Science of Star Trek: Transporters

[ShinobiGarth]

it takes far too much energy to convert matter into energy, so transporting isnt really feasible unless we find a way around that

[luminositymusic]

What

[luminositymusic]

Really?

[MrChronified]

Just to clearify a few things. Some of the finer points on the theoritical operation of the transporter are touched on in the TNG tech manual. So, a Transporter is NOT a teleporter. It does not destroy matter and create a copy. Using annular confinement a spatial matrix is made(additional fields DO hold you in place, same time)Molecular Imaging Scanners provide analog quantum state data w/ the help of the heisenberg compensators(anybodies guess how they actually work)

[drnekodr]

Where is the whole thing?!! I wanna see the rest of it!

[jimjimthehumanbin]

couldn't you be physically frozen in a temporary stasis or something, this snapshot is scanned and the information transferred to another pod (that is also frozen) and brought out of stasis/frozen state. just throwing around ideas. edinburgh uni are working on light hard drives to store info so it won't be long before we have organic computers to handle large calculations.

[PtAltmVansanTarr]

We will be able to upload our brains to the 'net and thus won't need this kind of tech--we will constantly replicate the real universe as it is discovered by robots on the 'net universe, thus we will see the "real world" up to date. It's estimated by 2020 we will be able to do this,which also means--the odds are we are likely in a kind of simulator right now!!

[jimjimthehumanbin]

@PtAltmVansanTarr like the anime/manga 'Ghost in the Shell'. In a way you would become immortal if you could upload your 'soul' to a form of inter/intranet.

[pillsareyummy]

@luvpole69 "TELETRANSPORTER EXPERIMENTS HAVE BEEN DONE AT " Are you referring to the work of Anton Zeilinger and 'quantum teleportation'? If so, it's not the same as the teleportation of Star Trek (or other science fiction). 'New' matter would have to be used to reconstruct what ever it was that was being teleported. However, as I understand it, only photons have been teleported at this point.

[UNDATHESPEL]

@pillsareyummy Caltech Professor Jeff Kimble and his colleagues reported their findings in the journal Science. I am under the impression that the experiments were concluded in 1998. I have read of many of such experiments as far back as the 1980s. Infact reference was given to such an experiment in the 1982 edition of 'The Physical Universe' by Frank H Shu a Berkeley Professor of

Astronomy at the time. Infact I cant remember for sure but I think that experiment

involved a sub at' particle

[UNDATHESPEL]

@pillsareyummy You are correct however that the experiment to which I refer

was done with light and not particles. If the results were real though it is still

very significant. Just a little food for thought. Matter waves are theoretically believed to travel faster than light. If they do then the matter wave clock travels backwards, which should mean that the matter waves are travelling backwards

through time. A real pandoras box if ever there was one.

[UNDATHESPEL]

@pillsareyummy Is matter destroyed in the process of teleportation, and new

matter created? That is a complete unknown at this moment in time. We shall

have to wait and see. But if matter is destroyed in this process, is it important?

Remember matter on the sub-atomic level would be destroyed and recreated

in the human body all the time, it does not seem to be a problem.

[UNDATHESPEL]

@pillsareyummy My previous statement about reference to teleportation in

Professor Shu's book ' The Physical Universe ' may be incorrect. I looked through this book once again to see if i could find the reference, but have not been able to

do so. I felt sure I had read of such a reference in this book, but it seems I could

be mistaken. If I have been mistaken I apologize for this error.

[datuna]

full lecture with a good quality? :(

[Deke101]

Basically, the transporter as depicted in Star Trek opens up several cans of worms.

One: Life and death.

Two: Matter and energy.

Three: Technology and devices.

Four: Perception and cognition.

Five: The human condition.

The transporter can make you young again, cure disease, fix fatal injuries, make copies of you so you CAN be in two places at once, even fix your hairdo! The possibilities/problems are endless.

[Deke101]

The second problem I have is when they transport down to a planet from the ship. Whenever any form of energy waves are sent back and forth like in communications, there HAS to be a device to transmit and another device to receive it. There MUST be some sort of device on the other end to receive and reasemble the sent energy into matter. When transporting to the surface, it just magically happens and the energy transforms itself back into a perfect (copy?) of Spock.

[Deke101]

I find two major problems with transporter tech as depicted in Star Trek.

One, the possibility of the concept itself. Transforming matter into energy physically destroys the item. When we do this to a living thing, it is physical death. Now we reasemble the item somewhere else and somehow breath life back into it? At best we would reasemble a dead body at the other end.

[BillTheWaterDrinker]

How would the transporter transport your 'soul.' I mean if you are destroyed and then rebuilt at another location, would that be like fading to black forever and another person who looks and acts exactly like you appears in the other location, or would it be like waking up from surgery to find yourself in another room? If the latter is true, then what if the transporter just copied you but didn't destroy the original?

[Deke101]

@BillTheWaterDrinker It's worse than that. In one episode, Lt Barclay thought he was being attacked by some creature while IN the transporter beam. This shows that people remain conscious WHILE in the transporter and perceive their surrounding DURING transport. This is absurd on several levels.

There was ALSO an episode where Riker WAS copied by the transporter and he met his copy years after the incident.

[gusb232]

I disagree thats its impossible.

Even if H.U.P is not violated we are still able to extract half the information.

So all we need to do extract some interlaced pattern of positions and motions , and then take into account the the overall or larger scale uniformity of heat and chemical makeup as a parity check.

Then we could (I think) accurately interpolate all the information.

[hardrockgirl90]

Great going Andre

[DeltaFoxtrotWhiskey3]

You can either know what something is doing or where it is? Hmmm....

Get two scanners to scan things at exactly the same time. One will tell where it was and one will tell what it was doing. This will allow a copy to be made of that image. The original would be destroyed in the process though.

[davidls11]

But how did they beam things into space? Where did the atoms come from to create the copy?

[temporaldisplacement]

The atoms come from wherever you want ...turn a brick into a chocolate pudding! yum!

[davidls11]

That's how the replicators work. Not the Stargate SG1 replicators of course...they work differently. But I digress. The ST transporters were often used to send items out into space. The atoms needed to create a copy wouldn't be found in space.  For that matter (no pun intended) even sending someone down to a planet would be a problem if the planet was lacking in a particular element.

[temporaldisplacement]

Yeah, in this respect the replicators are a bit more practical .....tea?

[davidls11]

Yes thank you. Earl Gray...hot.

[davidls11]

And a side of slaw.

/watch?v=8ZBTDlvShYg

[DeltaFoxtrotWhiskey3]

Q: You know what kind of batteries were used in the Star Trek transporters?

A: Energizer

[tiove]

was this lecture never officially recorded?