Beam Me Up: 'Teleportation' Is Year's Biggest Breakthrough

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Kaos36

709 posts

Ultimate Geek

#73667 19-Dec-2010 08:17

Wouldn't it be great if we all had a teleporter machine in our living rooms as common as the television. Need to go to Auckland just hop on the teleporter and zap to your destination, forgot to do that report for your boss and time is up go back 24hrs and start on it. Haha

Thanks to physics, and the truly bizarre quirks of quarks, those Star Trek style teleporters may be more than fiction.

A strange discovery by quantum physicists at the University of California Santa Barbara means that an object you can see in front of you may exist simultaneously in a parallel universe -- a multi-state condition that has scientists theorizing that teleportation or even time travel may be much more than just the plaything of science fiction writers.

Until this year, all human-made objects have moved according to the laws of classical mechanics, the rules governing ordinary objects. Toss a ball in the air and it falls back to Earth. Drop a coin from your roof and it falls into your yard. But back in March, a group of researchers designed a gadget that moves in ways that can only be described by quantum mechanics -- the set of rules that governs the behavior of tiny things like molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles.

And the implication -- that teleportation and even time travel may someday, somehow be a reality -- is so groundbreaking that Science magazine has labelled it the most significant scientific advance of 2010.

Read more here:

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/12/17/beam-teleportation-years-biggest-breakthrough/

Note: Kaos36 has checked his posts making sure Windows 7 is not mentioned.

Worst Response To A Crisis:
From a readers' Q and A column in TV GUIDE: "If we get involved in a nuclear war, would the electromagnetic pulses from exploding bombs damage my videotapes?"

oxnsox

1923 posts

Uber Geek

#419009 19-Dec-2010 10:35

Why go back and do the report... just go back far enough to be 'the boss' and get someone else to do it...

(Understanding the whole issue is beyond me right now, but if I could jump to a place where things can be demonstrated to me in a way I'd understand. I wouldn't have a problem with that.)

NonprayingMantis

6434 posts

Uber Geek

#419048 19-Dec-2010 12:55

teleporation sounds good, but actually it would suck.
the reason: you die every time you teleport.
http://www.cracked.com/article_15655_5-awesome-sci-fi-inventions-that-would-actually-suck.html
"A teleporter wouldn't actually break down your atoms and then shoot those same atoms thousands of miles through the air; even if it were possible, there'd be no reason to do it. It would instead just grab Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms from out of the air and assemble you out of those (one Hydrogen atom is the same as another, after all).

In other words, teleporters would work more like fax machines than mail. It transmits a signal and the machine on the other end spits out a copy. Only instead of a copy of a letter, it's a copy of a person, right down to all their thoughts and memories and here the original is destroyed. This was demonstrated in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Episode 250 ("Second Chances", aired May 24, 1993, Stardate 46915.2) where they failed to destroy the original Will Riker and were left with two of him.

Are you grasping the weirdness of this? The original is destroyed. That means when you step into a teleporter, you die. But, the rest of the world won't know you died, because a copy of you will step out of the other end of the machine. It won't be you, though, it'll be another you that happens to share your memories. To the outside observer the thing will always work fine, and the thing that steps out of the receiving end will think it worked fine. The one person who knows it didn't worked fine, can't tell anyone because they died via total atomization the moment they stepped into the machine.

So, the first time Captain Kirk used the teleportation device to beam down to an alien planet, he was basically resigning himself to an immediate death and hoping that his twin would carry out the mission for him."

Behodar

10502 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#419055 19-Dec-2010 13:35

It doesn't have to be the person that teleports. Imagine buying physical products online and having them teleported to your house. And if it was adapted for data, you wouldn't need to wait for files to download, you could just instantly teleport a copy to your computer.

But I'm not holding my breath for this to happen anytime soon...

oxnsox

1923 posts

Uber Geek

#419056 19-Dec-2010 13:38

It's Jim... but not as we know him