"Teleportation": Nanotech circa 1967

From: Forrest Bishop (forrestb@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Sun Aug 04 1996 - 03:27:27 MDT


        In 1967, when I was a student at Bishop Dagwell Hall (now called
 Oregon Episcopal Schools), our science teacher, Mr. Morin, asked us to
 each write a ten page paper on anything we wanted to, as long as it
 involved science.

        This was shortly after Star Trek had debuted on television, and a
 central attraction was the teleporter (“beam me up, Scotty”), a
 concept I was already quite familiar with as an avid science fiction
 reader. So I decided, during that class hour, to examine ways in which
 a teleportation device might be constructed. Most of the content of
 the paper was outlined in that same hour.

        The main idea looked at was to 3D raster scan (“like with
 television”) an object while disassembling it into its atomic
 components, and create a data file of the structure on the fly. The
 atoms were then accelerated by a particle accelerator, while the data
 file was sent by radio.

         At the receiving end, another particle accelerator running in
 reverse would decelerate the atoms. A radio receiver and computer took
 the incoming data file, and used it to reassemble the object,
 atom-by-atom.

        And so, the idea of assembling atoms by design hardly requires a
Ph.D. to conceive. It is in fact something a twelve-year-old could come
with.

Forrest Bishop



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:35:42 MST