Teleportation

[Whitestar]

Hi everybody.

 

 

I have always been intrigued by the concept of teleportation and with the recent advances in quantum teleportation at the University of Innsbruck, the results are encouraging. However, it should be noted that this form of teleportation doesn't allow physicists to teleport the photon itself--only its properties to another, remote photon. Here is the site:

 

http://www.aip.org/physnews/graphics/html/teleport.htm

 

I'm an aspiring science fiction writer and what I want to do in my story is achieve teleportation by actually teleporting the people themselves, not their properties. So, I began thinking about how I was going to do that. I thought about creating a teleporter that works by converting matter into energy and reconverting the energy back into matter and being able to pass through walls and ceilings, sort of like radio signals.

 

 

Speaking of matter and energy, in 1998 researchers at Stanford University's Linear Accelerator Center successfully converted energy into matter. This feat was accomplished by using lasers and incredibly strong electromagnetic fields to change ordinary light into matter. The results of this experiment may allow for the development of variety of technological gadgets. One such development could be matter/energy transporters or food replicators that are commonly seen in some of our favorite science fiction programs.

For more information, check out the following site:

 

http://www.geog.ouc.bc.ca/conted/on...10/210_2_2.html

 

The thing that concerns me about this concept has some philosophical issues to address. For instance, if the mass of a person is converted into energy in an uncontrolled way (eg, collision with a very large amount of antimatter, destroying every proton, neutron and electron in your body) then the information that is encoded on the gamma rays (usually) released will be lost.

 

In a controlled conversion, you could in principle convert the entire body to energy one particle at a time, and then read off the whole state and transmit it. But there are two problems with this:

 

1) A tremendous amount of data needs to be sent. In the book entitled, "The Physics of Star Trek" author Lawerence Krauss calculates the approximate amount, about 10,000 light-years to the center of the galaxy!

 

2) The amount of time this takes.

 

However, current thought in neuroscience is that

the "personailty/consciousness" is not at all QM, and thus there is no need to break someone down to a subatomic level and read their Quantum State. Instead, it is simply enough to know there chemical structure - and copy it at that resolution. This means there are no "no cloning" problems, much less data to handle, and no need to destroy the original (given sufficient technology to do the scanning). This would allow you to create "clones" - you could send copies of yourself "over the radio", while you stay safe at home. (Greg Egan's Diaspora talks about this at an AI level - the AI programs clone themselves and send themselves all over the place)

 

Now if you turn each person into energy, you get a cloud of gamma rays expanding outwards. There is nothing that would make them spontaneously reform the person - even if you reflected them backwards, they would not neccessarily create the original particles. It is much more likely that teleportation would involve sending the information that can be gleaned from the gamma rays, and then having the information used by a base station to construct the person, more mechanically.

 

In my view, when your body is destroy, you die. End of story. What comes out of the teleporter is an exact copy, with all your memories etc, and no knowledge that it isn't you, but it isn't. No one would ever notice the problem, so it only affects you when it happens. Unless, if you believe in souls, there are "conservation of souls" problems to deal with - does the same sould follow the body around? While in an energy state, there is no consciousness, no heart to beat. Hence, once matter has converted into energy, the person who first underwent the procedure has cease to exist and once the energy is reconverted back into matter, that individual will be replaced by a replica who will literally be born into existence.

 

What does everybody else thinks?

 

Whitestar

[psi20]

I was wondering how it's possible that every particle is arranged properly to create the object that is to be teleported again. I don't know much about the topic, but if you teleported the person particle by particle, at one point, wouldn't they have half a body and bleed to death?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

You would have to get the info and then disassemble them instantaneously.

About basically dieing doing it: I wouldn't care, because you couldn't tell the difference. I had thought of it though, watching Star Trek.

[rockstarjaiden]

if we could teleport... we'd be golden. i mean telepathy is real... why can't we teleport... that isn't really the question here i don't think. i think the question IS WHEN will we teleport?

[mossoi]

Are you saying that telepathy is real?

 

Do you have a source for this fact?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

If you want proof to the contrary of telepathy, take this:

Apparently, there are telepathics that talk to the dead. Houdini asked one to talk to his sister. The telepathic did. Unfortunately, Houdini had no sister. The telepathic was lying.

[Sayonara]

Cap'n Refsmmat said in post # :

If you want proof to the contrary of telepathy, take this:

Apparently, there are telepathics that talk to the dead. Houdini asked one to talk to his sister. The telepathic did. Unfortunately, Houdini had no sister. The telepathic was lying.

You do know what proof is, right?

[Quantum Defect]

Originally posted by rockstarjaiden

i think the question IS WHEN will we teleport?

 

Exactly! I can guess: Probably not during my lifetime. (Yes, I'm such a negative human)

 

 

Here is a link for the aspiring sci-fi writer (who might have checked this article already, but I can't read minds yet so do forgive me):

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2049048.stm

[Rasori]

Following some links there, I found this:

Will we ever be able to move solid objects around?

Highly unlikely. It seems we can move photons of light around and photons do not weigh anything. Perhaps in a few years, we could teleport a single atom. Some researchers believe that we may be able to teleport a virus but they will not say when.

 

If we could ever teleport a virus, wouldn't that be like the cure for a lot of things? You find all the virus cells in someone's body and just poof them away. No more common colds or flus or anything.

 

Plus, couldn't you then like adapt it to teleport cells (like... say, cancer cells) out of one's body? Possibilities, if we can get as far as some thing, are nearly endless.

[YT2095]

surely a "Radio Signal" of that power and sufficient energy to be actualy able to re-create matter would have a slightly more than utterly devestating effect of biblical proportions to whatever it was you wished to teleport through?

 

Just an Observation