I offer the thought that there may be no distinction; that this confusion may be a fundamental characteristic of psychic teleportation.
THEORY OF PSYCHIC TELEPORTATION:
I'd like to get through this fairly quickly, since I don't believe in psi teleportation, and since my major interest is in the effects of teleportation on society.
1) Consider the following theory: A man in deadly danger would learn to teleport in order to save his life.
I can remember two novels in which the idea was cruciaclass="underline" JACK OF EAGLES, by James Blish, and THE STARS MY DESTINATION, by Alfred Bester. The idea is simply to point a gun at a man's head, and fire. One time out of a thousand he will frantically teleport out of the way of the bullet, and you will have a teleport.
Forget it. There has been too much opportunity for it! Violent death has occurred since man was definably man. How many have learned to teleport in time to save their lives? Too few to be noticed.
But there's another flaw in the theory. Psychic powers are notoriously undependable. Experience says that when the ability to teleport is most needed, that's when it won't show up.
2) My prejudice against teleportation has a valid basis. I haven't seen it in action.
Science has existed on Earth for-depending on how you define science-between a couple of centuries and a few millenia. We can't yet build a hardware-type teleport system. But psi powers, if they exist at all, have been around since man was definably human. If teleportation is both possible and useful, we should have been using it since men moved into the Nile Valley. And we would never have given it up...if teleportation is both possible and useful.
We conclude either that teleportation is not possible, or that it kills those who possess the gift before they can demonstrate it to anyone. Both are possible.
Consider Bester's "Blue Jaunt". A man in a panic, drowning, teleports without considering where he's going. He ends up inside a wall. BOOM! Bad trip.
Or, psi could be dangerous in other ways; Genelinked to insanity or to mental deficiency, for example.
In any case, psi teleportation is out. But let's ignore facts and do some speculating.
PRACTICE OF PSYCHIC TELEPORTATION:
What about conservation of energy? What of conservation of momentum?
These questions are not idle. Stones did not stop falling when Einstein published a new theory of gravitation. The old laws hold; new laws of physics usually apply only to new areas of observation. Changing one physical law is like trying to eat one peanut.
Okay. So what happens if you try to teleport uphill? Does your body get colder, or lose mass? There is a gain in potential energy. It must be compensated by the loss of energy of another form.
Suppose I were to teleport to Kerguelen Island? (I am writing in Los Angeles. Opposite me on the Earth's globe is the heart of the Indian Ocean, in which Kerguelen Island is the nearest land mass.) Because of the Earth's spin, Los Angeles and Kerguelen Island are going in opposite directions. Were I to teleport to Kerguelen Island I would have to land running-at half a mile a second.
Teleportation can be dangerous. You don't teleport out of a speeding car either.
3) I take another theory of psi teleportation from THE WORLD OF A, by A. E. Van Vogt. It seems that two objects similar to each other, to twenty decimal places will join each other. The lesser will bridge space to contact the greater. This presumed law applies to masses, thought waves, and even whole personalities.
We can't disprove it. It could be a fact. We can't disprove it because Van Vogt never defined similarity, nor greater, nor lesser. So now you know how -to write a science fiction story. But we can still work with the idea; and I believe Van Vogt missed some great comic routines. Take this one:
In one scene in THE PAWNS OF A, we see Gilbert Gosseyn on one side of. a fence. He wants to be on the other. So he looks at a piece of land just beyond the fence and, with the power of his extraordinary brain, he tunes himself to that piece of land, adjusting his own atomic makeup to a similarity of within twenty decimal places.
Now, twenty decimal places is pretty finicky. Gosseyn must get within that range, but he must also make sure that he will be the lesser of the pair and not the greater. One slightest slip...
So he makes the bridge...and half a ton of earth descends on him.
I don't believe in psychic teleportation. But I could be wrong. So:
We will assume that it is possible for nearly anyone to learn to teleport A new learning technique has been developed. It may be serving DNA or RNA molecules in one's food, tailoring them to carry a superficial memory directly to the brain, as we now feed flatworms to each other to transfer learned responses. It may be something else. What do you get, when nearly everyone on Earth can teleport?
You get Alfred Bester's THE STARS MY DESTINATION. I offer the book as a text to accompany this course. I'll name a few highlights:
Thieves, uncatchable or nearly so, who teleport around the world to follow the night. They never see sunlight.
Locked doors, and behind the doors, mazes complex enough to confuse anyone who might try to teleport inside. Otherwise there would be no private property, nor privacy either.
Transport vehicles become obsolete. Collectors collect them as period pieces.
Classification of each citizen's teleport characteristics. (Bester assumes a distance limit. My own question: is the limit due to relativistic uncertainty? The more distant is one's destination, the less certain is its location in space and time.)
Intensive, probably productive research into other psi powers (since one has been shown to exist).
I object to one thread of Bester's tapestry. If Gully Foyle tries to "jaunt" along a "geodesic curve" he will end by going slower than light. That's how geodesics work in Einsteinian space. But it doesn't affect the pattern of Bester's society, which is worth studying.
THEORY OF MECHANICAL TELEPORTATION: Anyone know anything about tunnel diodes?
The field is full of good writers named Smith. One wrote a story using a teleportation system based on the tunnel diode effect. Apparently physics students are now taught that a tunnel diode takes an electron here and puts it there without allowing it to occupy the intervening space. If you can do it with quantum physics, why not with larger masses? With people? The theory looks good, and it hasn't been used much in science fiction.
Older, more often used, and more traditional is the beaming method. You convert your passenger and/or cargo to electromagnetic waves, fire the beam across space, catch it in a receiver and convert the electromagnetic energy back into matter.
A modification is Poul Anderson's system in THE ENEMY STARS. Poul's system records the position and energy state of every subatomic particle in the passenger's body. A side effect is that the body is vaporized, so that one winds up with a complete record of the passenger plus a cloud of superheated plasma. The gas is sucked down through a grid, into a matter reserve, to await the next incoming signal.
The record of the passenger is fired across space. A receiver picks it up and uses it, plus the plasma in its own matter reserve, to reconstruct the passenger.
I don't know. I wouldn't ride in one of the goddamned things.
The engineering problems seem trivial compared to the legal, ethical, and philosophical ramifications. Still, what happens if the signal gets snarled up? In the good old days I read of the possibilities in EC comic books; and the pictures were vivid and horrifying. In practice, the least bit of interference would leave the passenger an idiot or a good imitation of a corpse. Over interplanetary distances you'd have to worry not only about intervening dust and gas, but about red and violet shifts due to gravity and relative velocities. And what happens to your soul?