Teleportation

Scruff

Not pulling the piss here.

Interesting article in New Scientist about some advances in research into teleportation.

Still on the quantaum and photon level though, so all u trekkies calm down.

mind u in star trek they don't perfect teleportation for another couple hundred years...hmmm

Saruman

Interesting.. a small step up from moving a particle of light from one end of a room to another! Beam me up scotty? I think not.. interesting all the same.. we may never be able to teleport matter but a particle or photon could contain data so it would make a kick ass communication system over long distances.. more like the future of ICQ than travel..
yup could be talking through my arse but how many people said that about Arthur C Clarke when he thought of an artificial satelite system around earth long before it was thought possible and now we use them every day to watch TV or talk on the phone.

EvilGeorge

So if they ever managed to fully develop somthing like that for humans who would be first to test it - I just remember the film "The Fly" - shudder.

Saruman

Thanks for Volunteering EvilGeorge

Scruff

yeah, it would be great for long distance communications.

At first look it would seem that faster than light communications would be possible with it but then how do you communicate the nessary properties of the photons to teleport to the receiver.
F.T.L. Foiled again, damn special relativity!

Saruman

Dont know how you would do it, i assume on a similar but more advanced method that they use for Optical/laser data transfer like optical digital audio and stuff like that.. that parts easy its getting the teleporter to work thats the problem.. hell we need a physicist in this thread!

scipio_major

Yeah I read that article with great interest when it came out. There is still a theoretical problem either they can't do because the speed of light constant limits the transfer of information (It's a loophole they introduced to Einstine to allow for quantum mechanics ie things can go faster than light (quantum leaps for example) but you can't use them to tranfer information) or more interestingly they will be able to use it in which case the people who decide this will have to mess about with Einstine's theories to take that into account. It won't throw out relativity but it does raise doubts.

I remember reading (possibly in new scientist as well) that some lab had converted a quark (Everything smaller than a proton is a quark in my book) into energy, they then transmitted the energy a couple of metres where they reasmblemed the quark. I have no idea if I did actually read it or was it all just dream. Anyone heard about that experiment? When you're an aspiring SF writer it all becomes a blur.

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Scipio_major (scatterbrained)

amen

there is a little know phsyics affect to to with seperating photons/electrons(not sure which) but basically if you split the pair and bring one somewhere else then when u change the state of 1 the other know instantly

this is being investigated as a means of communications (it also appears to excced speed of light)
I'll try and find the links

ps

I have a B.Sc (Hons) in Applied Physics!!

scipio_major

$hit. I just relised we were talking about two different. I assumed we were talking about electron spin. Apoligies. The first part still holds for that though. For future reference I *will* read the link and not just scan it. There was an article about that in NS as well, using it to transmit information instantaniously.

I'm still interested to know about the second part though.

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Scipio_major
Bags packed and straight jacket on.

Saruman

interesting all the same scipio_major dont worry about it.. we all scan and then reply thinking we know whats going on and turns out its a different topic!

EvilGeorge

Has enyone seen that program Earth: Final Conflict, I liked the idea of the teleport there.

Basically every 10 mins/15 mins 10 - 20 people stand inbetween 2 machines and are beamed from NY to London, Paris or where ever the destination is instantly - lugage and all - better than the airline system I'd love to see somthing like this down the line if it ever was possible.

seamus

I can't see that article (haven't got the bandwidth), but as far as I see it, there are two main problems with trying to get teleportation to work.
1. Is Einsteins mass-to-energy equation, i.e e = mc^2. The big deal here is c, the speed of light, which is roughly 300 million metres per second (according to Mathcad - I always thought it was much slower, anyway). So to convert 1 kilogram of anything into energy, it would produce 1X 3 X 10^16 J of energy which is 30 billion kJ of energy (someone wanna check that, it seems a tad high ) - which to try and transfer over any media we know of at the moment is well, laughable.

2. How do we reassemble it on the other side? How do you convert energy to matter?

Anyway I'll give that article a look when I get some bandwidth skillz . I always hated studying physics, but I love reading about it, especially when I understand concepts involved