The Star Trek transporter, could it work?

Question

Two pronged question here. Will we one day be able to move particles from one locale to another? If that happens, what about people, how would we move the soul with the particles?

Answer 1

It has allready been done. Particles have been 'transported' from one local to another. It happen ed when I wrote and answered this question,

information was teleported, as were some atomic and sub atomic elements.
Recent developments

Until recently, scientists had been able to transport only light or single atoms over short distances (millimeters). However, it was reported in October 2006 that Professor Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have made a breakthrough in the field.[3] Their experiment involved the transportation of information from one macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms to another, located half a meter away. The technique involved the use of quantum entanglement, quantum measurement and quantum feedback. Little information is available, however, which throws suspicion over what would otherwise be a great accomplishment.

[edit] Davis report

In 2001, the United States Air Force commissioned Eric W. Davis, Ph.D., FBIS, to do a scientific study of teleportation.[4] The Davis report has been very controversial due to its recommendation of further studies of p-Teleportation:

A research program improving on and expanding, or implementing novel variations of, the Chinese and Uri Geller-type experiments should be conducted in order to generate p-Teleportation phenomenon in the lab.[4]

The report (page 2) classified teleportation concepts into five sections:[4]

sf-Teleportation
"the disembodied transport of persons or inanimate objects across space by advanced (futuristic) technological means." The report does not further define sf-Teleportation, and has no further comment on it than to dismiss it from the scope of the report. This type of teleportation could use a physical connection between the two locations, such as a wire. Using existing technology, such as the Internet, or telephone lines, could be the means for this type of teleport. However, this means it would be extremely slow, since a typical living animal is approximately equal to 600YB (yottabytes). Compression could be utilized, but would have to be effective in keeping all data intact.

p-Teleportation
"the conveyance of persons or inanimate objects by psychic means."

vm-Teleportation
"the conveyance of persons or inanimate objects across space by altering the properties of the spacetime vacuum, or by altering the spacetime metric (geometry)." This category includes the use of wormholes for transport, and the modification of the speed of light.

q-Teleportation
"the disembodied transport of the quantum state of a system and its correlations across space to another system, where system refers to any single or collective particles of matter or energy such as baryons (protons, neutrons, etc.), leptons (electrons, etc.), photons, atoms, ions, etc." The report explicitly includes in this category a process essentially the same as that envisioned by the fictional transporters of Star Trek. It also includes quantum teleportation by means of quantum entanglement.

e-Teleportation
"the conveyance of persons or inanimate objects by transport through extra space dimensions or parallel universes."

The report did not investigate sf-Teleportation other than to define it. The report recommended further study in all other types of teleportation (pages 28-29, 47-49, 54, 62).

[edit] Teleportation scenarios

The use of teleportation as a means of transport for humans still has considerable unresolved technical and philosophical issues, such as exactly how to record the human body sufficiently accurately and also be able to reconstruct it, and whether destroying a human in one place and recreating a copy elsewhere would provide a sufficient experience of continuity of existence. Believers in the supernatural, such as religious people, might wonder if the soul is recopied or destroyed, and might even consider it murder. Likewise, someone with a secular worldview who considers the body synonymous with the self might also see the disintegration of a given corpus as the killing of a human being. The reassembled human would be a different sentience with the same memories as the original. Many of the questions are shared with the concept of mind transfer.

It is not clear if duplicating a human would require reproduction of the exact quantum state, requiring quantum teleportation which necessarily destroys the original, or whether macroscopic measurements would suffice. In the non-destructive version, hypothetically a new copy of the individual is created with each teleportation, with only the copy subjectively experiencing the teleportation. Technology of this type would have many other applications, such as virtual medicine (manipulating the stored data to create a copy better than the original), traveling into the future (creating a copy many years after the information was stored), or backup copies (creating a copy from recently stored information if the original was involved in a mishap.)

Another form of teleportation common in science fiction (and seen in The Culture and The Terminator series of films) sends the subject through a wormhole or similar phenomenon, allowing transit faster than light while avoiding the problems posed by the uncertainty principle and potential signal interference. In both of the examples above, this form of teleportation is known as Displacement or Topological shortcut (Scientific American). (In the Terminator movies, Skynet used its displacement technology to produce a time machine, and thus named it the "Time-Space Displacement Equipment.")

