alrighty then, I have a question and it seems rather silly, but I think if enough people got together and thought about it it might work why shouldn't Line of Sight transportation work? couldn't you take the massive energy that something is made of, convert it to a light signal and send it via fibre optics? there are just a few complicated bits on the dematerializing and reassembly end, but so long as you got everything right it could be very good you'd need a very fast computer on each end, some means by which to convert the energy, store it (mass capacitors and mass conductivity) and just move things obviously for quite some time it would be very very expensive, but once it was worked out totally you could just convert a cargo shipment to energy, move the energy and the instructions for reassembly, and then once they arrived reassemble them (and yes I know how much energy we're talking, I do understand that we're dealing with cosmic numbers) and someone has to have some idea how to do those tricky dissassembly and reassembly bits......
Even if hypothetically you could disassemble a structure and beam it, then by the Heisenburg uncertainty principle it is impossible to know the quantum states of all your particles to arbitary precision. This means that it would be impossible to reconstruct anything you disassemble. Having said this there is a property known as entanglement by which two particles become 'entangled' in this if something changes in one particle the same change will instantly happen to the other. This can be used in a rather convoluted to transfer the exact information of a third particle although this destroys the original so its teleportation as opposed to cloning. IBM do a good beginners guide to this, im hungry and want dinner but ill put a more detailed explanation up at some point if anyone is intereted. The Optics group at Geneva have teleported a photon over long distance.
Actually, what I like the sound of even more, is the atom-changing thingamadoober. Where you get basically that same message, or a code for the chemical makeup of something, and then you can convert atoms of one sort to another and arrange them. They seem like related technologies, so would probably come about near the same time, but this one would be endlessly useful. Need some food? Make an apple out of a rock! And whatnot. ...
well okay, you can't know where electrons are, but does it really matter? isn't lead still lead regardless of where the electrons land so long as they are in their proper atom? the first one is awesome, I mean you aren't moving you, you need a blank for it to work, but is that so terrible? hell couldn't that concevably get every non trade deficit bit of stuff shuffled?
Yes it most certianly does matter where the electrons are. If you dont know where they are then you cant put them back where they belong. Theres no way of making sure that the electrons end up in the right place thus chemical bonds may not form. Infact as to what form you took would be fairly random and almost certainly would bare little resemblance to a living organsim. All though as I say theres no reason in principle that entangled particles could not be used. Practically doing this with anything more complex than an elementary particle is hugely complicated. And for even the simplest molecule completely out of the question for the foreseable future but in principle it is possible.
I'm not talking living organisms, I'm talking basic things like computers and cargo containers full of well, whatever and I mean if you know how many electrons belong to which atom, which I suppose you could figure out by what compounds were involved you could just do it in pure theoretical calculations and things the only reason you are dematerializing something in the first place is to get an idea of it's complete make up and get the energy
Okay allow me to re-phrase nothing can be copied exactly. Any structure that is made of more than one elementary particle could not be guaranteed to form the correct structure. To even trying to do it with a hydrogen atom would rquire an immense stroke of luck. Search for the 'no cloning' theorem on google. Then search for quantum teleportation and learn about entanglement and how in principle this does allow teleportation if the original is destroyed. You'll come accross the following statement quite a lot; |1,2> = 1/sqrt2(|1>|2> - |2>|1>) or something similar.
I'm not going for exactly I'm going for close enough, as long as it's the same shit and it's been moved I'm happy I'm looking at something dreadfully elementary that produces something more or less as it left, like say I send a box of chinese finger puzzles across the ocean, I just need those to arrive with their (I don't know the phyiscs version of the word, so I'll use the bio one) phenotype intact, they look, feel and more or less act the same, and so long as they are close enough I'm contented I know now that there is no way to move something in exactly the way it started of any real size, it's just to complicated, but what about just moving card board boxes and garbage? hell if you could just directly convert the matter of garbage to energy and reproduce something you had the pattern of stored wouldn't that put you way ahead?
Lets work on scales here. Lets start by drawing a line between the 'quantum world' and the 'classical world'. In the classical world information can be copied, in the quantum world it cannot. The border is a somwhat grey area but roughly speaking its around the small molecule to atom size by the time you get to chunky molecules classical physics works pretty well. So you can analyse a molecule see what it made out of and then re-create it assuming you have a reaction that allows it. However if you want to do a 'Star Trek' with materialisation and dematerialisation you can forget it. This is most definately in the quantum regieme. In the dematerialisation process verything about what you were moving/copying would be stored as quantum information whihc cannot be completely known, you could not make a copy. However Ill repeat the copy is out the question (you cannot have replicator at quantum levels but maybe a nano replicator given time) but to transport you dont have to know the information you just have to be able to send it. Using entangled particles you can send this information, you can never know exactly what your sending but you can guarantee its an exact copy. So quantum teleportation is not out of the question, in principle at least.
if you could do that sort of thing, why transport things? why not just code the signatures of items and just materialise energy into whatever you wanted? nothing would have value anymore except energy the matrix! tm
At the fundamental level everything that happens around us is the swapping of quantum numbers going by the laws of quantum information. You cannot transfer quantum information without destroying the original. So you cant make multiple copies only 1 and this would destroy the original. As I write this I wonder if theres also a classical thermodynamic argument here but im not sure Ill do research, maybe.
