I’ll Beam Right Over

The latest iteration of Star Trek movies have a

pretty cool transporter signature. The original

was kind of goofy with speckles and blue light.

But the question remains, what about

teletransporting requires the sounds effects?

One of the most iconic pieces of technology from Star Trek was actually a compromise. It was also the reason why the third episode made was shown first. Originally, Gene Roddenberry wanted the Enterprise, or a shuttle craft, to land on a planet’s surface each time there was the need for an away team.

But that was a budget buster (sets, models, etc.). They had to think of a cheaper way of getting crew members down to a planet and back the ship. Voila – the transporter. How did it change the order of the first season? The third episode (The Man Trap) began with Kirk and cohorts transporting down to the planet surface. By showing this first, they didn’t have to go to the time and effort of explaining the transporter – you just saw just what it was for and how it worked.

Star Trek’s transporter moved stuff, animate or inanimate, from one place to another, without them every being located anywhere between the two points. The matter was converted to energy and this was moved at the speed of light (or similar) to the destination. Once there, the matter was reassembled into the object again.

Well…. That’s one way it might have worked. It might also be that the information about the object was transmitted from one place to the destination, and the object was built from atoms at that location. This second possibility is kind of like faxing –

Faxing has been around for years, it got its start with the work of Captain Richard Howland Ranger (from Indianapolis, by the way) transmitting pictures via telegraph in 1924. The picture was one place, and then it was reproduced in another place. If you destroyed the first, then that would be like a Star Trek transporter. But there are problems to solve before we get to the destruction issue.

Triangulation works in many systems. On the left

is how the police can locate a cell phone by the

cell towers that bounce the signal. With just two,

the overlap is two places, , but the third eliminates

one of the two possibilities. It’s the same with GPS.

Three satellites are need to locate a person or thing

on the face of the Earth.

The first question in transporting a person to a specific location is honing in on that location. You need a way to define a single point in space. Here we have made great strides. It’s called the global positioning satellite (GPS) system.

GPS uses a system of 30 satellites in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth. Any one point on the planet can be located using a GPS locator at that point. It will triangulate the distance to each of three of the satellites and this will define the point where the locator is. A signal is sent from the locator to the satellites and the time is measured for the signal to return. Time and speed are used to calculate distance.

In space, defining a certain point would take more than 30 satellites - try millions. Untenable at best, impossible more likely - a different method is needed. Each solar system could have a different coordinate system, using the central star as the 0,0,0 point. Then any point at a given time could be defined by directions x, and y, and a distance z from the 0,0,0 point.

Going from solar system to solar system will be even harder, so the science of astrometry has developed things like the International Celestial Reference System (ICRS). It's not easy to explain, but suffice it to say our Star Trek transporter officer will have to be pretty darn good at math.

In the first two movies about flies and transporters,

the result was a switching of parts. In the 1986 film

with Jeff Goldblum, the fly and the scientist were

merged into one being. In Star Trek, they overcame

this problem with pattern separators to keep

peoples’ information separate and biofilters to

destroy infections agents and such.

Now that you have a way to beam someone to infinity and beyond, how do you bring them back? Star Trek used a pattern lock – they tracked those they transported so that they would have their position at all time. This way, they could beam them back from wherever they were; they didn’t have to go back to the same spot at which they arrived.

Now we come to the crux of the transporting problem. Can you send an object from one place to another without it ever being anywhere in between? It’s not like sending something by microwave pulse, by optical cable and light pulse, or even by radio wave. You can follow those pulses of information from one place to another or even intercept them at some point along the way.

For teletransporting, the object needs to be here…. and then be there. Can we do that? Yes and not yet. Yes for information and energy, not yet for matter. What we have been able to send is information about certain electrons, photons of light, or atoms. The information is their quantum states (like in relativity and quantum mechanics). Quantum states define the unique characteristics of a particle in terms of its energy.

Quantum entanglement is indeed spooky. When

two particles come near one another, they become

linked. Because two particles CANNOT have the

same quantum numbers, one will always have the

opposite values of the other for each characteristic.

