i read this article … a few months ago, i think scientists are teleporting sound waves … okae, but who cares, i want to teleport myself to … space … ever possible? or lets keep it real, nonliving, like a bomb to … afghanistan.
‘teleporting sound waves’? sounds like ‘radio’ or ‘telephone’ to me.
teleporting people?
I don’t think so, unless we can find some way of folding space or otherwise displacing the whole person in a single operation (Larry Niven does a lot of this in his stories)
The Star Trek transporter idea, while it’s initially more feasible, glosses easily over the sheer volume of information that you would have to process if you were going to disassemble a person and reassemble them elsewhere; it’s not just the positions and relationship of all the atoms themselves, it’s all the quantum stuff too (which you can’t measure without changing it)
No. You’d have to record every single atom’s position in the object you want to teleport very exactly, then transmit this huge bulk of data to another place and then re-build the object there. No computer or telecom link would be able to handle this masses of information in a reasonable span of time.
Besides (and everlasting, unlike the restrictions caused by data processing capacity), Heisenberg’s law prevents you from getting ALL the data you’d need about a particle in order to describe its position sufficiently.
I’m not a trekkie, but I think they get around this on ST with a ‘pattern buffer’ which is supposed to be some sort of non-digital way of storing the huge amounts of information, and a ‘Heisenberg Compensator’ (no really) to get around the whole uncertainty thing.
They came a little bit closer to making teleportation a reality recently. They were able to use quantum entanglement to entangle a trillion or so atoms. News link is here:
Not too long ago, this same argument could have been made about web pages. At that time, no computer or telecom link could ever serialize the bits needed to represent a full-page color animated display, send the data to a remote location, and reconstruct in a useful amount of time (some still can’t…).
I’m not arguing that teleportation will ever be possible. I’m just saying that if bandwidth were the major hurdle, the problem would be solved fairly quickly.
There’s also the obvious problem that if you make a duplicate of yourself at the destination, you’re still left with the original body which needs to be, um, disposed of. I don’t find that a very comforting thought.
Though it does open up the possibility of making some improvements while you re-create yourself. Say, leave out all the AIDS viruses or cancerous cells.
There was a short film about this on, I belive, Sci-Fi channel’s “Exposure” program. The main character’s job was to “balance the equation”, destroying the body on the sending end after confirmation of receipt from the other end. He was not a happy fellow when the handshake protocol failed…
Everyone is dead on about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle getting in the way of a typical science fiction transporter ala Star Trek (and yes…the show makes a nod to reality by saying that a Heisenberg Compensator is part of the mechanics…what a Heisenberg Compensator does is anyones guess). It is also true that the amount of data that would describe a complete human being (for example) is staggering. Still, I wouldn’t use that as a reason for why teleportation can’t happen since who knows what types of computer stoarge capacity and bandwidth might be available in the future (as micco already noted).
However, some scientists think they may have found an end run around Heisenberg in this regard. The basis for this is called the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Effect (EPR). The particulars are beyond my understanding but basically they manage to scan the object and transmit that data and the bit they can’t get due to Uncertainty is somehow transmitted in a separate bit of information which modifies the reconstructed version at the other end such that you get a perfect copy. Obviously I’m missing quite a bit so maybe Chronos or another SDMB physicist type will be along to explain better. Also realize that AFAIK this is still theory and hasn’t been accomplished yet. If they have done such a thing it is bound to be done by only a few atoms or particles…we’re a LONG way from transporting humans in this fashion even if it turns out to be possible.
Finally, and I’m still looking for a cite to this, I thought Quantum Mechanics allows for a sort of teleportation by pure, random chance. A particle might, for example, spontaneously disappear off of the earth and pop back into existence on (say) Mars. The chances for this happening are exceedingly remote (i.e. you’d have to watch longer than the expected life of the Universe to see a particle do this) but chances are it is happening all the time somewhere in the Universe. While any given particle may not do this on a timescale just short of forever there are gazillions (scientific term) of particles in the Universe. Keep rolling the dice and sooner or later it is bound to happen somewhere (just like winning a lottery…your individual chances of winning are very small but if enough people play and presumably pick different numbers someone somewhere will win). Unfortunately I don’t know if this effect could ever be controlled or harnessed or if it is purely random.
