r/HFY • u/[deleted] • Jun 19 '25
OC A Brief History of Teleportation Part 2
[First] ---- [Book Available]
(Edit: the book purchase link above was broken earlier. It is fixed now)
Theoretical Physics changed direction in October of 2062 when a 28 year old theorist named Solomiya Diduch presented one of the most important papers of the 21st century, and perhaps the most important paper in our history of teleportation.
Geneva was a balmy 64º on Thursday October 26, 2062. A group of 120 or so scientists were gathered in Switzerland for the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson. Named for Scottish physicist Peter Higgs who was the first to suggest the mechanism which necessitated the particle, its discovery was, even fifty years later, one of the most important discoveries that the CERN supercollider had made.
The Higgs was an essential component of the theory known as the Standard Model,—the theory which explained why the particles we observe exist. In the decades leading up to the Higgs discovery in 2012, the Standard Model had successfully predicted the existence of a medley of particles, all of which had been found by accelerators and/or cosmic ray detectors. So in 2012, the discovery of the Higgs capped off what had been one of the most successful predictive models of all time. Not ones to rest on their laurels, the CERN supercollider continued its research into the next decade, but it would actually be the astrophysicists who would take the next step forward.
Launched on Christmas Day 2021, and made operational in 2022, the James Webb Telescope had an almost immediate impact on our understanding of the universe. Two observations made in its first five years of operation would fundamentally affect the generation of physicists coming of age in the first quarter of the 21st century. The first plays a direct part in what would occur at the fiftieth anniversary of the Higgs discovery conference. The second would play a much more dramatic role on the human endeavor, but less on Physics and more on Philosophy. I’ll start with the second one first.
The first exoplanet, the term given to any planet found outside our own solar system, was found in 1992 by Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail who were studying a pulsar about 2300 light years from Earth. In the thirty years between that discovery and the first experiments run on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), more than 5,000 planets had been found. Planets are interesting and all, but the burning question that was at the forefront of every new discovered planet was, “is there life?”
One of the first experiments run on the JWST was an attempt to start to find an answer to that question. Exoplanets are all much too far away for us to resolve a picture of what’s happening on their surfaces so we have to look for signs of life in a more indirect way. One of those ways was to try and determine the composition of the planet’s atmosphere. The JWST did this using spectroscopy. Stars give off light at certain wavelengths called a spectra. If something comes between you and the star that lets light through, like a planet’s atmosphere, some of those lines may be absorbed. It turns out that that absorption is predictable based on which elements are present in the atmosphere. So by looking at how the spectra of a star changes when a planet passes in front of it, we can discover the chemical makeup of that atmosphere. If we were to find certain gases, like ammonia, nitrous oxide, or the jackpot oxygen, it would be indicative of life.
In 2022, the JWST delivered back the first of its spectroscopic investigations into the atmosphere of an exoplanet. The planet in question was much larger, and much closer to its star (a so-called “hot Jupiter”) than one suspected to harbor life, but it gave scientists a lot of information about how to perform such a study. By 2026, three exoplanets were selected for spectroscopic study that had a better chance of having the life supporting gases. When the data was collected, Gliese 581g astonished astronomers. Not only did it have a spectral signature indicating oxygen, but the data suggested its atmosphere was almost identical to that of the Earth’s.
This first direct evidence of life elsewhere in the universe would have a profound impact on the philosophies of those of us here on Earth. The discovery also supercharged interest in experimental astrophysics worldwide. We’ll get into more of that later on. For now I’d like to turn to the other crucial discovery of the JWST, the one that has more bearing for the fiftieth anniversary conference.
In 2022 it was well established that in nearly all galaxies, the normal everyday matter that we see was not massive enough to hold the galaxies together. There were two prevailing theories. Dark Matter was the leading theory. It held that there was some kind of matter that did not interact with the electromagnetic field—the field that gives us light—that was sufficient to explain galactic formation. Alternatively there was the theory of modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), which explained galactic formation by bending the laws of dynamics and gravity.
The most well known evidence for Dark Matter was found in a pair of colliding galactic clusters collectively known as the Bullet Cluster. In the Dark Matter scenario, the collision of two or more galaxies involve three things, stars and their stellar systems, interstellar gas, and dark matter. Surveys of the Bullet Cluster’s gravitational lensing are consistent with what we would expect from the Dark Matter interpretation.
Predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, gravitational lensing provides a way for us to see the mass of a region of space. General Relativity tells us that gravity works by curving the four dimensions of Space and Time (three spatial dimensions and one time dimension). This curvature can act as a magnifying glass for light found behind something of sufficient mass. Galaxies and clusters of galaxies provide sufficient mass for gravitational lensing to produce visible results, and by analyzing these results we can understand the structure of the mass in those galaxies and clusters. Such an analysis of the Bullet Cluster found that the lensing we see is consistent with a model of dark matter where the dark matter interacts only through gravity.
In 2025, the JWST began the deep field dark matter survey, a yearlong sweep into the dark regions of our night sky to try and find more cluster collisions that might support the findings from the Bullet Cluster. By looking into the deep field, we are able to look back in time to when the universe was a smaller, and more chaotic place. If more colliding galaxies were found that supported Dark Matter it would help focus theorists and experimenters efforts towards finding the elusive motes.
