To Beam Or Not To Beam?

[Neroon]

Hi.

 

I have always been intrigued by the concept of teleportation and with the recent advances in quantum teleportation at the University of Innsbruck, the results are encouraging. However, it should be noted that this form of teleportation doesn't allow physicists to teleport the photon itself--only its properties to another, remote photon. Here is the site:

 

http://www.aip.org/physnews/graphics/html/teleport.htm

 

 

I'm an aspiring science fiction writer and what I want to do in my story is achieve teleportation by actually teleporting the people themselves, not their properties. So, I began thinking about how I was going to do that. I thought about creating a teleporter that works by converting matter into energy and reconverting the energy back into matter and being able to pass through walls and ceilings, sort of like radio signals.

 

 

1) Since we are talking pure theory here, is the matter/energy conversion process teleportation in the literal sense, at least theorically?

 

 

The thing that concerns me about this concept has some philosophical issues to address.

 

 

2) For starters, does conversion of matter into energy and vice-versa in this case imply the person undergoing the process has ceased to exist, only to be replaced by a replica who was literally born into existence once the energy was reconverted back into matter?

 

 

3) What other theories or ideas can I use for my story?

 

 

Neroon

[WebFeet]

Originally posted by: Neroon[/i

1) Since we are talking pure theory here, is the matter/energy conversion process teleportation in the literal sense, at least theorically?

Hyperthetically, if you could convert matter into pure energy, then the technology should also be able to do the reverse.

The problem with current physics is Heisenberg's uncertainty, in that you can never know where a particle is at any particular moment.

Star Trek transporters get round this with a very convenient piece of equipment call a Heisenberg compensator.

 

2) For starters, does conversion of matter into energy and vice-versa in this case imply the person undergoing the process has ceased to exist, only to be replaced by a replica who was literally born into existence once the energy was reconverted back into matter?

So long as the same energy that was converted from matter was used to reconstruct the individual, then it would be the same person.

If however you converted the matter to energy only for the purposes of mapping the individual, and then transmitted this mapping to reconstruct the individual out of locally available energy, then you would have dilema. The person you create would be a facsimile. Their memories would be the same, so to a certain extent they would contain the same consciousness, but they would not be exactly the same person.

 

It would bring a new angle to cryogenics, rather than freeze a terminally ill individual, you could merely reduce them to energy and record the mapping on a DVD, only to recreate them when medicine was advance enough to cure them - sure save on the storage containers.

[Tormod]

I wrote a hypography on teleportation some time ago (might be a bit outdated now, but hey!).

 

http://www.hypography.com/hypography.cfm?id=52

 

Tormod

[L Stencil]

I think that some day teleportation will be a working real thing. The reaosn being that if we can stop light and imprint light on atoms we will be able to reconstruct the atoms of a physical thing and send them else where and put them back into order within secounds. If it wasn't within secounds it wouldn't work because we would die. The thing that is going to keep something like this on hold is there are million2 of billions of trillions or millions of atoms in the body i know a number like that is just a crazy example of atom that moake up the body and to imprint and send you would have to have the formula for the raduii of each atom and mass the number of electrons,neutrons,protons there relative mass,there orbitals there is just so much to 1 single atom so if we could come up with some way to figure out the atom structure of a person i think that we will learn how to use teleportation.