Displacement teleporters eliminate many probable objections to teleportation on religious or philosophical grounds, as they preserve the original subject intact — and thus continuity of existence.

p-Teleportation means of teleportation are sometimes referred to as "psychoportation," or "jaunting"; named after the fictional scientist (Jaunte) who discovered it in The Stars My Destination (originally titled Tiger! Tiger!), a science fiction novel by Alfred Bester.

In religious, occult, and esoteric literature, teleportation is the instantaneous movement of a person or object from one place to another, by miraculous, supernatural or psychic means rather than technological ones. For instance, in Acts 8:39, after Philip evangelized an Ethiopian official: "When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing."

[edit] Teleportation lab experiments

In June 2002 the Ph.D. project of Dr. Warwick Bowen led by Dr. Ping Koy Lam, Prof. Hans Bachor and Dr. Timothy Ralph of the Australian National University achieved (quantum) teleportation of a laser beam.[5]

It was a successful quantum teleportation experiment involving the use of 'entangled' photons. A target photon was successfully 'scanned', its properties 'copied' onto a transition photon, and finally the photon was recreated at another location of arbitrary distance, proving in essence the theorems proposed by Einstein to explain his 'strange action at a distance'.

Scientists teleported atoms in 2004.[2]

Oct 2006 - For the first time, Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have conducted a teleportation experiment involving a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They teleported the information a distance of half a metre. "For the first time, it involves teleportation between light and matter, two different objects" [1]
Source
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleportation

Answer 2

The transporter was an after thought of Gene Roddenberry. The original thought was they would move crews from one place to another with a shuttle craft, but that wasn't really practical in the continuity to the story.
So, Gene decided to just have a device to instantly move them from one place to another, thus, the "transporter".
The concept of breaking molecules down individually and moving them from here to there is way way beyond our technology.
But, with nano-technology becoming a serious factor in our society, it isn't a good idea to say "never", because who would have imagined we could have cellphones today when the original "Startrek" aired. Cellphones today are a whole lot like the communicators they used on the original series.
As far as the soul, who knows? We don't know exactly what the soul is to begin with, so if our molecules are reconstituted at the other end, maybe our soul rides along??

Answer 3

In my opinion, anything is possible, if you have the technology; so who knows what scientists would find out in the future; BUT, I think that Teleportation is what will result, and not transportation. So far scientists were able to teleport electrons. The research began by IBM and their rational was that it would help them create a quantum computer that would be able to teleport a 3D object (person).
From what I understand, a quantum computer scans a person, then projects the scan (think of it as a fax machine faxing a person) to another 'continuum' and in the process of projecting the scan there, the original person follows and materializes to 'fill out the projected 'probability / potentia' into reality. In other words, the original disappears and pops up in the other continuum the same way action follows thought in lucid dreaming where you think of a place, and you're there. Just imagine a hook protruding from the person's mind into the location and then 'pulls' the person like a slingshot to that location and vice versa.
According to Jan Wichernick, in chaos theory, the cause is the attractor; the unseen force in the future that draws the effect...the current and past time events into it. So, it's very much like that 'concept'.

Answer 4

Actually, they have already made a "transporter" of sorts -- but it can only move elementary particles so far.

Theoretically, the transporter is possible, but it would require incredible amounts of energy (that's why the Enterprise was powered by the annihilation of matter/anti-matter). You take the target object, convert it to energy, transmit the energy to a different location, and reconvert it to matter. All in accordance with Einstein. But, as always, the devil is in the details.

Answer 5

Theyve already teleported particles. Subscribe to scientific american magazine, I think even Wired magazine had an article on this. Theyre getting close, but it wont be like star trek in our lifetime. despite what someone else stated- INTERNET COMMUNICATION IS NOT TELEPORTING. Its TELE COMMUNICATING.

Shesh.

Answer 6

no the particles would not come back together soy would just disperse (plus only losers watch star track)

Answer 7

I don't know if we will ever reach that point, but it sure would be cool if we could do it.

Answer 8

Define the "soul". My worry is that if we did this my butt would be where my face is.....

Answer 9

DORK!!!!!!!!