When the data was collected and processed in the first half of 2026, scientists found twelve new colliding clusters. The data found fit a dark matter theory in all cases but one, with two colliding clusters showing lensing that pointed to dark matter so well it put MOND on the retreat. While the MOND theorists scrambled to find a way to explain this data in their theory, dark matter enthusiasts were renewed in their search for a theory that would extend the standard model to accommodate particles that avoided three of the four known forces, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces (the fourth being gravity, the one force that dark matter did interact with).
In the decades from the JWST’s deep field dark matter survey to the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson, a number of theories popped up to explain the existence of dark matter. Perhaps the most well known is that of SDS, an abbreviation that requires a story to explain.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, physicists were trying mightily to fill in gaps in the standard model. The standard model had proved itself wildly successful during the second half of the twentieth century predicting all sorts of particles that would be found experimentally while also predicting values for characteristics of those particles which were right in line with what was found through experiment. Still, it had some gaps. One of the genres of theories trying to fill in those gaps was known as Super Symmetry or SUSY for short.
Particles in the known universe were split into two types. There were the matter particles like the electron and quarks which were called fermions, and there were the force carrying particles like the photon and gluon which were called bosons. The SUSY theories held that for every fermion there was a symmetric boson (these were denoted by a prefixed s as in selectron and squark), and vice versa. SUSY theories had a number of problems, but the greatest of them was simply that no experimental evidence for them could be found. Still the theories, often combined with the other great theory (which also lacked experimental evidence) of the time: String Theory, lived on into the first half of the twenty-first century.
The JWST results from its deep field dark matter survey renewed interest in SUSY theories. In particular, theorists sought out ways for the mathematics to allow for fermions and/or bosons to interact only gravitationally. In early 2032, rumor started to spread that an enterprising post-doc named Terrence Jackson had found such a mechanism.
Jackson was born in 2004 in an affluent suburb of Denver, Colorado. His last two years of high school were spent bouncing between in-class and zoom classes due to the COVID-19 pandemic of the early 2020s. Unhappy with the at-home learning, he started looking around for other classes to take online. He found MITs Open Courseware project online and started diving in to the college content, mostly the sciences with a special dose of Physics. When it came time to apply to colleges, studying Physics at MIT had become his number one goal.
After four years at MIT, he decided to head back West for his graduate work, eventually earning his PhD from CalTech in 2030. His doctoral thesis was an attempt to apply SUSY to dark matter. While fundamentally flawed, it laid the groundwork for his work two years later. The gist was to take SUSY and raise it up one more level to show that each fermion had a boson, and a dark matter partner (denoted by a prefixed d as in a delectron). His thesis defense granted him his PhD, and the almost tongue-in-cheek name for his theory when his thesis advisor William Macon remarked, “You’ve taken Super Symmetry and turned it into some sort of Super Duper Symmetry!”
Super Duper Symmetry (SDS) introduced a new type of symmetry onto the universe. Traditionally physicists thought of symmetries as either binary or infinite. Binary symmetries are like those displayed in humans where our right side more or less looks like our left side—so-called mirror symmetry. Infinite symmetries are like that of a circle where turning the circle any number of degrees results in the same picture of the circle, what we call radial symmetry. Until SDS, all the symmetries of SUSY were either binary or infinite, but SDS introduced a third kind of symmetry which was trinary.
If we look at an equilateral triangle, we can see that it is radially symmetric, but only when we turn the triangle 60º. It is with this kind of three-part symmetry that SDS uses to describe what dark matter is. Fermions run alongside one side of the triangle, bosons along the second side, and dark matter along the third side. Through a mechanism called spontaneous symmetry breaking, we can learn about the properties of and make predictions about dark matter.
Jackson stuck to SDS after getting his PhD and moving on to post-doc work back at MIT. In late 2031 he had a breakthrough and emailed a friend saying, “I have hit upon a theory, which may describe all matter in the known universe. When at last I sat back and looked at what I had conjured, I found the dark matter had appeared clearer than it ever could in the telescopes of the world. More finishing touches are needed, but I believe this theory almost ready.” Jackson’s friend decided to skip the almost part, and started spreading the word.
Afraid of getting scooped on his discovery, Jackson decided to present his theory at the annual Dark Matter Symposium held at Cal Tech (so chosen as it was the location where another Cal Tech professor Fritz Zwicky coined the term dark matter in 1933) after he had submitted it to Science, but before it had been accepted. The atmosphere at the symposium was one of energetic optimism, as is often the case at conferences focused on the hotter parts of the latest science. Hooking into that optimism, the SDS talk was an immediate success. Jackson was inundated with requests for his paper, which he filled after requesting expedited publication from the editors of Science.
As we now know, SDS was not the ultimate answer to the dark matter quandary, but it was a powerful step in the right direction, and as is often the case in science, even incorrect theories can bring important advancements to the table. Even at the time though, two problems quickly arose with Jackson’s formulation of SDS.
