Would you use a transporter beam?

Richards · Jul 8, 2015

Umbran said:
Star Trek had to invoke gobbledigook (the "Heisenberg Compensators") to get around this

"Gobbledigook?" That's not "gobbledigook" -- it's technobabble!

Johnathan

freyar · Jul 8, 2015

tomBitonti said:
Heh: Create a magic "entangled foam" which fits in a coffin shaped device (since a coffin is about the right size for most folks), entangle that with a similar device, then transport the second device to wherever.

Then you just need to figure out how to entangle the foam on one end to yourself, and the second device to a "blank" on the other side.

Press the button and bang, you have some non-sentient goo on this side and (with luck) you emerge from the blank on the far side.

If we say that the full quantum copy is necessary to preserve consciousness, then we can have the blank be a copy accurate up to but not including the detailed quantum state.

Lots of magic, for sure. The coffin filled with foam seems to be a person sized ensemble of quantum bits, and we are struggling to make just a half dozen. Maybe copying the state of the nervous system would be sufficient? (But, that's still huge.)

Not sure if the basic mechanism is valid: Can you entangle B with C, then entangle A with B and C with D, then force the state of A to D? Applying natural language reasoning to "entangle" seems iffy.

Thx!

TomB

Yeah, the hugeness of the number of subatomic particles that make us up is an incredible practical problem. But you have it basically right; you need to create the two "entangled coffins" and ship one to the destination ahead of time. Then you get into a third device that entangles you with the coffin that stayed behind --- of course, it would have to be done in a very precise way that so far we only know how to do for something like a single set of electrons. So you end up with you at the destination and two buckets of weirdly entangled goop at the starting point. So really, what you are doing is entangling B & C, sending C somewhere else, and then entangling A & B, which forces C into the state of A. At least that's how it works for electrons and photons and the like.

tomBitonti said:
Eh, if that would work, it seems to create the possibility of faster-than-light travel. The notion of entanglement that I proposed must be wrong.

People have wrestled with this issue when it comes to entanglement for a long time (going back to Einstein, in fact). The way to think about it is that there's a fair bit of indeterminateness in how a quantum system will interact with the environment (another quantum system). That means that, to transmit a message using entanglement, you also have to send information by normal means, which is limited to light speed. How to apply this to something human-sized is quite a hard question (and similar questions are an active area of research in physics), but presumably there would have to be a lot of information sent by normal means in order to reassemble you properly at the end of the teleportation process. Still, travel at close to light speed would be pretty useful.

Umbran · Jul 8, 2015

freyar said:
So really, what you are doing is entangling B & C, sending C somewhere else, and then entangling A & B, which forces C into the state of A. At least that's how it works for electrons and photons and the like.

And note that entanglement is not a permanent state for all time. You have to create the new entangled state without disrupting the old one.

freyar · Jul 8, 2015

Umbran said:
And note that entanglement is not a permanent state for all time. You have to create the new entangled state without disrupting the old one.

Right. And you have to somehow keep B & C entangled, which generally means keeping them isolated from everything else around them, while you ship one of them somewhere.

Umbran · Jul 8, 2015

And, here's a short film that's relevant. Aside from being amusing, it does shed some light on why how a thing works matters.

Includes some NSFW language, I am afraid, so I am stretching rules to post it - if anyone prefers, I'll take it down.

https://youtu.be/vBkBS4O3yvY

I'm A Banana · Jul 8, 2015

Morrus said:
Assume the technology dematerializes you, sends information to another location, and then you are reconstructed exactly the same - to the last atom - including all memories. Would you be happy to transport?

Is your answer the same if there is a slight delay between the copy being created and you being dematerialized. So you see your copy appear on the other side of the room, and then you are dematerialized?

For me, I can't help but view it as death. I've been disintegrated, and a clone of me is walking around in my place. It thinks it's me, but it's mistaken; it's a clone of me. And it's so good that nobody else can distinguish. Except I got disintegrated, and that's a copy of me.

