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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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