Then, no matter how far apart, when one switches,

so will the other.

Sending the information to another place allows the scientists to then create that same quantum state for a photon, etc. at a different point in space. In reality, you just sent that particle (and all its information) to a different place. What makes this possible? Quantum entanglement – what Einstein called spooky action at a distance.

If one particle ever has a relationship (trades energy or even bumps into) another particle, their quantum states are linked (entangled) forever. Change the states of one, and the states of the other will automatically changes as well. This occurs even if they are very far from one another at a later time. This is how information and energy of the particles can be sent from one place to another, but never exist in between.

Many recent papers have shown the progress we have made in sending quantum information and energy from place to place. A recent distance record was set for sending a photon of light – 143 km. This is important because that's about the distance from Earth to low flying satellites, so beaming quantum information could help in communications. Also, improvements have been made in amplifying the signal without losing entanglement.

The principal reason for all this research is to develop quantum computing not a transporter. Regular computing uses 1’s and 0’s; using quantum information would allow for a bit being a 1 and 0 at the same time! With quantum computing you could solve huge mathematical problems where variables could be in multiple states, or do millions of problems all at once, using a small number of qubits (quantum bits). In fact, a computer of just thirty qubits would have the same processing power of a 10 teraflop (trillions of operations per second) classical computer. Your laptop runs about 10,000-100,000 times slower than that.

Scientists recently made a 10,000 qubit “circuit board” in a demonstration, and another group showed how single photons could be used as routers on a circuit board to send information different ways. Maybe quantum computers aren’t so far off.

Mike Teavee was the first person sent by television

in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He was sent from

one place to the other with a receiver needed to stop

the signal and interpret it. The biggest problem for

Star Trek teleportation is that there is no receiver to

stop the signal and reassemble the person. Ever try to

get a light beam to stop at a certain place on its own?

You see the problem.

So, can quantum teleportation and quantum computing be used for transporting people or macroscopic objects? Maybe. Matter is just energy in a different form (E=mc2, there's Einstein again). Each atom in your body can be defined in terms of its position and its quantum states, so maybe we could harness all that information into a pattern (like on Star Trek).

Every person is made up of about 10²⁹ particles, each with multiple elements of quantum information. That's a whole bunch of information to transport. It might be necessary to invent quantum computing in order to transfer the massive amount of information needed to transport a human being to another place. Of course, this means that we are accepting our second description of transporting from above - sending just the information and building a new person at the destination point based on the defined quantum states of their every atom. Only quantum computing could manage that trick.

But what do you do with the first version of the person being transported? Would they be destroyed while obtaining their pattern? The first one would have to be destroyed or there would be two of them. Nobody wants two Dr. McCoy's around to complain twice as much about their atoms being scattered all over the galaxy. But wouldn't it be murder to get rid of the original? I like the idea of transporting both the information and the atoms; no crime committed there.

Next week, how close are we coming to making a cloaking device, and would we know it if we did? We couldn't see it.

Contributed by Mark E. Lasbury, MS, MSEd, PhD

As Many Exceptions As Rules

Filippov, S., & Ziman, M. (2014). Entanglement sensitivity to signal attenuation and amplification Physical Review A, 90 (1) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.90.010301

Ma, X., Herbst, T., Scheidl, T., Wang, D., Kropatschek, S., Naylor, W., Wittmann, B., Mech, A., Kofler, J., Anisimova, E., Makarov, V., Jennewein, T., Ursin, R., & Zeilinger, A. (2012). Quantum teleportation over 143 kilometres using active feed-forward Nature, 489 (7415), 269-273 DOI: 10.1038/nature11472

Shomroni, I., Rosenblum, S., Lovsky, Y., Bechler, O., Guendelman, G., & Dayan, B. (2014). All-optical routing of single photons by a one-atom switch controlled by a single photon Science, 345 (6199), 903-906 DOI: 10.1126/science.1254699

Yokoyama, S., Ukai, R., Armstrong, S., Sornphiphatphong, C., Kaji, T., Suzuki, S., Yoshikawa, J., Yonezawa, H., Menicucci, N., & Furusawa, A. (2013). Ultra-large-scale continuous-variable cluster states multiplexed in the time domain Nature Photonics, 7 (12), 982-986 DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2013.287

Sometimes Warped Thinking Is A Good Thing

The Star Ship Enterprise could achieve faster

than light travel due to its warp drive. Only the

saucer was the ship, everything else was just for

creating the warp bubble.

