Lab Notes
Jumping for (Scientific) Joy

"Watson, come here! I need you!" March 10, 1876: When Alexander Graham Bell called for help after spilling acid on himself, he was shouting through a "voice telegraph" device and, inadvertently, placing the world's very first telephone call. From that point forward, we've been able to cast our voices almost anywhere on the planet, with the expectation of an instantaneous reply. Distance collapses in the face of telecommunications, transforming what is, after all, a rather big planet into a single global village. But there's a hitch: Only our voices travel at the speed of light. The fragile meat of our bodies still has to be ferried around well below the speed of sound. But what if we could transmit our atoms along with our ones and zeros? Better still, what if we could do this without any messy technological infrastructure?

Fortunately, opening at #1 and remaining near the top in its third week of release, Doug Liman's new teleportation flick Jumper is here to answer that question. The movie has already made over $120 million in box-office receipts and is still going strong; we can only imagine what the home-video release will look like. Critics may hate it (at 16 percent, its Tomatometer reading is nothing short of abysmal), but I'm not really sure why—the characters are interesting, the plot makes sense, and the action carries a unique visual appeal that's worth the price of admission all by itself. More importantly, the story does exactly what science fiction is supposed to do: It starts with an interesting proposition and then explores the consequences, both obvious and non-, for the characters and for the world. Character development is not a strong point for this movie, I'll admit, but since it's only the first film in a planned trilogy, there should be plenty of time to fill in the details as we go.

20th Century Fox pulled out all the stops on this one, with a genre-action script penned by David S. Goyer (Blade, Batman Begins), Jim Uhls (Fight Club) and Simon Kinberg (Mr. & Mrs. Smith, X-Men: The Last Stand). The writing team also includes novelist Steven Gould, who composed the 1992 multiple-award-nominee book on which the movie is based. Interestingly, the original story did not include Griffin—arguably the film's most interesting character, who provides most of the show and tell about what's going on. Gould has released a spinoff novel about Griffin, though, titled Jumper: Griffin's Story.

Now, it's my job to suss out the science here, so the first and most important question to answer is: Could any of this actually happen? Quick answer: Yes. Long answer: Probably not. Even longer answer: Hard to say for sure until we have a unified theory of quantum mechanics and gravity. We've talked about quantum teleportation many times in these pages (most recently in "Reach for a Battlestar," Feb. 2006), and yes, it's possible, but the mechanism for "jumping" in this case is explicitly (though fleetingly) described, and it involves wormholes.

Falling down the wormhole

The term "wormhole" was first used in 1957 by physicist John Wheeler, riffing on the earlier work of mathematician Hermann Weyl, who'd been noodling around with the general relativity equations supplied by Einstein. The name did a lot to popularize the idea; it became a staple of science fiction almost immediately and eventually penetrated the somewhat denser imaginations of the general public as well. As Jumper clearly shows, a person in the English-speaking world today has at least a rough idea what a wormhole is. The word is mentioned exactly once in the script, with no further explanation needed or offered.

Topologically speaking, a wormhole is a point in space that actually occupies two points in space. Imagining the universe as a fat guy's shirt, the wormhole is what happens when you fold and stretch and press two distant pieces of the cloth together. The individual threads aren't cut or frayed in the process—the universe remains intact!—but a bead of sweat can dribble lightly from one side of the shirt to the other, covering inches or feet of space in a single instant. Do wormholes exist? Quite possibly; no one has ever observed one, but the laws of physics (at least as far as they're understood today) seem to allow for it. The only problem? For a wormhole large enough to admit a human body, it seems a tremendous amount of energy (often "negative energy" supported by "exotic matter" or "cosmic strings," i.e. other things that have never been observed) is needed to keep the tunnel mouth open.

In the movie, the wormhole is called a "jump scar," and it remains open for several seconds—sometimes even several minutes—after the jumper has passed through it. Where does all the energy come from? I have the same problem with telekinesis and pyrokinesis; a human brain simply can't generate enough energy to throw cars and explode buildings! But perhaps the actual mutation here is energy-related: An ability to tap into the tremendous heat at the core of the earth or the center of the sun, or possibly even the zero-point field that pervades all of space and time. With that kind of mojo behind it, I can just barely believe that an idiosyncratic arrangement of neurons could maybe, possibly generate a signal that modulated an energy pulse that rippled the fabric of the universe, if only for a moment.

Might as well jump

The jumper steps across, yes, into a world of trouble he can scarcely imagine. Notably: In spite of its obvious evolutionary advantages, teleportation has not been observed in the animal kingdom, and it probably never will be. And yet the scientist in me doesn't find very much here to disagree with. A few niggling details:

1) Velocity: If you're falling off a building, your terminal velocity is around 55 meters per second. If you jump to the safety of your apartment on the other side of the world, you should still be moving 55 meters per second. That'll put a dent in your floors! In fact, it's worse than that, because the rotation of the Earth means the ground on other side of the world is moving at 578 meters per second in the opposite direction from the ground on this side. Hate to say it, amigo, but you're also going to dent the wall. The fix? Clearly, the wormholes created by jumpers have particular velocities as well as particular locations. Consciously calculating all that would be quite a chore, but it seems to happen in or near the motor cortex of their brains, as effortlessly as moving an arm or bending a knee.

(The book includes some intelligent discussion about velocity matching and frames of reference, but since this didn't make it onto the big screen, the movie's audience is left to fend for itself. This is part of the reason, I suspect, that seasoned science-fiction viewers enjoyed it more than naive critics did.)

2) Appearing underwater: If one side of a wormhole is in Africa, and the other side is at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, the pressure difference should be several tons per square inch. At first glance, it seems that water should fire out through the dry end of the hole at lethal velocity! However, on closer examination the skilled reader will realize that Africa is higher than the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. This means that the water has to rise up a mile or two through the Earth's gravity well, losing potential energy in the process. In fact, the potential energy loss exactly matches the pressure differential, meaning the water will simply fall out for a moment while the hole is closing, exactly as we observe in the film.

3) Teleportation of stationary objects: In order to leap across the spacetime continuum, the jumper actually has to step through the wormhole. Bringing a girlfriend along—or even a vehicle—should be no problem if the hole is wide enough, but how can a stationary object (e.g., a building) go through? Well, we've already established that the wormhole ends are mobile, so I suppose one of these could simply sweep across the building, scooping it through like a fish through the mouth of a net.

So the movie gets a guarded pass from me—yes, it's possible, and yes, the extrapolations make a kind of screwy sense. Of course, a science-fiction columnist's mind is constructed to take things a little further, and in idle moments it can gravitate to dangerous questions. Could a jumper put on a spacesuit and teleport to the moon? Or farther? With a series of carefully staged jumps around a black hole, could he travel in time and cause a paradox? Luckily for us, the jumpers are neither physicists nor science fiction fans. They do seem to have some knowledge of comic books, but spend most of their actual time worrying about (a) sex, (b) money and (c) staying out of the clutches of the secret organization trying to kill them. Otherwise, we might find, through their careless actions, that the fabric of the universe really could be torn apart!

Readers should of course note that the movie and the book bear only passing resemblance to one another, and that Steve Gould—a diligent and responsible fictionist—is hardly responsible for what a room full of Hollywood suits decides to do. If science could find a way to control that, why, the world would be a jumper's paradise indeed.

Sources:
The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com): "Jumper"
www.rottentomatoes.com: "Jumper"
Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org): "wormhole," "terminal velocity," "telephone"
Encyclopedia Britannica 2008 Ultimate Reference Suite: "Black Holes and Wormholes"
www.digitalnoir.com