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USAF Studies Teleportation
ArchAngel21x writes "Star Trek fans may be happy to hear that the Air Force has paid to study psychic teleportation.
But scientists aren't so thrilled. The Air Force Research Lab's August 'Teleportation Physics Report', posted earlier this week on the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Web site, struck a raw nerve with physicists and critics of wasteful military spending."
Stephen King wrote a nice short story about teleportation called The Jaunt. I'm not much of a King fan, but the story is very good. In The Jaunt people can teleport between different locations, but they have to be put to sleep first, otherwise something very bad happens. Most of the story is from the perspective of a father telling his family, all of whom are about to go "Jaunting", about the history of how it was invented and its side effects. Very interesting read.
The Air Force did NOT pay to study this. They commissioned a study and one of the recommendations was this, and they have already stated it will not be funded. Hurray for illiteracy!
There is good science to suggest that the conservation of energy is real. This has been tested repeatedly.
There is also good science to suggest that the theory of relativity is real, every day in particle accelerators across the world it's used to make predictions that turn out.
The combination of conservation of energy, and relativity suggests that on any largish scale, there can be no teleportation. Of course these things break down when quantum theory is important, but quantum theory seems to be unlikely to be important for the teleportation of large scale objects over large distances.
the way this goes is that conservation of energy (and mass, which is energy in relativity) must be a local phenomena, because if it is non-local, then two different observers will see things differently, one sees that mass a disappears and mass b appears simultaneously at a different spot, another observer moving in a different relative frame will NOT see these as simultaneous, thereby violating conservation of energy since mass b will appear first, then mass a disappear.
when you bring in quantum theory, there is uncertainty involved, and relativity hasn't exactly been melded properly with quantum, so things get a little more muddy, but we're talking about very SMALL effects on the order of 10^-34 joule seconds (hbar).
IN other words, there is already a huge set of scientific evidence against the idea that this is possible.
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Link 1
Link 2
Just a couple of examples.
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -Anonymous
It's a good thing you're humble, because you're wrong.
Total determinism was an ancient dream of science that proved wrong. Einstein was the last of the "titans" to believe in it. The quantum physics guys demolished that dream.
At the quantum level, everything is a probability. It's just that things play out in such a way that, at a macro level, the Universe appears to be deterministic. But that's just an emergent property of a probabilistical foundation.
But i agree with you that psychic phenomena should not be rejected outright, based on present day's scientific dogma.
Well, the section on wormholes is 90% kosher. He even goes so far as to calculate the amount of exotic matter needed to create such a wormhole, and seems to have read most of Visser's (excellent) book on the physics of them.
It might have helped had the authors of this report read the rest of Visser, however. Such as the calculations showing that exotic matter is intrinsically quantum-mechanically unstable, to the extent that such a wormhole will collapse within a time strictly less than the time it takes for a light signal to get through said wormhole.
Which is good, because teleportation by wormhole lets information travel faster than light and is therefore equivalent to building a time machine.
I really hope that we don't have our government funding research into time machines. Because then this is going to start sounding like a very bad movie plot.
Actually, as I understand it, spiders have fast nerve signaling - fast enough that their reactions are faster than your perception, so they look prescient.
;) I see most of my movies on the airplane. But I do find that reality is often much stranger than fiction, that scientists discover stuff that is more outrageous that anything Hollywood can dream up.
Very good point, many creatures do have "super-human" senses. The spider nerves are a great quantitative tweak on neuronal engineering - bigger diameter axons carry signals faster and the small size of spiders means the latencies are extremely low.
Other creatures have abilities that seem near-psychic but are not when you study the creature further. Cockroaches have sensitive hairs on their tails that pick up the air pressure wave that precedes any subsonic moving object. Because the pressure wave travels at about 700 miles per hour (the speed of sound), the cockroach feels the swatter approaching long before it reaches the roach. As a double advantage the hairs are wired directly to the legs so the roach flees the instant something starts moving its way without "thinking."
Flies have a 3-stage pipelined visual system that operates a 400 Hz (compared to human's 60 Hz system). They see the swatter and react more quickly than the human eye.
Electric fish use an active electric field to map their surroundings in muddy water. Dolphins and bats use ultrasound. Mantis shrimp see 6 color bands and 4 polarizations. Pit vipers see far IR. Etc. All of these amazing examples rely on well know physics to let the animal sense what a human cannot.
Geez, don't you ever get out to the movies?
Unfortunately no!
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Really stiff materials transmit waves very well, and really thin things transmit very little energy in the form of waves out along the thickness of the material - most goes right in. Real bullet proof vests are thick, made of materials that are not very strong (kevlar is a type of nylon) but are very light and absorb a lot of energy. Also think of window glass - very strong, very stiff, can't absorb much energy VS polycarbonate, the plastic known as bullet proof glass.
Visco-elastic materials behave in a similar way, and most metals behave differently under very high strain rates - but you really need something to absorb energy, so the opposite would be better. Something that gets squishy and squirts everywhere is a whole lot of energy that doesn't get through. Thixotrophic mud (spelling will be wrong) gets sloppier when you stir it.Someone is bound to post back that kevlar really is strong - it is very strong for a polymer and it doesn't weigh much per unit volume, so people tend to confuse strength to weight ratios with strength. However, something an inch thick is going to be stronger made from low quality steel than kevlar. Stength is how much force a material can take for a given cross section - that's all it is.
There are stronger polymers than kevlar, but you wouldn't want to use them in a bullet proof vest since they don't absorb much energy.