Posted on July 12, 2007 at 10:09 am
Star Trek’s beaming becoming reality?
Not quite yet. Let’s say, we are working on it. At least some Australian scientists have reconstructed the beam experiment that has been conducted in Germany before, but with different methods. The scientists have been able to transport atoms from point a to point b with the help of lasers.
In Star Trek, a gigantic pod that can hold up to five or six people that are placed between kind of invisible tubes, are being transformed into energy and then back into matter at the desired destination. A so-called Heisenberg-Condensator plays a vital part in the transporting process from and to the Enterprise (yes, in all models of the ship, Archer’s, Kirk’s, Picard’s, and generally in all other human starships appearing in Star Trek). The process often takes only a few seconds, if the conditions at where ever the crew wants to go is right. The teleportation mechanism and the device have been made up because at the time of Kirk’s Enterprise, they could not afford to build and launch shuttles from the ship all the time.
The old-fashioned transporter built into Kirk’s Enterprise, which is a Constitution Class ship, by the way
In reality however, beaming a human being to another destination as seen when Kirk says ‘beam me up, Scotty’, is not that simple. Engadget has posted this article:
Although the idea of teleporting individuals from one place to another in order to sidestep the headache of rush hour traffic has been around for quite some time, a team of Australian physicists are busy making it work (on a smaller scale, of course). Granted, they don’t fully expect their teleportation scheme to be used on humans in the near future, but there’s always hope, right? Anyway, the team has developed a so-called “simple way to transport atoms,” which involves bringing the atoms to almost absolute zero, beaming them with two lasers, and using fiber optics to transport them to any other place at the speed of light where they “enter a second condensate” and reconstruct. We’ll keep you posted on when human trialing (hopefully) begins.
This process works with atoms, or several of them, but as soon as you enter the realm of more complex combinations of molecules and atoms, such as objects, beaming will become extremely difficult to achieve. First of all, you would have to have a storage medium that stores all the information about an object, it’s composition, how it’s made up, which molecule is at which position. For a human being for example, a magnetic hard drive as we know it, must have the approximate size of our planet to store all the information. Science has discovered a certain threshold, which marks the barrier of zooming into an object. If you try to get close as this boundary, the image will start to blur, you will not see what’s beyond the sub-atomic. Dr. Heisenberg found out about this threshold is therefore called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
This essentially means that you can store information of a human being (or any object for that matter) up to a certain point, but you will be missing important information, which makes up a human. We don’t know what it is, but it’s there, and cannot be dismissed.
As long as we do not have a way to get around the Uncertainty Principle, we’ll be beaming atoms, but that’s about it.