That’s a metaphysical question too; if you destry my body and make a copy of me somewhere else, then maybe it’s not me at all, maybe I dies and what you have is just a new individual that thinks it’s me.
Surely a logical extension of this that it is possible (though even more unlikely by many orders of magnitude, I’m sure) that every particle in my body might suddenly dissapear and reappear on Mars*?
*[sup](I’d prefer Barbados)[/sup]
you guys may be right about the bandwidth thing, but one thing is for sure; teleportation devices won’t be USB compatible.
I’ve seen two types of teleportation discussed in sci-fi. One is as you describe leaving a duplicate of yourself somewhere and the stories explore some of the implications of that. In most sci-fi, however, the original is destroyed in the scanning process and re-created at the other end. Besides avoiding some potentially confusing situations by having multiple copies of yourself running around this also has some scientific merit for being a preferred method.
Remember that mass and energy are equivalent. Most teleportation schemes have the person converted into energy, moved somewhere, and re-created at the other end. If I were to just make a copy of you I’d need the energy equivalent of your mass on hand to effect such a thing. I’m not sure of the math but applying E=MC[sup]2[/sup] to your body mass comes up with a pretty big number. I’m reasonably certain that if I threw a standard sized human into a tub with an equivalent amount of antimatter the resulting explosion would be on the order of a nuclear detonation or worse. You’d probably level whatever city you were in. (To get an idea I once heard that a gram [or an ounce?] of antimatter would be enough to get the space shuttle into orbit.) In short, if the copy of yourself method of teleportation existed, it would be horrendously expensive in terms of energy needed.
However, if I convert your mass to energy and reconvert it back to mass at the other end I presumably don’t need to throw in a lot of energy of my own (ok…I have no idea how much energy doing the conversion would take so maybe they even out…does anyone know?).
Hehe…My brother, who is a physicist, mentioned this one to me and you are correct in your logical extension. You might very well indeed pop out of existence where you are and re-appear just about anywhere. Hopefully it would be Barbados but unfortunately will more likely be any number of places you wouldn’t want to be (Mars, the bottom of the ocean, the core of the planet, somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy and so on).
Also, as you said, the chances are vanishingly small but they aren’t zero.
Who knows? Maybe this is what happened to Jimmy Hoffa!
No, but it will probably come with 30 free hours on AOL.
Hey, imagine if AOL figured out remote teleportation and packaged it with their software. You open up your program, connect, and hear, “You’ve got me!”
but you’d need to send the person as energy without losing any of it on the way.
I suppose it’s more probable though, that I would pop out of existence and reappear as a load of dissociated particles spread across the entire universe.
Lawrence M. Krauss from Case western University Ohio asks exactly this question in his The Physics of Star Trek. He admits that if the current speed of computer development continues, the necessary capacities could be reached in some two centuries; yet he says how to do this is a mystery.
He estimates the number of atoms in a human body at 10[sup]28[/sup] and the mass of data necesary to sufficiently describe (hey, like the boldly go thing!) one single atom’s state at one kilobyte. You’d therefore need 10[sup]28[/sup] kilobytes of data to save everything that has to be known about you.
Constructing a computer that can save and handle that bulk is certainly not the easiest task ever; the speed of development we saw during the last decade cannot continue forever, since the limits of that development are in sight (I heard the other day that the insulating layer of non-conducting material between two conductors on a processor currently is avbout 20 atoms thick; 3 atoms or somewhat like this is the minimum because a layer thinner like this would allow current to flow even if it’s a nonconductor, so you cannot extend the capacity forever). Of course there are alternatives to the prevailing silicium-based technology, like quantum computers, but constructing a memory that can save your 10[sup]28[/sup] kilobytes of information without exceeding some reasonable size would make it necessary to use practically every electron as a data-saving element.
So I’d say the bulk of information will be far too big even if Intel&Co keep on researching.
The Heisenberg problem, however, still looms over your plans, so I’d recommend you buy an airline ticket for your next trip.
sure they will , they will just make it with technology we don’t understand , like Cavemen would not understand our societies technologies