by Gregory Mone
Let’s get back to little Cindy in Tequesta. When Santa turns up at her house and uses the scanner to determine which gift he should leave under the tree, he doesn’t have to search through his bag for the correct item. He pulls out a single wrapped and bow-tied box.
(He used to have two options, one with girl-themed wrapping and another with the paper geared toward boys, but Mrs. Claus insisted that this sent the wrong sort of message about her husband’s social awareness, informing him that he might as well just leave the boys guns and the girls aprons. He eventually adopted gender-neutral, Christmas-tree-filled, green-and-red paper instead.)
Inside, a self-assembly apparatus awaits a signal. Santa types the given gift’s product code (which he gets from the toy ID program) into his remote control. He aims it at the box, and the process begins. The relevant building blocks are released into a central, solution-filled chamber, and, over the course of the next few hours, they gradually link together to form more complex higher-order structures. The toy assembles first, and the leftover components, or building blocks, merge to form the proper container, whether it be plastic, metal, or cardboard. Finally, the solution drains out through a virtually undetectable hole in the bottom of the box and evaporates quickly, leaving little or no trace on the carpet or hardwood floors.
(Some of the newer-model composite hardwoods from IKEA tend to react with the solution, resulting in a slight fade in the color of the faux wood, but Santa’s elves are working to remedy this unfortunate consequence. On a different but equally tangential note, you might have noticed that one of the flaws with self-assembly is that each apparatus is a one-time-use device. That is, Santa, or his lieutenants, have one less self-assembly device every time they visit a house. And this, in turn, might have incited you to wonder what happens when Santa runs out, given that his bag doesn’t contain an infinite volume of space. The answer, sadly, is fairly boring. Additional self-assembly devices are stored in warehouses across the world; Santa and his lieutenants have to visit them frequently, via wormhole or warp drive, to restock, which only makes travel coordination that much more difficult.)
Without these self-assembling toys, it’s conceivable that Santa would not be able to complete his annual rounds at all. Yet the technology is not perfect. It could not produce every gift Santa drops off on a given Christmas Eve. In certain cases, the toys are too complex, and Santa needs to turn to a more powerful manufacturing device.
Every once in a while, Santa needs a PERM.
33
Teleporting Kittens
PORTABLE ENTANGLEMENT-BASED RAPID MANUFACTURERS AND OTHER TELEPORTATION-DERIVED APPLICATIONS
Santa only uses his PERM, or Portable Entanglement-based Rapid Manufacturer, when faced with impossible-to-manufacture gifts. Some items are too difficult to build piece by piece or to search out at the last minute. Like kittens. Santa loves dropping off kittens; the kids adore them, and the parents can’t say no to them. But his self-assembly tech can’t handle living organisms, and Mrs. Claus is allergic to cats, so he can’t keep a stock of them at the Pole.
Instead of creating each of these specialty items, or buying up and stockpiling them during the year, Santa teleclones them. Using his PERMs, he simultaneously creates thousands of copies of a single item in living rooms across the world.
Telecloning is based on the phenomenon of entanglement, a long-postulated and recently confirmed trick that nature plays in the quantum world. The study of entanglement started out as an imaginative argument between two of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, only one of whom believed in Santa Claus. Ultimately, it says that if two little bits of matter or photons of light are linked in a certain way, messing with one of them will instantly affect the other as well. The actual how-it-works details are considerably more complex, in part because physicists like to use terms that have one meaning in our world but a different one in theirs. For example, although subatomic particles are neither tasty nor dreidel-like, physicists say they have qualities like “flavor” and “spin.” When two particles are entangled, adjusting the spin of one changes the spin of the other. But, again, it’s not that kind of spin.
Instead of discussing spinning electrons that don’t really spin, we’ll put this in more Santa-friendly terms. Say Mrs. Claus has two small chocolate-chip cookies. Being a woman of moderation, she decides that they are still too much for her alone, so she places each one in the center of its own plate. She sets one plate on the kitchen table, then carries the other over to her husband’s desk.
When Mrs. Claus returns to her kitchen, she sits down and, noticing that her cookie is situated slightly off center, she moves it to the right. (She has a mild case of OCD; the upside of this is that her hair is always perfect.) If these two cookies are entangled, then Santa’s will move at exactly the same time.
This is the general idea, anyway; the real truth is that scientists haven’t actually figured out if entanglement would work at the cookie level. For now, this phenomenon, which Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” is limited to the microworld. Physicist Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna was one of the first to prove that entanglement is real, but in the last decade, many more scientists have jumped into the strange new field. They’ve entangled photons of light and even clouds of particles, and, by acting on one part of the pair, induced instant changes in the other. Star Trek–style teleportation isn’t quite on the horizon, but these scientists—at the University of Maryland, MIT, Georgia Tech, and other leading institutions—contend that their work with quantum entanglement could soon lead to unbreakable codes and faster computers.
In a slightly different twist, a group at the University of York, led by physicist Sam Braunstein, entangled three groups of particles in such a way that measuring one induced a change in the other two. This was the first case of quantum telecloning, the process by which two, three, and even four copies of an original are produced via entanglement. The exciting point: Braunstein and his team suggest in their paper that there is no limit to the number of possible clones. And this is where we get back to Santa.
Each PERM contains a cloud of entangled particles inside a gift-wrapped shell. Each device and each collection of particles it contains is linked to those inside an original, or master, PERM at the North Pole. When Santa finds that a child desires a gift that can’t be self-assembled, he deposits a PERM. (If he runs out, he picks up new ones at the nearest ware house.) At the end of the night, when his rounds are complete, one of the elves back at the Pole entangles the desired item with that master PERM. The essential information is transferred to that device and then dispatched to each of the entangled PERMs across the world. In a flash, hundreds, or even thousands, of those items, whether they be kittens or vintage robots, materialize.
Seriously? Is this really how it works? Does Santa really teleclone toys and pets? No. Santa does take advantage of quantum entanglement, but only with his computers; it’s one of the reasons his AI programs are so robust and his servers can churn through and analyze so much data. Sadly, PERM-style teleportation of the sort described here, though incredibly appealing, is probably not possible in our universe.
But everything else in this book is true.
Acknowledgments
Nika, for love, support, confidence. Clare and Eleanor, for horse-play and other welcome diversions. Mom and Dad, for the Millennium Falcon and so much more. Thanks to the many experts who provided critical feedback and great ideas: Richard Muller, Mike Moriarty, Stephen Smith, Rick Casler, Babak Parviz, David Smith, Michael Czech, Jason Dickinson, Richard Obousy, Jose Maciel Natario, Matthew Andrews, Sangho Park, and Gabor Forgacs. Thanks to Adam Rogers, for assigning the realistic version of this story, plus Mr. Brown, Sergeant Dyer, and Skloot for early endorsements. Thanks to Harry Campbell for his wonderful illustrations. Ken Wright, for believing in the project, providing enormously helpful editorial guidance along the way, and, of course, finding the right publisher. Eve
ryone at Blooms-bury, including Jenny Miyasaki and Sara Mercurio, and especially Ben Adams, a truly smart and funny editor, for helping me shape and refine the whole thing, and for adding some really choice one-liners.
A Note on the Author
GREGORY MONE is a contributing editor at Popular Science magazine. His feature articles have appeared in Wired, Discover, Women’s Health, and National Geographic Adventure, as well as The Best American Science Writing 2007. He is also the author of the novel The Wages of Genius and lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two children.
By the Same Author
The Wages of Genius
Copyright © 2009 by Gregory Mone
Illustrations copyright © 2009 by Harry Campbell
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eISBN: 978-1-60819-114-7
First U.S. Edition 2009
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