That clone, though, in scenario #2 where a slight delay means it sees me in the original transporter booth just before I dematerialize, would know it's the copy. It would know that because it is standing in the destination booth and it's looking at me in the origin booth. In that case, the copy must feel weird knowing that it's a 5-second old copy of me, and that I'm dead.

What about you? It's an old debate, but I always enjoy it!

[video=youtube;pdxucpPq6Lc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc[/video]

I'm basically with you.

The thing for me is that there doesn't seem to be a continuum of consciousness - I don't disappear and reappear someone else from my perspective. I just disappear.

If there was some way to preserve consciousness for the trip...there'd be a little more to it.

Umbran · Jul 8, 2015

Richards said:
"Gobbledigook?" That's not "gobbledigook" -- it's technobabble!

Not quite. "Technobabble" is techno-jargon that the listener can't understand, but may actually be accurate and correct. The difference between technobabble and normal use of jargon is the intent and audience - if you have two specialists talking about a subject, they're just using jargon. If they are knowingly using it in front of a layman to confuse or mislead, then it is technobabble.

The full term I was referring to is "pseudoscientific gobbledigook" which differs from technobabble in that it is guaranteed to have little or no accurate technical content

Ryujin · Jul 8, 2015

Umbran said:
Not quite. "Technobabble" is techno-jargon that the listener can't understand, but may actually be accurate and correct. The difference between technobabble and normal use of jargon is the intent and audience - if you have two specialists talking about a subject, they're just using jargon. If they are knowingly using it in front of a layman to confuse or mislead, then it is technobabble.

The full term I was referring to is "pseudoscientific gobbledigook" which differs from technobabble in that it is guaranteed to have little or no accurate technical content

It's a subset

MarkB · Jul 9, 2015

To be fair, the Star Trek Transporter is not quite the appropriate model for this. Although some very unusual circumstances allow for transporter-duplication, the device does not function by scanning a person and creating a copy - instead, it converts them into a matter stream, shunts them through a buffer, and transmits them, intact, to a distant location. And, according to at least one TNG episode, the subject remains conscious throughout the process.

However, to take the example at face-value, I would not be interested in using a device which copied me and deleted the original, at least for everyday use. In exceptional, life-or-death circumstances, I might resort to it in order to allow at least some version of me to exist, but I would view it more as a data backup than an escape.

Mustrum_Ridcully · Jul 10, 2015

I think our sense of self is a fascinating thing.

Naively, one might say that we want a sense of continuity. But... We don#t actually have that. When I sleep in at night and wake up, there is just time gone. I can't remember what happened, my continuity is broken.

Our bodies are not stable and always in the same state. We're living beings that constantly change.
Their state is constantly changing. What would make an error during a teleportation process different from a change in your state because you moved or inhaled some oxygen?

Basically, every nanosecond we experience some change. And yet, we still think we're the same person. Only sometimes, when we look back, we realized how we changed from what we once where, but still, we think we're us.

For Morrus scenario - if my copy winks back at me before I get annihilated, I have some severe doubts that it's me. It's another copy of me. I am about to be destroyed. I would say sucks to be me, but I am no more in a bit anyway.

I think I will not travel with MorrusPort.

When it comes to stuff like quantum entanglement/teleportation... maybe it's actually different. But then the "see my own copy" aspect can't happen, AFAIK.

BTW; if we were theoretically able to entangle our bodies so we could "teleport", it might be very different from Trek teleporters.

Since you can't entangle at any distance, it might work by us stepping into the "entanglement machine" black box, and then stepping out. Inside that block box, there are entangled particles. That box will be transported to whereever we want to go, and when it's there, the parts can be "released". So basically, instead of sitting inside the plane, w would simply send two briefcases - one containing our stuff, and the other containing our quantum entangled particles that become us later.

But I think the part where we step out of the machine is where the whole process is failing... If I understand QE correctly, if you collapse the wave function of one partner in an entanglement, you do so with the other. But I bet that if you step out f the box, you will under go a lot of wave function collapses, so it's not actually possibe to work that way.