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Teleportation — Fact and Fiction
jcatcw writes "Earlier this week actor Hayden Christensen, of Star Wars fame, and director Doug Liman discussed teleportation with MIT professors to compare the reality to the special effects version in the upcoming movie, Jumper. Edward Farhi, director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT, said, 'It's a little less exotic than what you see in the movie. Teleportation has been done, moving a single proton over two miles. [But] teleporting a person? That is pretty far down the line. The quantum state of a living creature is pretty formidable. That is just not in the foreseeable future.'"
The Star Trek method makes perfect sense. Roddenberry & Co. didn't have the budget for establishing shots with shuttle craft and planetary atmospheric flight. They needed something that would be cheap to produce, not eat up lots of show time, and would have a good "wow" factor.
The article doesn't go much into it, but I once saw and spoke with one of the leading researchers into quantum information theory. He gave a fantastic seminar on how to send "instant signals". This is my poor memory trying to recall things over my head, so please correct me if I make a mistake, but I think this is the general principle:
You need quantum entangled particles so that their states are always related, and no matter how far apart, when you mess with one particle, the other one instantly changes state accordingly. Thus, you can send signals instantly to anywhere (theoretically) by this approach, manipulating a particle some place and having people elsewhere record the changes from its entangled twin.
The problem is that while its instant when you decide to do it, you first have to get half of the entangled particles to their destination (moon base or whatever) -- so it would be days, months or years until you transported the entangled particles elsewhere, and ONLY THEN could you actually instantly send signals to the moon, Pluto, etc.
It seems teleportation would have a similar constraint, based on the article. This isn't to say teleportation or instant communication is never going to work, but just that infrastructure would need to be well thought-out in advance, and that it isn't quite the "go anywhere, even if you haven't been there before" of sci-fi.
If I have a long stick and you hold the other end of it and I thrust my end towards you, you will instantly faster than the speed of light feel it at your end.
Although it's a neat idea as a thought experiment with an infinitely rigid stick, in reality the effect cannot be faster than the speed of light as the force you apply accerlerates the molecules at the end closest to your hand first, which in turn apply an increased force against the next molecules along and so on until the force has propogated through the whole stick to the other end. As it's essentially forces accelerating masses, they must still obey special relativity and cannot move faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.
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Science hasn't teleported squat. They've just caused one particle to mimic the quantum state of another. The number of particles at the source hasn't changed. The number of particles at the destination hasn't changed. So in what way was anything "teleported"?
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Larry Niven wrote a bit about the problems with teleportation, such as conservation of momentum and energy. You also have to do two-way teleportation, otherwise you're teleporting into matter (that includes air). If you change elevations, what happens to the potential energy? Does it convert to heat?
You're exactly right. In fact, the impulse is transmitted at the speed of sound in the stick.
-- Alastair
I'm just assuming that everyone here knows this already, but for the one or two of you who don't know, the Heisenberg Compensator is the part of the ST transporter that deals with the pesky quantum issue of not being able to pin down the exact location of the subatomic particles whizzing around in Picard's body.
Of course it's physically impossible to make such a compensation, and when one of the technical guys on the show's staff (Okuda?) was asked how the Heisenberg Compensator worked, he replied, "Very well, thank you."
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I will try them.
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Hayden is Star Wars, not Star Trek. That's why he doesn't know it.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.