Alpha Centauri is the closest solar system to Earth. It has at least one exoplanet orbiting the binary A and B stars, so it could be our first stop outside our solar system. Alpha Centauri is 4.37 light years away, so traveling at the average speed of a space shuttle, it would take 165,000 years to reach it. Even at the speed of light it would take 4.37 years. But the Starship Enterprise could do this in a matter of days. Is that really possible? Approaching the 50^th anniversary of Star Trek, science says--------could be.

The warp drive on Star Trek allowed them to travel faster than light, a phenomenon now believed to be at least possible. For decades physicists believed that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light, that light speed was the upper limit of out universe. It was an idea put forth by Einstein, so people tended to accept it.

While the limit may still be true for the parameters that Einstein placed on it (traveling in space-time), there may be ways around it. For instance, what if you expanded or contracted space-time itself? Or what if you attached yourself to the power of the expanding universe, it's speeding up to such a degree that it will at some point be traveling faster than the speed of light.

So - right off the bat we have a Star Trek concept (faster than light travel) that at one time seemed silly, but now - not so much. Maybe there is more to this warp drive than we imagine. Let’s see how Star Trek imagined it and then how it may actually come to be.

Mr. Scott’s babies – his warp core, dilithium crystal, matter/antimatter engine and warp drive really break down to two basic principles. The energy to create the warp was derived from harnessing the power of matter/antimatter collisions.

In Star Trek, dilithium crystals somehow gave them

control of the matter/antimatter annihilations in

the engine. In real life, dilithium is usually a gas

made of two lithium ions. But University of

Huntsville (AL) scientists have made a stable form

of lithium, that, along with deuterium, can be used

as fuels for an impulse engine. Not the same thing,

but still dang cool.

For particles of matter – protons and electrons – there are antimatter equivalents, antiprotons and positrons. They are equal particles, it’s just that their charges are reversed. Antiprotons are negatively charged and positrons are positively charged electrons. Sound like science fiction? Well, it’s not – and many people are still alive due to antimatter.

Some chemical elements naturally give off small amounts of positrons, and we can use the energy of their annihilating collisions with electrons to achieve positron emission tomography (PET) scans of the human body. PET is a powerful tool for visualizing the 3-D functional ability of human organs and tissues and is important for diagnosis of many diseases.

So don’t scoff at antimatter – Star Trek had it exactly right. In fact, CERN in Europe made anti-hydrogen atoms last year – although they didn’t last long. And the Santilli telescope has confirmed the presence of antimatter galaxies at the edges of the visible universe. That issue resolved, let’s move on to how antimatter was used in Star Trek.

When a particle of matter meets its opposite, they annihilate one another and release lots of energy. The warp antimatter engine on the Enterprise used heavy hydrogen, called deuterium, and its antimatter equivalent as their power source.

They had to keep the antimatter in a strong magnetic field so that it wouldn’t touch any matter (except the deuterium they wanted it to), otherwise it would annihilate the warp core and destroy the ship. This is the containment Scotty was always yelling about.

Because E=mc² can go both directions, the

annihilation of a up quark and an anti-up quark

produces energy, but that energy can fuse into

gluons and the release matter in the form of a top

and anti-top quarks. So the universe is till producing

antimatter. Look up how quarks help form protons,

neutrons and electrons.

Matter/antimatter engines are coming closer to being real. A Case Western/Kent State paper from 2012 described the concept for a beamed core antimatter propulsion engine using annihilation products to produce thrust. The computer simulations stated that the engine could be produced with today’s technology. This is another example of how Star Trek got it right - and had it first.

