Stargates are holes in space. You step through. No deconstruction.
Nightcrawler’s ability shifts him to an alternate dimension that he can move through more swiftly then shifts him back to ours. It doesn’t deconstruct him.
That’s not true. Right from the start, stargates have been stated to work by deconstructing travellers as they step into the event horizon.
Couldn’t that be how Tesla’s machine works, too?
But if we’re talking quantum mechanics here, then the one that existed five minutes ago teleported across the while at the same time staying where he was. He had two options - teleport and not teleport - and he took them both. The two continuities exist in the same universe.
No teleportation is taking place. The copy is created in a new location. The original, who pulled the lever, doesn’t go anywhere. The original’s options are get copied or don’t get copied. By pulling the lever he opts for the machine to make a copy of him elsewhere.
But Tesla was designing a teleporter, not a duplicator. Why can’t we assume that he was successful?
No, because you can’t both step through a hole in space and not step through a hole in space, at the same time. At least one of the two Dantons must have been created.
I’ll take your word for it. I have no indication of that from the episodes I’ve seen, but I didn’t see any of the first season and my viewing subsequently has been haphazard.
Tesla was *trying *to design a teleporter. It was a long while ago I saw the movie, but IIRC it took him a long time and much money to come up with a machine that did anything at all. The impression I got when viewing the movie was that he had inadvertently made a copier rather than a teleporter.
So you’re suggesting that Tesla’s machine collapses the forking probabilities that would generate parallel universes into one universe, in addition to teleporting the man?
In effect, Tesla’s machine both works correctly and fails completely?
I think that’s an assumption that forces a paradox that pushes the limits of believability, even in science fiction.
That’s precisely what I’m suggesting.
Quantum mechanics is counterintuitive. What you and I see as a paradox…
Maybe he was trying to make a teleporter and accidently stumbled on a duplicator. It didn’t seem as if he understood what he was doing with creating all those hats and cats.
I disagree. There’s nothing in the movie that suggests what you said.
If we put Danton in a room, close the door, wave a magic wand, open the door and see two Dantons, why must one be an original and one be a copy? Why can’t the magic cause true duplication?
That’s a possibility. I prefer to think that he was experimenting with some form of quantum teleportion, and accidentally sent his subjects down two seperate legs of the Trousers of Time.
Maybe the teleportation affects the past (in this case, nanoseconds to the past), preventing the teleportation. Like how you can go back in time and prevent yourself from going back in time, thus creating two of you?
Maybe I read too much science fiction.
And anyway, if it was a duplicator, why and how did it send its product 100’ away? Looks like teleportation to me - either teleportation of a the original, or teleportation of a copy.
Admittedly, genetics is not my area of expertise but google points to some studies that show this isn’t entirely true. One example here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23276953/
At any rate, procreation is one of those things some people get kind of emotional about so I don’t think you can really make a blanket statement that it doesn’t matter based purely on genetics. I mean, if all these characters behaved completely logically and rationally it wouldn’t be much of a story.
I’d like to believe that for the sake of the wife but I am not convinced. It seemed like they each played Borden about half the time, I think the dickish brother would end up playing the husband more than just from time to time. I think that is part of the reason it was so difficult on Sarah.
Mild spoiler for the book FWIW:
It was definitely suggested that they both slept with the same women and they couldn’t tell them apart.
Another thing that is interesting when watching the movie again is trying to figure out which Brother is playing Borden. I think Bale does a good job of making them seem like two different people when you are looking for it but not being so obvious about it that it spoils the surprise the first time.
I don’t think we’ll ever find common ground on this theme, as your conclusion is to transparently and obviously incorrect to me. One way to look at the disagreement is that you view consciousness as akin to a computer file, where there isn’t really a concept of “original” and “copy”; all copies are perfect and none of them have identity.
I view consciousness as more akin to a physical object with an independent existance, and while in science fiction you could say that a perfect duplicate could be made, but the identity of the original cannot be transferred and the new copy is created with its own identity.
I strongly object to your statement that “consciousness transferrance is impossible is directly contrary to the text of the film.” In this context I’m making a distinction between transferrence and duplication. I mean transferrence in the sense of sending identity to a remote location. By duplication I mean creating a copy somewhere else while the original object (and its identity) remains unmoved and unchanged. The movie remains silent on this question; neither of our interpretations is prohibited by what is shown to us on screen.
Just to clarify, by “identity” I don’t mean just consciousness; I mean anything with a physical existance. I don’t think the hats are being transported either, because that would violate the hat’s identity.
Here’s a web definition of identity: “sameness in all that constitutes the objective reality of a thing.” I think you buy into this definition completely. Two things that are the same are the same thing. I do not; the “sameness” part is contrary to the very concept, IMO. I would describe identity (as I use it above) to mean “the persistant objective existance of a thing.”
The quantum world differs from the macro-world in several ways; one that I find most fascinating is that all particles with a given set of properties share identity. In the macro-world, every thing has its own unique identity; no two things can ever be truly identical.
If you had a child, and s/he were killed and replaced with a perfect copy without your knowledge, and then you were told about it, would you grieve?
How about my time-travel scenario, mentioned above?
Say you build a time machine. You enter it, travel one minute to the past, and prevent yourself from entering the time machine. Now there are two of you - the one who travelled back in time, and the one who didn’t. One of you is exactly one minute older, but other than that, you’re identical. Which is the original, and which is the copy? The time-travellar? But he’s older - he can’t be the copy. The non-time-travellar? But his life was just as linear and uninterrupted as anyone’s.
Unless the two resulting Dantons share a collective consciousness, the two Dantons are separate entities with indepenedent identity. That makes them two different things even given perfect duplication.
No, I recognize that it’s the same matter used in reconstructing the new version of you at the new location. I contend that the act of deconstructing your matter into energy kills you. A perfect duplicate of you is created at the destination.
I have to ignore Barkley’s mid-transport consciousness, but those who don’t share my view have to ignore the duplicate Riker. Those two episodes collectively disprove any attempt at a coherent interpretation, as they directly and fundamentally contradict each other.
No, there is no action at a distance in the use of wormholes. A wormhole is a fold in spacetime, so the actual physical distance is reduced to effectively (almost) zero. One assumes that stargates are artifical wormholes.
The noteworthy distinction is that a wormhole is actually permissable by our real life laws of physics. Identity transfer at a distance is not.
Heh, nice example. My knee-jerk reaction is that comic books merit as much thought as Road Runner cartoons: none at all.
This reads as unnecessarily antagonistic. Why call me stubborn for having a conversation with Miller? And what does a (hypothetical) made-up Star Trek rule have to do with the fundamental laws of our real universe? I don’t follow your train of thought on that one.
He’s riffing on what I said, which wasn’t meant as a generality, but rather a genuine personal answer to the hypothetical. I tend to think he was mocking me, but no harm no foul.