The study successfully compiled an extensive review of worldwide literature and discussed the current state of research," said Col. Michael Heil, director of the AFRL Propulsion Directorate, "but we were disappointed at the level of scientific rigor in the report's analysis."
In the end, the Air Force decided that "it is not appropriate to pursue further study or to mature the technology." But they'll keep their eyes open to be prepared to take advantage of "any advances with potential application to the Air Force."
Davis believes research in quantum teleportation could yield breakthroughs in encrypted communication—where attempts to intercept messages would destroy the message itself—as well as quantum computing, which would significantly increase computational power beyond our current digital world of 0s and 1s.
The Air Force refused to provide a list of other studies it is working on—or how much in public money they're throwing at them—but it reminded me that lasers, stealth technology and GPS were once considered science fiction. "If we don't look at what's possible, we're going to be remiss," says Ranney Adams, public affairs director for the AFRL's Edwards Research Site.
This is sensible enough for technologies that are 20 or 30 years out—the timetable the Air Force research lab says it works with. But with those magic bullets a little farther down the road, circa late-21st century/early-22nd century, the Air Force might be better served to contact a less expensive consultant. Like, for example, me. In exchange for a cheese steak at Capriotti's, I could have told the research lab, "You know what? Teleportation is, um, not quite possible yet in 2005." No scientific equations. No $25,000. Same conclusion.