The whole purpose of the matter/antimatter energy was to use the released energy to run the ship’s systems and to produce plasma.  Plasma isn’t science fiction either – it’s matter that has been stripped of its electrons. A positive hydrogen ion is just a single proton that has lost its electron – this is plasma, although you could do it with larger atoms as well. Neon lights glow because the electricity strips the electrons from neon gas – that’s plasma as well. On a very large scale, plasma repels matter with electrons, so it can create sort of a vacuum around whatever is creating it.

The Star Trek plasma was sent through the warp nacelles (those cigar shaped pieces to each side of the hull) to generate a plasma bubble around the ship. This bubble would warp space-time around the ship and allow it to travel faster than the limits within space-time. Again, not so far from possibility.

NASA and others are developing wings and

fuselages that generate plasma bubbles on their

own. This creates lift, reduces drag, eliminates a

radar signal, and….. glows!

There is speculation that some Russian jets (SU-37) of a couple decades ago used a plasma bubble to create a stealth capability and reduce drag on the fuselage. This possibility was confirmed in 2000 in a paper in the Journal of Thermophysics and Heat Transfer. So, on a small scale, plasma could reduce drag and speed up jet planes. On a large scale, could it warp space-time and allow a ship to travel faster than light in a bubble?

In 1994, a Mexican physicist named Miguel Alcubierre did the math to determine if this possible. Called the Alcubierre hypothesis, or Alcubierre warp drive, his math says it is possible to warp space-time around a ship, while leaving unwarped space-time inside the ship, so that the crew would experience normal time flow. About 10 years ago NASA rated this at the conjecture level, but it has moved to reasoned speculation. For scientists, this is a big change.

The reasons for the move was that the original calculations suggested that a huge amount of energy would be needed – equal to that released if all of Jupiter’s mass was converted to pure energy. But more recent changes to the shape of the warp disc need (more round than football shaped) reduced the amount of energy needed to a few thousand pounds (converted to energy – that’s still a whole bunch).

This is conceptual design of the IXS Enterprise, and

warp drive ship. The circular parts will generate the

warp bubble instead of the nacelles behind and on

each side of the original Enterprise. Despite that

difference in shape, Roddenberry’s Enterprise

was pretty doggone close.

NASA believes in this concept enough to have started designs on a warp drive ship (of course it's called the IXS Enterprise) and on experiments to generate and detect warp bubbles. Headed by NASA scientist Harold White, the program still has some conceptual problems to overcome. The largest one, and stick with me here, is this. If you want to generate a negative energy warp/plasma bubble around the ship, then that would include putting some plasma in front of the ship.

Even if the warp allows you to travel faster than light within the bubble, the front edge of the bubble would have to be maintained, meaning that you would have to keeping building the bubble in front of the ship at a rate faster than light speed. Since that would be outside the warp bubble, it would then break the laws of physics in space-time. We’re back to the limit that nothing can move faster than light. Darn you, Einstein!

Next week, yet another Star Trek idea that is coming closer to reality – is a transporter just a pipe dream, or a pipe from one place to another?

Contributed by Mark E. Lasbury, MS, MSEd, PhD

As Many Exceptions As Rules

S. Beghella-Bartoli, P.M. Bhujbal, A. Nas (2015). Confirmation of Santilli's detection of antimatter galaxies via a telescope with concave lens. America Journal of Modern Physics, 4 (1)
 
Alcubierre, M. (1994). The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity Classical and Quantum Gravity, 11 (5) DOI: 10.1088/0264-9381/11/5/001

Ganiev, Y., Gordeev, V., Krasilnikov, A., Lagutin, V., Otmennikov, V., & Panasenko, A. (2000). Aerodynamic Drag Reduction by Plasma and Hot-Gas Injection Journal of Thermophysics and Heat Transfer, 14 (1), 10-17 DOI: 10.2514/2.6504

H. White (2013). Warp Field Mechanics 101 Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 66, 242-247

Ronan Keane, & Wei-Ming Zhang (2012). Beamed Core Antimatter Propulsion: Engine Design and Optimization J.Br.Interplanet.Soc., 65 arXiv: 1205.2281v2