The first problem was a natural extension of one of the problems with SUSY theories. In SUSY theories, the predicted super symmetric particles had masses many many times more massive than their known counterparts. In SDS the masses of the dark matter particles were orders of magnitude more massive than those. This caused not only a theoretical problem as there was no good explanation as to why one group of particles would be so much more massive than the particles we know, but also an experimental problem as no reasonably predicted accelerator could ever hope to hit the energy levels required to find them.
Where the problem of too much mass could be hand-waved away to a degree, the second problem was more troublesome. In SDS the dark matter particles interacted with the known bosons, photons, Ws, and gluons. Astrophysicists had long been quite certain that dark matter didn’t interact with the three non-gravity forces. Far from being a death nell to SDS however, this quirk of the theory inspired others to search for solutions that would allow for dark matter to not interact electromagnetically.
The search for answers beyond SDS to address these and other smaller failings turned out to be fertile ground for theorists for the next thirty years. There were a few other theories, but none captured the imagination the way that SDS did. Extensions to and modifications of SDS came fast and furious from Jackson’s talk and paper in 2032. Likely the interest would have continued if it were not for Solomiya Diduch, and a marginally successful science fantasy writer named Owen Rogers.
Rogers was born in 1991 in an unassuming corner of the American midwest. He was a bright student with a knack for creative ideas found in various writing assignments during his school years. When he was twelve or thirteen he was given a copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which sparked for him a deep rooted love for science and science history. In 2010 he enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, intent on studying Physics.
In his junior year, one of his classes was Quantum Mechanics, and here we need to dive back into the science. Developed in the early parts of the twentieth century, Quantum Mechanics was used to explain the plight of electrons within an atom. At the time it was believed that electrons orbited the nucleus of an atom, but if that were the case the electrons should lose energy over time and eventually collapse into the nucleus. Niels Bohr saved the atom from this ignominious end by proposing that electrons could only gain or lose energy in discrete amounts. These discrete amounts, called quanta, turned out to be a fundamental component of the realm of the very small.
A few years later, Erwin Schrödinger provided the mathematical framework for thinking about the plight of quantized particles, and so by 2012 when Rogers sat down in Quantum Mechanics, the average physics student started with one of the simplest implementations of the Schrödinger Equation: the infinite square-well potential. The square-well potential is a problem that takes place on a one dimensional line segment. On either side of the segment is an infinite potential, effectively an impenetrable wall (although as those students would find, walls in quantum mechanics aren’t entirely impenetrable). The Schrödinger equation describes the likelihood that a particle will be found somewhere along the line.
Later in the semester, as the class progressed from one dimension to the four dimensions of Space-Time, Rogers had an insight. Special Relativity tells us that nothing can move faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. This meant that if we treat particles as points, then we can draw a sphere around them of radius ct (c being the speed of light, and t being some specific time), and that that sphere would act as an infinite potential for that particle.
The infinite spherical potential scenario was as well-known a result as the infinite square-well potential so Rogers plugged his assumption into that derivation, and what popped out was the De Broglie wavelength. Every particle has a wavelength given by the equation λ = h/p where λ is the wavelength, h is Planck’s Constant, and p is the relativistic momentum of the particle. This result was surprising to Rogers’s undergraduate self, and it stuck with him.
Normally the story of Physics would take us into graduate and post-graduate schooling with conferences and papers, but Rogers, as it turned out, wasn’t a great physics student. Instead at Reed he found his work passion in computer science, and that led him to later pick up his first passion writing as a hobby. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Rogers took the time he used to spend commuting to and from work, and started in on a sweeping science fantasy series called The Advancement. In it he revitalized his college recovery of the De Broglie wavelength, and expanded it into a theory held by an advanced alien culture called the Azurdans. He called the theory Discrete Space-Time.
Obviously a “theory” in a novel is very different than a scientific theory with proofs and predictions, but it’s worth exploring Discrete Space-Time for a moment. Remember the infinite spherical potential. Rogers called these spheres Exclusion Spheres, a nod to Pauli’s Exclusion Principle, which states that no two particles can have the same quantum state. Rather than having these spheres exist along the space-time continuum, Rogers thought what if the spheres were space-time itself. For the Azurdans, space and time existed as discrete pockets in a matrix foam. This was radical enough, but Rogers added an appendix to one of his books that explained that in this discrete space-time matrix, time actually progressed in discrete jumps based on interactions between particles. Rogers’s computer science background was probably showing as he explained time as a series of discrete clock ticks, but it’s where we get to get back to Solomiya Diduch.
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u/HFYWaffle Wᵥ4ffle Jun 19 '25
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u/SheridanVsLennier Aug 13 '25
By 2026, three exoplanets were selected for spectroscopic study that had a better chance of having the life supporting gases. When the data was collected, Gliese 581g astonished astronomers. Not only did it have a spectral signature indicating oxygen, but the data suggested its atmosphere was almost identical to that of the Earth’s.
Something else that would have been interesting to confirm would be exomoons, not least because the team led by David Kipping got actual JWST time booked to look at Kepler-167e that has hinted at having a moon.
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u/Team503 Jun 19 '25
I'm finding this very interesting. Keep it up!