The science behind teleporters.

[Reincarnate]

Re: The science behind teleporters.

Another way to think about it: You have a box with two marbles, one black and one red. You pick one at random and give the other to your friend. You guys speed off away from each other for many light years. Then you examine your marble and realize it's black.

[MetalAtlas]

Re: The science behind teleporters.

there are things faster than the speed of light. If you were to get a telescope that was strong enough to see, say a planet x amount of life years away, the time that its would take the light to reach said telescope would be showing you something that happened in the past. Essentially, time is perceptual. Even though you witness something first hand, it still take some part of time for you to witness the event, so you're technically watching it in the past. So in theory, to be able to piggy back this idea into a teleporter, you would either have to move really really fast, essentially as fast as or faster than time itself, which might open up other problems in addition to the ability to remap the entire brain etc.

[Kage06]

Re: The science behind teleporters.

If they did go the route of "copying" you, then you wouldn't come out perfect on the other side at all. It'd also copy every other cell, etc. It wouldn't simply copy your DNA and replicate it. You'd be as you were.

But the true way for me would be if we find a way to find a worm hole and harness it if one was even possible, so that essentially, you aren't transferred through wires, but through time to another place.
That make any sense? That way, you would be yourself on the other side.

If though only our cells were cut and pasted to our new location, think of it this way (and I know it is weird), but cells are copied all the time, and old ones die.

You are essentially not the person you were, how many years ago it takes for all the cells to replicate once in your body.
You are a copy. Your brains cells have probably been copied countless of times, including what stores memories.

The only difference is, it would happen in an instant, so you'd have a complete self as you were, as if cells had replicated over time and created who you still are.

Am I making any sense?

I do know that using this method, if you had cancer for example when you left, you'd still have cancer on the return.

We would need to know basically everything about the human body for this idea to ever materialize though, and by that point, we'd have technology to pin point cancer cells, and destroy them without the hassle we do now. That's a given.

[Reincarnate]

Re: The science behind teleporters.

MetalAtlas: There's nothing currently faster than the speed of light. You'd need infinite energy just to accelerate something TO the speed of light.

Kage06: The point of the question is really to address what "we" actually "are."

The reason the cell-replication paradox isn't a paradox is because in one scenario we have replacement over time and therefore a continuous consciousness -- but in the cloning process we are simply killing the original and therefore not allowing for a continuum.

--

Scenario 1:
As of time t, I am composed of atoms, which we'll denote collectively as A.
I allow atom set B to replace me over time x.
As of time t+x, I am composed of B.

Scenario 2:
As of time t, I am composed of atoms, which we'll denote collectively as A.
We create an example replica of me out of B with any memories necessary for his experience to feel continuous.
I am killed.

---

Even though in both scenarios we are looking at atom set B as "me," I'd lose my continuity in the latter case even though the end result is the same. We are localized to our function.

[devonin]

Re: The science behind teleporters.

Of course, in Scenario A, there could actually be discontinuity, but our mind simply confabulates into the blanks so that we don't realise when the break was. We've got the idea that our memories are faulty and easily tricked already embedded into our conception of how the mind works. Who's to say we'd even notice the gaps?

[Reach]

Re: The science behind teleporters.

I really hate it when people bring up entanglement. You cannot use quantum entanglement to communicate faster than light.

Think of it this way. Consider a message you want to send to a friend. You want to use a coin for this. So you flip the coin -- and whatever it lands on, hold it up so you see your side and your friend sees the other. This is like an entangled state that collapses the wavefunction -- if you see heads, your friend will see tails. If you see tails, your friend will see heads.

Now, using just that coin alone, transmit a message to your friend.

Stuff like this gets brought up a lot because a number of experiments have reporting using entanglement to get light pulses to 'move' faster than c, among other methods (e.g. cesium gas).

Interestingly, phase or group velocity CAN exceed c, seemingly infinitely. This is well established. They, however, cannot exceed c at the same time.

Though, signal velocity (speed of information) can't exceed c, despite it usually being equal to group velocity.

Confusing, but the bottom line is you're right. Electromagnetic radiation can exceed light speed in vacuum, but only under conditions where there is no information transfer.

[Reincarnate]

Yeah, the relativity of simultaneity pretty much puts everything into place such that c is never violated. Phase velocities are > c in many cases but you can't transmit info at that velocity: v sub p = c^2/v sub g where v sub p is phase velocity and v sub g is group velocity (information transfer).

Likewise with entangled pairs -- if we looked at one half of a commuted pair attribute in one particle and the other half in the other particle, we'd be violating HUP. Of course, this is easily resolved when we realize that these observations wouldn't be at the same time -- once you observe commuted attribute P in particle A, commuted attribute Q of particle B is no longer entangled on that basis.

Some wiki information on this stuff if anyone's interested

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light#Phase_velocities_above_c

tl;dr: No, none of this shit is going to let you communicate faster than light or travel at the speed of light or greater and gives you pretty bleak outlooks where teleportation is concerned.

However, of course there is all the hype over wormholes, but you'd need something called exotic matter to stabilize the "throat" of the wormhole in order for you to even pass through to another portion of space. The problem: Exotic mass is basically "negative" mass with a negative energy density, and we don't know of anything like this in existence (it's theoretical). Michio Kaku's books "Beyond Einstein" and "Physics of the Impossible" are great reads for this stuff, though.

Further point of clarification: Antimatter and negative matter are totally different things. The former exists and has POSITIVE energy -- but a reversed charge. The latter hasn't been proved to even exist yet. If it did, it would be lighter than nothing (i.e. float) and would be repelled and shunned away from planets and meteors and gas particles and anything else. Even if it existed, it'd certainly be nowhere on Earth and would likely be located in deep space.

[benguino]

Re: The science behind teleporters.

If they did go the route of "copying" you, then you wouldn't come out perfect on the other side at all. It'd also copy every other cell, etc. It wouldn't simply copy your DNA and replicate it. You'd be as you were.

But the true way for me would be if we find a way to find a worm hole and harness it if one was even possible, so that essentially, you aren't transferred through wires, but through time to another place.
That make any sense? That way, you would be yourself on the other side.

If though only our cells were cut and pasted to our new location, think of it this way (and I know it is weird), but cells are copied all the time, and old ones die.

You are essentially not the person you were, how many years ago it takes for all the cells to replicate once in your body.
You are a copy. Your brains cells have probably been copied countless of times, including what stores memories.

The only difference is, it would happen in an instant, so you'd have a complete self as you were, as if cells had replicated over time and created who you still are.

Am I making any sense?

I do know that using this method, if you had cancer for example when you left, you'd still have cancer on the return.

We would need to know basically everything about the human body for this idea to ever materialize though, and by that point, we'd have technology to pin point cancer cells, and destroy them without the hassle we do now. That's a given.

I thought that brain cells are one of the few types of cells that do -not- replicate. Am I correct?

[Kage06]

Re: The science behind teleporters.

You may be right there. Apparently they do not...
I just assumed that since every other cell copied itself, the brain would have to as well, since cells I didn't think had that long of a life cycle.

But according to what I've read, different cells have different life cycles. For example skin and cells in the gut for example are apparently replaced every 24 hours.

[Reincarnate]

Re: The science behind teleporters.

Some cells in the brain do, others don't