From: Ross A. Finlayson (raf@tiki-lounge.com)
Date: Sat May 19 2001 - 10:10:31 MDT
Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de wrote:
> Anders Sandberg wrote:
> >
> > Is it just me, or are everyone implicitly assuming it will work? It
>
> No. I would be very much surprised if it would work. But that there
> exists a remote possibility of it working, and that people think it's
> worth doing an experiment is pretty much mindboggling.
>
> > looks like an interesting idea (I have not yet seen the real physics
> > papers) but I wonder if he has taken the presence of the EBC into
> > account - I bet he has found a vacuum solution of the GR equations, and
> > now hope the presence of matter doesn't change it too much.
>
> Anyway, the Einstein-Bose condensate turns weirder day by day.
That time travel thing would be pretty cool. It would seem, in some ways,
that if there is time travel then that would be a very good mechanism for
space travel by teleportation. For example, a few years ago they
"teleported" some molecules around, or that was the information.
Time travel is among the "space opera" science fiction themes, for example,
many people have heard of time travel in various forms since Welles'
fictional machine. One regular question is that of the meeting grandparents,
to go back in time and cause events that would make going back in time
impossible. This kind of research brings perhaps a more serious light to the
speculative fiction of time travel.
About the matter teleportation, to refer to exploitation of solar resources,
if that was effective then it could be economical for freight. In the book
"Battlefield Earth", they made a movie about it, the voracious mining aliens
used teleportation and the privacy of it to exert economic control, until
near the end of the book, when all of them were killed for Terl and some
females, from whom the protagonists removed the brain devices, where Terl did
not have one. In "Star Trek" personal teleportation is a given, although the
"Star Trek" version had only an intersystem range where the other was
extragalactic, from which we got people saying "beam me up" for years.
A concern about the introduction of negative energy or anti-energy is that it
is difficult to say that some experiment would not metaphorically tear the
spacetime fabric and explode this neighborhood of the galaxy. From what I
understand about antimatter, it has been produced in miniscule amounts in the
lab, or observed, where its most well-known property is to react with matter
in an abrupt way. It can be contained with magnetic shielding, and there has
never been enough of it to risk more than the lab.
I am reading a book about genetic biochemistry, it is by Asimov and called
"The Genetic Code". It is from 1962, about forty years ago. I have read
much of the Asimov fiction, and was pleased to see that his non-fiction
remains very readable. It has helped me to understand some of the
biochemistry associated with the nucleotides in the nucleic acid in the first
chapters.
Here, these subjects are wide-ranging, with each deserving diverse
investigation. By the same token, they are happening concurrently, so that
as we examine their meaning for humanity, they may be considered as part of a
whole, where that is the extant body and practice of human knowledge, and the
implications of imminent advances of science and technology.
Ross.
-- Ross Andrew Finlayson Finlayson Consulting Ross at Tiki-Lounge: http://www.tiki-lounge.com/~raf/ "It's always one more." - Internet multi-player computer game player
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