The Telpher: Telepathic Teleportation

New Perspectives on a Common Science Fiction Trope
by Steven Eckroad

Teleportation is now a reality—at least at the quantum level. It is information, not matter, that is teleported in the subatomic world. Science fiction sometimes invokes quantum teleportation of information to explain teleporting. The information encodes a person’s matter (e.g., for example, see the description of the Transporter in Star Trek). For my Telpher series of novels I wanted to add a little more specificity to the process and some new ideas by introducing human telepathy and the fifth dimension. The process is telepathic teleportation.

Telepathic Teleportation with the Telpher

The first thing to point out is the derivation of the name Telpher. That is, where did I get it and does it have any meaning other than the one I give it in my novels? The the web site: Real Telphers will show you pictures and descriptions of modern day telphers. They are cars that provide transportation between distant mountain tops by stringing overhead cables between the peaks.

So, the teleportation Telpher in the 24th century is a transportation device between distant locations that are otherwise hard to reach. My concept of telepathic teleportation involves a symbiosis between Machine and Human. The Machine is a device that opens a fifth dimension portal. The Human is a specially trained telepath. I gave the Machine the name Telpher (which is the title for the first book and then the series). The Telpher uses exotic energy to condense, to a quantum level, the baryonic matter of the person or thing being teleported. (Dark energy is another name for exotic energy. Baryonic matter is just the constituents of the atoms we are made of.)

The resulting quantum field in a purely 5th dimension, obeys a scaling factor of 16 orders of magnitude. That is, the energy of matter in the 5th dimension field is greater than what it is in our 4D realm by a factor of ten to the sixteenth power (the physics of this is quite reasonable – see Warped Passages by Lisa Randall). This higher energy is more than enough to efficiently encode a human being.

Role of the Fifth Dimension in Telepathic Teleportation

The 5th dimension field extends over all of four-dimension spacetime. (Think what a 3D person would see when looking at a 2D “Flatland” world. The 3D person can “see” and “travel to” all of the 2D world at once.) The 5th dimension allows timeless (instant) travel from one 4D location to another.

I built on this idea. I postulate that the 5th dimension field is essentially matter converted to mental energy, which a telepath may sense and/or manipulate. Current physics postulates that gravity is a force that exists in the 5th dimension at extremely high energy levels. Gravity “leaks” into our 4D realm at much reduced levels (see Randall, below). So, like gravity, I postulate the mental field in the 5^th dimension to extend into our 4D world, though attenuated.

The machine portion of the Telpher converts the baryonic matter of the person being teleported to 5th dimension mental energy. Then the Human Telepath interacts with the attenuated (4D) field. She forges a synergistic link with the Telpher to access the 5th dimension and direct the teleportation process. The Telepath perceives the teleported person or object as a hologram of the information stored in the 5th dimension field. She mentally directs the initial encoding and subsequent decoding of the hologram. She also establishes the interconnection between the departure and arrival locations of the traveler.

Some Physics to Support Telepathic Teleportation

In her book, Warped Passages, Harvard physicist Lisa Randall conceives a five-dimension universe with two domains, called branes. One brane, the “weak brane,” is the four-dimensional world we live on. The other brane, the “gravity brane,” lies close by in the direction of a fifth dimension (i.e., along a fourth space dimension).

Of all the known particles and fields in our 4D world Randall shows that only the graviton (the particle of gravitation) is free to move into the 5^th dimension. However, the mass (or, energy by E=mc²) of the graviton increases as it moves from the weak brane to the gravity brane. The math that describes the change in mass is renormalization. [Renormalization specifies relationships between fundamental properties (e.g., mass of graviton) in a theory when properties at large distance scales differ from properties at small distance scales.]

Scaling Factors

Randall uses a scaling factor to mathematically replace the the weak brane graviton mass with a theorized gravity brane mass. The scaling factor is 10¹⁶. The graviton’s mass (energy) on the gravity brane is 10¹⁶ times what it is on the weak brane. The scaling factor is exponential (that is, mass increase along the 5^th dimension is not linear). Randall sets the distance between the two branes (i.e., along the 5th dimension axis) over which the scaling occurs to be less than the Planck units for space (<10^-33 cm) and time (<10^-43 sec). Since space and time are not defined at Planck scale dimensions, movement of quantum particles in the Planck realm is independent of space and time.

Incidentally, the exponential scaling factor and the fact that only gravity extends into all four space dimensions explains its relative weakness compared to the other known forces. These extend into only three space dimensions. According to this the additional dimension “dilutes” gravity.