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Teleportation a step closer?

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LAN_403

Conundrum

Sat Jan 15 2011, 07:07AM

Registered Member #96 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4061

heh.. "moar power to ze primary pattern buffers.. ve need more zignal.."

something like this could be used to store data for a teleporter, with >5 years or so advanced technology this might allow something the size of a virus to be "beamed" from a remote location as long as there is a working transmitter.

As it happens, a pattern buffer that can store quantum states was described in "Star Trek" but they used some sort of superconducting toroid which the matter stream circulated around. Needless to say this simply won't work IRL.

-A

IamSmooth

Sun Jan 16 2011, 10:39PM

Registered Member #190 Joined: Fri Feb 17 2006, 12:00AM
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I have a philosophical question about teleportation:

If it were truly possible to decode the entire structure, beam the information to another location and reassemble, would it truly be the same person? The person would have the same memories, but is it just a "clone"? In fact, one could read the structure and recreate it without dissassembling the original.

Would not true teleportation involve transporting the original atoms to the destination?

Nicko

Sun Jan 16 2011, 10:52PM

Registered Member #1334 Joined: Tue Feb 19 2008, 04:37PM
Location: Nr. London, UK
Posts: 615

IamSmooth wrote ...

I have a philosophical question about teleportation:

If it were truly possible to decode the entire structure, beam the information to another location and reassemble, would it truly be the same person? The person would have the same memories, but is it just a "clone"? In fact, one could read the structure and recreate it without dissassembling the original.

Would not true teleportation involve transporting the original atoms to the destination?

This is similar (as I understand it) to some Buddhist ideas around re-incarnation - they don't believe in the concept of a "soul", so I had a deep discussion with one of my colleagues (who is a Buddhist) about this - i.e., without a soul, how could "you" be re-incarnated?

His somewhat obtuse, but elegant, response was to consider the process of lighting a candle from another candle - the second candle flame is derived from the first, but is not the same.

There you go, Grasshopper...

IamSmooth

Mon Jan 17 2011, 05:08AM

Registered Member #190 Joined: Fri Feb 17 2006, 12:00AM
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Posts: 1567

Nicko wrote ...

There you go, Grasshopper...

All I know is that I know nothing...

Steve Conner

Mon Jan 17 2011, 10:27AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

Nicko wrote ...

[His somewhat obtuse, but elegant, response was to consider the process of lighting a candle from another candle - the second candle flame is derived from the first, but is not the same.

That's Buddhist teleportation for you - just kill the guy and have a baby at the destination.

Conundrum

Mon Jan 17 2011, 04:35PM

Registered Member #96 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4061

hmm... well sending just enough information to reconstruct the neural connections could work...
we are still talking about several petabytes of data or more..

-A

Bjørn

Mon Jan 17 2011, 05:43PM

Registered Member #27 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 02:20AM
Location: Hyperborea
Posts: 2058

Some of the properties of particles are when viewed in the sense of mathematics real numbers. That means they can't be processed digitally since that would require infinite storage and speed.

To get a perfect "teleportation" you need to transfer these variables and that can only be done with some sort of quantum technology. It will also destroy this property at the original. To transfer atom A to atom B you can for example entangle atom A with another particle and then use this particle as a carrier to atom B. When the carrier particle comes in contact with atom B the entanglement will be broken and the infromation that was once in atom A will now be in atom B. If you only transfer the atom arrangement you will not have a teleporation but a copy that is not identical.

Imagine trying to copy a photon from A to B. You use a sensor and a light emitter, if you use the highest possible quality setup you might be happy with it being a perfect copy arriving at the other end of the wire. In reality there are infinite many possible wavelengts, so no conventional sensor will be able to copy it. Then you need the direction, polarisation and a few other things, also with infinite accuracy.

There is an added complexity, if there is more than one particle you also need to syncronise the time for every single particle. Imagine two mirrors with a photon bouncing between them. If you try to teleport that setup the timing would be extremely critical.

Then the question is, how sensitive is a human to details in the construction and how good a copy is good enough? No one knows how the human mind works, it might well be quantum mechanical and disappear if you try to observe it from the outside. The other end of the scale is that the human mind is just a conventional computer that fits on a memory stick with suitably lossy compression.

In short, we know nothing about what is required and we know nothing about how to do it. We only know how to do it in cases that are so trivial that it is impossible to comprehend how far it is from the real thing.

Sulaiman

Mon Jan 17 2011, 07:00PM

Registered Member #162 Joined: Mon Feb 13 2006, 10:25AM
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 3140

I thought that you only need two counter-rotating black holes connected by a wormhole.
That's how mine works anyway.

(P.S. you also need to contain the em waves generated by any dna in the overall lf em field, or you may reverse the polarity of the energy flowing through the flux capacitor from the dilithium crystals, except on Tuesdays of course.)

Coronafix

Mon Jan 17 2011, 10:36PM

Registered Member #160 Joined: Mon Feb 13 2006, 02:07AM
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Posts: 938

i can't see any of it working until we create holographic data access.

Renesis

Tue Jan 18 2011, 12:37AM

Registered Member #2028 Joined: Mon Mar 16 2009, 08:13PM
Location: Norway
Posts: 319

I have an even more philosophical question for you. Say we scanned my brain, the way your hypothetical teleporter does. We end up with a mindboggling amount of information that will be used to assemble an identical brain somewhere else. An identical copy, inseparable from the original. But what if we instead fed this information into a supercomputer, and wrote a program that would simulate my brains normal functions; a brain emulator?

That would really bring up some existential questions. Here we have a machine buildt by a human, made of nothing but common semiconductors, that has a human mind with the feelings and emotions one would expect from such. Should we even call it a machine? And if my body died just afterwards, would i still be alive, my mind living on inside the simulation? Or would it be only a memory of me, like a talking and thinking picture? Would the machine be sad, because the mind within it is no longer considered a human? Would it remember the time back when it was... me? Can a soul really be written in binary code?

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