But is it still you on the other side, or is it a copy? If the latter, does that mean the transporter is a suicide box? After all, if we could figure out exactly how a transporter works, we could build one.
And those effects have some interesting consequences. Kirk never said those exact words on the show, of course, but you get the idea.
Trek has always depicted characters who are hesitant to use the transporter, from Dr. McCoy to the entire crew of Enterprise. Hoffman points out the first work to express real doubt about the continuity of personhood was the novel Spock Must Die by James Blish, which "played coy" about whether it's really you on the other end of the transporter.
To address the questions this raised, a good place to start is by looking at what the transporter actually does. Transporters actually have two pattern buffers in their systems to work as a backup in case one of them goes down. This energy beam is similar to the ones used on starships for tractor beams and phase beams.
One of the biggest scientific issues here is the fact that Star Trek seems to be able to beam you into almost any location. They do place some limitations on the where, but for the most part, those limits involve extremely dense materials mountains, rocks and sometimes if there is a force field blocking the signal. Once the matter stream has been beamed to the location, your atoms and molecules are reassembled.
The problem involved here is that in order for this to work, there would need to be a second device on the receiving end. Now, that sounds like a death sentence right there.
The key to making science fiction work for its viewers is to make it as believable as possible. This means there has to be some possibility that it could be real. There are actual formulas that measure the amount of energy needed to convert a human being into a matter stream.
Or how much radiation would be needed to beam and reassemble a human. The amount of energy to convert you into a matter stream is unobtainable. As an example, the amount of energy needed would be equal to roughly thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb from Gamma radiation is the highest level of radiation known to man, and even that is too weak to send the amount of energy a matter stream would contain. Think about those levels of energy and radiation.
Then think about exposing the human body to enough of both. No wonder some of the characters are nervous about using it! Take a look at the five-minute video below for a quick recap of how transporters work and the trouble they can cause:. There are characters on the show who have voiced these concerns as well.
Doctor McCoy is well known within the franchise for voicing his fears of using the transporter device. If your body is being ripped apart at the atomic level and put back together somewhere else, are you actually just a copy? While there are characters who fear the transporter, there are others who try their best to reassure them of their safety. Since there can only be one of you, it would stand to reason that the copy is, in fact, the new original. This is because there are serious distortions that can occur when atoms try to reassembly at different speeds.
Some science fiction writers imagine that the transportee is actually killed during this step, and then reanimated when the body's atoms are reassembled elsewhere. But, this seems like a process that no one would willingly undergo. Let's postulate for a moment that it would be possible to dematerialize—or "energize" as they say on screen—a human being. An even greater problem arises: getting the person back together at the desired location.
There are actually several problems here. First, this technology, as used in the shows and movies, seems to have no difficulty in beaming the particles through all kinds of thick, dense materials on their way from the starship to distant locations. This is highly unlikely to be possible in reality. Neutrinos can pass through rocks and planets, but not other particles. Even less feasible, however, is the possibility of arranging the particles in just the right order so as to preserve the person's identity and not kill them.
There is nothing in our understanding of physics or biology that suggests we can control matter in such a way. Moreover, a person's identity and consciousness is likely not something that can be dissolved and remade. Given all the challenges, and based on our current understanding of physics and biology, it does not seem likely that such technology will ever come to fruition. However, famed physicist and science writer Michio Kaku wrote in that he anticipated scientists developing a safe version of such technology in the next hundred years.
We may very well discover unimagined breakthroughs in physics that would allow this type of technology. However, for the moment, the only transporters we're going to see will be on TV and movie screens. Edited and expanded by Carolyn Collins Petersen. By , when production started on the fourth TV incarnation of the franchise, Star Trek Voyager , computer graphics was well into its stride and a new transporter effect was devised in which little spheres of light expand to cover the person, a shower of fading glitter providing a node to the past.
The universe of Star Trek may be only make-believe. The staff at Paramount may have no more idea how to beam a person around than Leonard Nimoy has of performing a mind meld. But the Trek transporter has brought the notion of teleportation into millions of homes worldwide, and given as a common set of images and expectations. Over the course of hundreds of episodes, the transporter's technical specs have been fleshed out and its dramatic possibilities explored in more detail than almost any other device in the history of science fiction.
According to the official bible of Trekana, The Star Trek Encyclopedia , the transporter "briefly converts an object or person into energy, beams that energy to another location, then reassembles the subject into its original form. A key part of the Trek-style transporter is the so-called annular confinement beam ACB , a cylindrical force field that channels and keeps track of the transportee from source to destination.
Basically, this stops your bits and pieces from drifting off into interstellar space while you're being dispatched to the surface of some strange new world.
It seems that the ACB first locks onto and then disassembles the subject into an energy- or plasma-like state, known as phased matter. This is a key step in the whole process, so it's unfortunate that the show's creators can't be a little more specific and win a Nobel prize while they're at it. But what's clear is that some "stuff," be it matter or energy or some hybrid of these, it sent from one place to another, along with instructions needed to reconstitute the subject upon arrival.
George O. Smith would have been delighted that his Special Delivery system, or something very much like it, eventually found its way into Hollywood's most celebrated starship. Imagine, then, that you've stepped onto the transporter pad, issued the fateful command "energize," and had your atoms turned into phased matter. Now you're all set to go. Your matter stream is fed into a pattern buffer a hyperlarge computer memory that briefly stores your entire atomic blueprint , piped to one of the beam emitters on the hull of the starship, and then relayed to a point on the ground where, all being well, the ACB will put you back together again.
There's even a component of the transporter, called the Heisenberg compensator , designed to sidestep one of the most basic laws of quantum physics — Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. This frustrating little rule insists that you can never know exactly where something is and exactly how it's moving at the same time. Unnoticeable in the everyday world, it comes into effect with a vengeance at the subatomic level and, at first sight, seems to pose one of the biggest obstacles to practical teleportation.
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