At the time I reviewed this for Perihelion Science Fiction,
real-life scientists claimed they had teleported a small object -- You can imagine it: "A thumb tack today, tomorrow, the world" (or a human: Beam me up, Scotty!). I have searched online for these science projects in which teleportation occurred.
"If you can imagine it, it could happen--and likely will" (or already did).
- Carol runs away screaming
Ok, back to the book review.
Charles Barouch hurls the reader headlong into the fire of ethereal physics with his novel “Adjacent Fields,” and if the science doesn’t scare us, the politics will. How does the inventor of a teleportation device get the funding to produce and market such a revolutionary product? What if customers can’t use the teleporter until their governments figure out how to regulate and tax the device?
--Carol Kean, Perihelion Science Fiction
Adjacent Fields by Charles Barouch
My Perihelion review was not permalinked, but I saved a copy in Word. Here it is (rights have reverted to me.)
Quantum entanglement. Teleportation.
Book covers rarely scare off readers with such heady terms, and even science fiction writers tend to embrace easier subjects, such as a post-apocalyptic planet Earth. Charles Barouch hurls the reader headlong into the fire of ethereal physics with his novel “Adjacent Fields,” and if the science doesn’t scare us, the politics will. How does the inventor of a teleportation device get the funding to produce and market such a revolutionary product? What if customers can’t use the teleporter until their governments figure out how to regulate and tax the device?
"When you invent something,” the hero reminds us, “no one leaps out of the shadows and presents you with a comprehensive statistical analysis."
The novel opens with “the little man” named Rama demonstrating his amazing invention, the Adjacent Field, at a conference of potential investors. "There was interest in their eyes, but also impatience...these people went to demonstrations for a living. Keeping their attention was vital to getting their money."
They witness cargo vanishing from one pad and reappearing on another, but don't even grasp what they have seen. "What commercial value do you see in moving small objects tiny distances between platforms?" asks one unimpressed investor.
Rama’s audiences cannot grasp the technology or see its potential--until a reporter in Rio swaps microphones with someone in New York, then Hong Kong. The unplanned microphone swap is “graspable." Within a week, the inventors have a privately traded company with six hundred stockholders. Not long after that, our protagonists are in jail on suspicion of finding a way to trade goods without paying taxes. Barouch narrates these ironies with dry, understated humor.
The political machinations of the story are scary, but so is the science. Teleportation would involve dematerializing an object at one point, sending the object's precise atomic configuration to another location, and reconstructing it there. Time and space would be eliminated from travel. We’d be transported to any location instantly, without crossing a physical distance. Charles Barouch apparently grasps the concept of quantum entanglement, but he mercifully simplifies explanations of how it works. E.g., "Both ultraviolet and infrared do pass through but the bulk of the visible spectrum won't. Radio frequencies pass through, except for short-wave and a few kilohertz worth of bandwidth in the middle of the FM range."
The “Adjacent Fields” of the title got their start in a monastery,
in the floor tiles, into which one monk has disappeared, another one is trapped, and a third one is disassembled, his various body parts appearing from time to time in one tile or another, even waving or speaking. This is not a book for impressionable readers to consume at bedtime.
The story bounces from the monastery to the inventors, to the businessmen and politicians, with a huge cast of characters that include semi-teleported monks, a Zen-seeking pianist, an escaped mental patient, a con artist with multiple identities, and a gay man whose lover fears Walter isn’t really gay but just unable to relate to women, due to an incident with his sister Jenny, now deceased, but the invention is named for her: the Adjacent Fields become JCI, JennyPads International.
The dialogue is memorable, even if the characters are hard to keep up with. Rama tells Walter, "I needed someone more trustworthy than I am. Don't ever completely trust me, Walter. Simply trust everyone else less."
Barra tells Russell,
"Quantum Physicists are idiots. Their theories are the worst kind of junk science and their beliefs are more like a crackpot religion than like any reasonable attempt at understanding.”
Russell’s unspoken response is priceless:
“He'd studied physics and built his device on these principles. He knew it was right because he had a quantum entanglement device under his robes and it worked. She had to be wrong.”
Barra verbally shreds Russell:
"If you intend to kill everyone who understands how the field works,” she says, “you can cross suicide off your to-do list."
Is that a great line, or what?
Aside from the risk of jail or execution for those who can create the JennyPads, there’s the disturbing knowledge of how many ways they can be used. Presented first as a way to ship packages to Brazil at the speed of an email, the invention may be used to save lives or commit murder. “A doctor could reach inside a human body and work on a person without cutting them open,” planes could drop JennyPads instead of bombs, making the invention the “Healer, killer, remaker of society."
The risk of spoilers prevents me from saying more. Try the book for yourself. It's brilliant.
NOTE: I reviewed this novel for Perihelion Science Fiction in 2013, followed by a review of Book One in a series starring Tiago. Sam Bellotto published a short story, "Tangle of Brilliance" by Charles Barouch. I love this author's imagination and erudition, so I started following on Twitter and Facebook, of course! Amazon punishes reviewers for "friending" an author they discover and love, and now all my Amazon reviews have been flushed, permanently, for "violating' the Friends and Family policy. It makes no sense to me. But Goodreads has not punished me "friending" an author whose work I love. Thank you, Goodreads! I wish I had copied more of my Amazon reviews over to this site before they were flushed into cyberspace and lost.
"Tangle of Brilliance" by Charles Barouch in Perihelion Science Fiction
Charles Barouch is a writer, game designer, and computer technologist. His science fiction novel, “Adjacent Fields,” can be found on his Bookmarks website along with an index of his other stories, technical writing, and blogs.
Barouch is a writer and journalist, published by International Spectrum, Mphasis (a Mensa publication), and HDWP Books.
“The reason we created HDWPbooks,” he writes, “has everything to do with how hard it is for good stories to get out there. To be clear: most publishers genuinely want to help good authors tell good stories. We--the publishing industry--want to help you tell your story. That puts us all on the same page.”
About Charles Barouch
Grounded in the real world, I write fiction. There is something about reading about people who see farther, sense more, and encounter more, which attracts me. I want to share that 'the world is bigger' wonder with all of you.
You can find a full list of my in-print writing here:
Eight years after this debut novel, I had to wonder again: is teleportation scientifically possible today?
How Quantum Teleportation Actually Works
Teleportation is real, thanks to quantum entanglement. It turns out that that scan-and-reassemble type of teleportation is actually possible thanks to a property of quantum mechanics called ...
.... Teleportation is pretty firmly situated in the realm of science fiction. We may not be able to teleport objects or people from place to place in an instant, but there are scenarios where teleportation can be achieved. Not only is it possible, but it's actually being accomplished in physics labs across the world.
Of course, we have to be careful about what exactly we mean when we say "teleportation." There's three different kinds of teleportation: teleportation through a wormhole, or something similar, where your body is simply relocated to another place; the Star Trek kind where your molecules are disassembled, beamed somewhere else, and reassembled in the same way; and the philosophy problem kind where your body is scanned and the information is transmitted somewhere else and used to build an entirely new body out of different materials. We're talking about the last kind here.
Here's another one:
Is teleportation possible? Yes, in the quantum world
While human teleportation exists only in science fiction, teleportation is possible in the subatomic world of quantum mechanics—albeit not in the way typically depicted on TV. In the quantum world,...
Portals, like the tiles in the monastery floor in Barouch's novel, fascinate everyone, not just me, right? Consider the wardrobe in C.S. Lewis's "Narnia' series.
Narnian portals - The British Library
Professor Sally Bushell explores C S Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia series, focussing on the use of the door as a portal that allows children to enter Narnia. 'It is not easy to cross from your world into this,' said Malebron, 'But there are places where they touch.' (Alan Garner, Elidor)
Writers, take heart:
C. S. Lewis, reportedly destroyed the first draft after he received harsh criticism on it
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, published in 1950, was the first of the seven Chronicles of Narnia to be published. The book became an almost instant classic, although its author, C. S. Lewis, reportedly destroyed the first draft after he received harsh criticism on it from his friends and fellow fantasy writers…
Two years ago, I posted my Perihelion book review at Steemit, after 
Does anyone believe this story?
BREAKING: Army scientists successfully 'teleport' Soldiers By Bob Reinert, USAG Natick Public Affairs
NATICK, Mass. (April 1, 2016) -- Army scientists have successfully "teleported" a fully equipped squad from a Massachusetts research and development facility to a training area in Germany, the Natick Soldier Systems Center (NSSC) announced today.
The nine human research volunteers, fresh out of Advanced Individual Training, were participating in experiments in the Doriot Climatic Chambers at NSSC when they disappeared and moments later materialized at the Grafenwoehr Training Area, completely unharmed. The chambers are capable of replicating any climate or weather in the world but have never before been used in this manner.
Teleportation, made famous in the "Star Trek" television series and movies, had been -- until what the Army is calling the "Natick incident" -- a hypothetical way of moving objects from place to place. American writer Charles Fort is reported to have coined the word in 1931.
Officials at Natick were elated by the event, which promises to one day revolutionize the way that American troops and equipment are transported around the globe. It also could ultimately make overseas bases obsolete as forces are instead moved from U.S. soil to remote trouble spots in the blink of an eye.
"No one is more impressed by this than I am," said Benjamin Storm, who manages the 61-year-old climatic chambers at Natick. "One moment, I was chatting with the young Soldiers, and the next, they all vanished into thin air."
(See more at the site, linked above)
Oh, and lest you get as excited as I did, check the date.
NATICK, Mass. (April 1, 2016)
Yeah, THAT date.
The Task Force expects to report its initial findings by April Fools' Day, 2017.
Ok, back to my search for actual science news. While I hunt, I leave you with this:
The Time Travel and Teleportation Experiments Of Project Pegasus
While Basiago claims there were several time travel devices at work during these experiments, the majority of his temporal adventures can be attributed to our old friend Nikola Tesla. Documents, allegedly retrieved from Tesla's New York City apartment after his death in January 1943, revealed the schematic for a teleportation machine.
Here's one more, a You-Tube video, Teleportation of particles using quantum entanglement | Quantum Physics Experiment, but don't get excited just yet (it doesn't look "real" but maybe that's on purpose, right? Right?):
Beam me up, Scotty!
Thank you for reading, and thank you