From: Dan Fabulich (daniel.fabulich@yale.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 02 2000 - 04:50:52 MST
> > Just an FYI, that's not how the fictional "Star Trek" transporter allegedly
> > works.
>
> James, I believe is correct in a classical sense. This is covered in
> some depth in "The Physics of Star Trek". If I recall, they basically
> concluded that the energy costs were too huge to allow transporters
> to ever work in a "classical" sense.
There are other reasons why transporters would be unwieldy, but this is a
significant one.
> However, in my reading of the text, it seemed to make no sense to try
> and transport atoms around at approx. the speed of light. Instead you
> want the *information* transported, which given the redundancy in a
> human body is probably not alot given a reasonable compression
> strategy. (E.g. you only need one copy of your genome and some
> difference information in the cells containing mutations [if you don't
> want to "repair" the mutations]).
I rather doubt you're right about that. Certainly, at the very least, the
layout of the connections b/w the neurons in your brain would need to be
recorded if we were trying to build something that remembered your name.
And anyway, ST's transporter works on *anything*, be it biological,
inorganic, weird plasma being, whatever. Only a very tiny set of the
things we'd want to move with a transporter have DNA, so your strategy
isn't very general.
> I would note that there is some confusion in S.T. about how the
> transporters actually work. In S.T.N.G. there is an incident
> where Riker gets replicated into 2 copies of himself. If atom
> transport were in fact the methodology, either you would get 2
> dwarf Rikers, or a very big energy bill to create the atoms
> of a second Riker from raw energy. That would be unlikely to
> have gone "unnoticed".
This doesn't suggest any confusion to me. In the mode of charity, one
could simply assume that the fact that there were two Rikers standing on
the transporter pad was much more remarkable to the crew than the fact
that the magic ST battery had been drained twice as much as one would have
expected; we could therefore plausibly imagine that no one bothered to
call attention to this little detail.
"Hey! Two Rikers!" "Yeah! And a lot of energy was used up just now!"
No, the ST transporter was very, very simple indeed. :)
-Dan
-unless you love someone-
-nothing else makes any sense-
e.e. cummings
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