15 APRIL 2000, Page 56

Singular life

Scientific tangle

Petronella Wyatt

It is 8.55 a.m. You have just staggered from your bed, showered, shrugged on your clothes and are ready for a vital appoint- ment — 40 miles away. This isn't me, inci- dentally. It was a story in last week's Observer. The piece continued: you walk calmly to Glasgow Quantum Transport Authority station and enter a booth. Lights pulse, and within seconds you find yourself in Edinburgh, having been de-materialised and reconstructed in a flickering of an atomic oscillation.

This is teleportation. It's like 'Beam me up, Scottie' in Star Trek Apparently it's coming to real life near you soon. The idea is that a man stands in a chamber beside a container filled with atoms. These atoms have been 'entangled' with other atoms in a distant third chamber. Atoms in the second chamber are altered to align with those of the human, producing an exact copy of the man in the third chamber. Following me?

Everyone knows that science abhors a vacuum cleaner, I mean it operates in a moral vacuum. Bertrand Russell once said something along the lines that the history of the last 400 years in Europe is one of simul- taneous growth and decay. The decay of the old synthesis represented by Christianity (particularly by the Catholic Church) and growth of a new synthesis, as of yet very incomplete, based hitherto on patriotism and science. Patriotism has been discredited almost everywhere except in part of the for- mer Soviet Union and the Balkans. What we are left with is science. We owe to Chris- tianity a certain respect for the individual. But this is a feeling about which science is completely neutral.

But with all this proposed dematerialis- ing business, there is a much more impor- tant concern. Does science operate in an aesthetic vacuum? This rum business of messing around with one's atoms might have the concomitant effect of messing around with one's figure. I mean, what if the re-entangled atoms were re-entangled the wrong way. What if you left Edinburgh with your arms where your arms normally are and arrived in Glasgow with them stick- ing out of your buttocks? What if you arrived, literally, with your foot in your mouth? What if one turned up in some woman's drawing-room with the machine having mislaid one's garments, or having wrapped your socks around your head? What I want to know is what will happen to my Ferragamo's?

Talking of which, the sharp objects con- tinue to be thrown over my article on Michael Douglas, the well-known sage. I received one the other day from some Michael Douglas fan club traducing me for not recognising what a genius the man was. Why should he remember the Cold War when he had more important things to think about? How dare I malign a man who was only trying to make the world a better place? Well, now they are all at it. Actors, I mean. Last week I discovered that Tom Hanks has been asked by the government to judge a national schools' essay competi- tion on the second world war. The educa- tion secretary David Blunkett and the US Ambassador Philip Lader have been struck, apparently, by how little teenagers know about the 'special relationship' between America and Britain and the role it played in the Allied forces' victory over Germany.

Mr Hanks was supposed to attend a launch at the Imperial War Museum, but pulled out. Perhaps he didn't wish to con- fuse his audience with the recent proposals for an autonomous EU defence force. I wonder what sort of thing Mr Hanks would require from a prize-winning essay on the second world war. Would he get page fright? But perhaps I am doing Mr Hanks an injustice. Perhaps he is a closet scholar of Clausewitz on war. Sir John Keegan has refuted some of Clausewitz's theories. Per- haps Mr Hanks can refute Sir John Kee- gan's. 'Hey, Sir Johnny, war is like a box of chocolates. You'll never know what you'll get inside.' Sir John, 'I beg your pardon.' Run, Forrest, run.

'I'll have that one — it's on special offer.'