Gribbin introduces quantum teleportation with language that is both vivid and reassuring:
“Quantum teleportation…rests on the now experimentally proven fact that if two quantum entities, such as two photons, are entangled then no matter how far apart they are, what happens to one of them affects the other. In effect, they are separate parts of a single quantum entity. … But by tweaking one photon in a certain way, it is possible to change the second photon into an exact copy…of the first photon, while the state of the first photon is scrambled up. In effect, the first photon has been teleported to the location of the second photon. … The teleportation conveys information, but it requires both a ‘quantum channel’ and a ‘classical channel’.”
Once again, the exposition is careful by popular standards — and once again, the care itself stabilises a set of misleading intuitions. The strain here is not flamboyant paradox but process metaphysics quietly reintroduced under the banner of communication.
1. “What happens to one affects the other”
The claim that “what happens to one affects the other” immediately reinstates a causal narrative. Something occurs here; something else is altered there. But as with entanglement generally, nothing happens to the second photon as a result of the first. There is no influence propagating, no modification transmitted. What exists is a structured potential governing joint outcomes. Measurement instantiates one cut of that potential, not a causal chain.
The phrase reassures the reader by gesturing toward ordinary notions of influence, even while insisting no faster-than-light signalling occurs. The reassurance comes at the cost of conceptual clarity.
2. “Separate parts of a single quantum entity”
This formulation tries to make entanglement intuitive by reifying the system-as-pair into a single extended thing. But this again invites process thinking: if the photons are parts of one thing, then something done to one part might naturally change another part.
Relational ontology does not require this picture. The entangled system is not a spatially distributed object; it is a system-as-theory, a structured potential constraining admissible joint instantiations. Treating it as a stretched object encourages precisely the causal intuitions that later need to be denied.
3. Teleportation as transfer
Gribbin is careful to note that teleportation is not duplication and that the original state is “scrambled.” But the dominant metaphor remains one of transfer: the state of the first photon is said to end up at the location of the second. This invites the image of something moving — information, state, essence — even while the text insists that nothing travels faster than light.
From a relational perspective, nothing is transferred. One instantiation is replaced by another, under constraints fixed by the entangled potential and the classical information exchanged. The dramatic term “teleportation” names a coordination of instantiations, not the movement of a thing.
4. Channels and completion
The insistence that teleportation “has to be completed” via a classical channel is meant to rescue locality. But it also reinforces the idea that teleportation is a process unfolding in time, with intermediate stages and completion conditions.
In relational terms, what matters is not completion but consistency: the perspectival actualisation of outcomes that jointly satisfy the structured potential. The classical channel does not finish a transfer; it supplies part of the construal that makes a particular instantiation intelligible.
Diagnosis
Quantum teleportation, as described here, continues the pattern of explanatory strain:
structural constraints are narrated as causal effects,
instantiation is narrated as transfer,
and coordination is narrated as communication.
The result is a phenomenon that sounds miraculous but must then be carefully hedged to avoid violating relativity. Relational ontology dissolves the miracle and the hedge together: nothing is sent, nothing moves, nothing is duplicated. There is a structured potential, multiple perspectival cuts, and classical coordination that makes a particular instantiation possible.
Placed after the Bell’s theorem posts, this discussion shows how explanatory strain shifts from metaphysical paradox to technological wonder — while relying on the same underlying narrative habits.
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