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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."
Initially I thought this may have some relevance to encryption as there is a phenomenon of quantum teleportation that appears to have some scientific validity and would have significance in military and strategic planning and communication. However, when I actually started reading the article, at first I could not stop laughing until I reached this part:
.pdf :An experimental program similar in fashion to the Remote Viewing program should be funded at $900,000 - 1,000,000 per year in parallel with a theoretical program funded at $500,000 per year for an initial five-year duration.
From the linked
What!!!!!???? I am thunderstruck that this recommendation could be made. 1.5 Million dollars for essentially a program that the CIA back in the 1970's decided was full of crap and decided to abandon. By the way, the CIA's program was ill conceived and full of it back then too amounting to a huge waste of taxpayer dollars.
Other conclusions in the document are: "We will need a physics theory of consciousness and psychotronics, along with more experimental data, in order to test the hypothesis in Section 5.1.1 and discover the physical mechanisms that lay behind the psychotronic manipulation of matter." What can I say? The status of basic science education among those who make funding decisions within certain areas of government are pitiful.
Even worse is this statement: "This phenomenon could generate a dramatic revolution in technology, which would result from a dramatic paradigm shift in science. Anomalies are the key to all paradigm shifts! " which has got to be the work of someone with a marketing background and absolutely no self respect in the scientific community. A document like this would be laughed out of the NIH or any other respectable scientific funding agency, but the scary thing is funding like this has always been able to go forward under the guise of military funding in crisis situations where fear abounds. Combine that with no understanding of science and this is what you get. If any of my students came up with something like this, I think I would cry.
Hey, if the Air Force wants out of the box thinkers, I can come up with all sorts of biomemetic and bioencryption stuff for 1.5 Million that would be based in scientific fact with reliable peer review science behind it.
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In a country in which a substantially larger portion of the population believes in the Virgin Birth than in evolution through natural selection, and which has just this week demonstrated that majority, why should anyone be surprised?
classically, the random slashdot quote at the bottom of this article was "You cannot achieve the impossible without attempting the absurd."
Dan Tedrick
With the current, rather theocratic US administration, I'm surprised they don't try training field medics in faith healing...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
If someone gave me money to study "psychic teleportation", I'd be like "Thank you, Allah!" and immediately begin researching liquor and hookers.
"Guys, you're not gonna believe this! Last night, I as at this strip club, I closed my eyes and when I opened them, I was face down in the gutter a few blocks away!"
[o]_O
Star Trek fans may be happy to hear that the Air Force has paid to study psychic teleportation [...]
Please, this is an insult to Star Trek fans everywhere. The Star Trek vision, if anything, was about using science and technology to enhance people's lives. It was and is in no way about this pseudo-scientific nonsense. (BTW, "pseudo" in this context means "false, but masquerading as", NOT, "kinda" or "quasi".)
If anything, Star Trek fans would (and should) be appalled by this.
End of rant.
This is just the cover story. The money is really being funneled into the Stargate program.
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!
Has to be a joke. Read the PDF. The name of the sub-contractor is "Warp Drive" and the end of the document contains discussions of "negative energy" and all kinds of totally bogus junk that looks like it was culled from a Star Trek script.
Seriously, this is some fan-boy trying to rile up the millitary conspiracy theorists (and apparently doing quite well).
Until the DoD comes out and says, "yes, this is ours and we published it in all seriousness," please stop believing everything you read on the Internet.
No, I am not suggesting some kind of bizarre conspiracy, just some 'front project' to cover up something that may involve new laser assault/defense systems, sonic weaponry, or new methods of fighter control mechanisms or something that might be really cool, really plausible or equally 'cool' yet disturbingly vile that they would rather not explain to the American public or Congress.
So, seeing that most of the nation, albiet only by a small fraction in the larger scheme of things, would fall for such crap, they decided to trot out that story. One, to be able to push it past such science-blind people as the majority of this nation and secondly to thumb their noses at the rest of us that would know and understand such a thing is bollox, yet are unfortunately unable to do anything significant about it...
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
However, most scientists that discuss teleportation don't talk about simultaneous teleportation. That *would* definitely be impossible due to relativity, like you mentioned.
In reality, quantum teleportation is a legitimate scientific topic (that's what I study, as a matter of fact). It's possible because the teleportation isn't instantaneous- it happens at a speed less than or equal to the speed of light. The reason it is called teleportation is that quantum effects are used to make a particle disappear from point A and reappear at point B (a suitable time later) without crossing the intervening space. Cool, huh?
This effect has already been demonstrated for photons, and limited effects have been demonstrated for single atoms. Whether or not it will ever be possible on a larger scale is a matter of debate... but it isn't a debate about relativity.
In the report, author Eric Davis says psychic teleportation, moving yourself from location to location through mind powers, is "quite real and can be controlled."
Yeah. It's called 'walking.' Or am I looking at it totally wrong?
Hope be with ye,
Cyan
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.