Teleportation

Teleportation, or Teletransportation, is the theoretical transfer of matter or energy from one point to another without traversing the physical space between them. It is a common subject of science fiction literature, film, and television.

Etymology

The use of the term teleport to describe the hypothetical movement of material objects between one place and another without physically traversing the distance between them has been documented as early as 1878.

American writer Charles Fort is credited with having coined the word teleportation in 1931 to describe the strange disappearances and appearances of anomalies, which he suggested may be connected. As in the earlier usage, he joined the Greek prefix tele- (meaning "distant") to the root of the Latin verb portare (meaning "to carry"). Fort's first formal use of the word occurred in the second chapter of his 1931 book Lo!:

Fort suggested that teleportation might explain various allegedly paranormal phenomena. It is unknown whether Fort was familiar with the earlier usage of "teleport".

Teleportation (disambiguation)

Teleportation is the fictional or imagined process by which matter is instantaneously transferred from one place to another.

Teleportation may also refer to:

See also

Migration (virtualization)

In the context of virtualization, where a guest simulation of an entire computer is actually merely a software virtual machine (VM) running on a host computer under a hypervisor, migration (also known as teleportation) is the process by which a running virtual machine is moved from one physical host to another, with little or no disruption in service.

Subjective effects

Ideally, the process is completely transparent, resulting in no disruption of service (or downtime). In practice, there is always some minor pause in availability, though it may be low enough that only hard real-time systems are affected. Virtualization is far more frequently used with network services and user applications, and these can generally tolerate the brief delays which may be involved. The perceived impact, if any, is similar to a longer-than-usual kernel delay.

Objective effects

The actual process is heavily dependent on the particular virtualization package in use, but in general, the process is as follows: