Movies have the jump on teleportation

— -- When David Rice, a character played by Hayden Christensen in the new movie Jumper, first discovers that he can teleport around the world at will, he makes a series of interesting choices.

First, it's to save himself from drowning by imagining himself in the warmth and safety of a familiar library. But Rice's desires soon grow darker, and before long he has gone from innocent experiments to robbing banks and joytripping around the world.

"Regular people aren't heroic," says the film's director, Doug Liman, "and I wanted the film to feel honest and realistic."

Realistic? In a science-fiction movie about teleporting "jumpers" who, thanks to a genetic mutation, can leapfrog to any spot on the planet in the blink of an eye?

Sure, Liman concedes, there are plenty of scenes in which the fictional world of Jumper favors fantasy over physics. But the idea of teleportation — traveling instantly from one spot to another without actually moving through the space in between — is just as at home in the physics lab as in the movie studio.

Science fiction vs. science

In science fiction, teleportation usually works in one of a handful of ways. Sometimes it comes down to superior mental powers, or maybe the ability to leap through a parallel universe or an extra dimension.

Then there's the transporter from Star Trek, a teleportation machine that "scans" the person to be transported and "beams" him up or down as a "matter stream."

Real-world teleportation, however, is based in the bizarre laws of quantum physics, which govern the behavior of subatomic particles such as photons and electrons. Starting in 1993, scientists realized that if conditions were just right, a phenomenon called "quantum entanglement" might be used to bounce fundamental information about particles — their quantum state — across space instantaneously.

Within a few years, scientists were announcing that they had achieved this "quantum teleportation," shifting the energy state from one electron to another, for example, in literally no time at all. In one experiment last year, European scientists teleported quantum information over 89 miles, between two of the Canary Islands.