From: John Clark (jonkc@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Tue Sep 01 1998 - 22:37:13 MDT
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
> Joe Jenkins joe_jenkins@yahoo.com Wrote:
>Lets say a non-destructive backup technology becomes available in
>2010. This technology allow us to place a subject on a MRI-like table
>and rotate his head while a stationary light source generates short
>bursts of photons. A sensor on the other side of the subjects head is
>able to register only the photons arriving first that passed through
>the brain without any collisions whatsoever. The photons that collide
>with brain matter arrive too late and are not part of the image
>created for that pulse of light because they had to bounce once or
>twice and thus travel further and thus take longer to exit the other
>side of the brain. The head is slowly rotated and a series of images
I had a similar idea a while back and wrote a post about it on
March 15 1997.
A few years ago I read about a technique for seeing through opaque
objects with optical LASER pulses of astronomical intensity but modest
energy, I remember seeing a picture of a newspaper taken through
several inches of milk, you could still read it. I wonder if a device working
on a similar principle could be used to obtain enough information from a non-
destructive brain scan to upload a mind.
When most photons that make up an image enter milk they are refracted
off the many fat globules in solution, if any photons come out the other side
of the milk container they have been bounced around so much that the
information on where they originated is hopelessly scrambled, all you would
see is a diffuse glow, not an image. However, a few very lucky photons,
perhaps one in a billion trillion, perhaps less, can make it through the milk
without interacting with anything. Because these rare photons don't get
bounced around but take a shorter direct path, they are the first photons to
emerge from the milk. If you only looked at those early photons and ignored
the much more numerous later ones, you could see an image and not just a
general glow.
I don't remember the researcher's name or the exact specifications of
his LASER, but I do know that intensities as high as 10^18 watts per square
centimeter and pulses as short as 10-14 seconds have been achieved with
table top LASERS. You'd want to squeeze every bit of information out of the
rare photons that make up the image, so just recording their amplitude, as
in photography, would not be good enough, you'd want to know their phase
too, and that means Holography. As a bonus, you wouldn't have to worry about
depth of field focusing problems, and the reference beam for the Hologram
could act as a super fast camera shutter, use a different frequency for the
reference beam pulse and put in a filter for the original frequency.
10^-14 seconds might be too long for a safe brain scan at the enormous
intensities required, and light can travel about a tenth of a millimeter in
that time, but I'll bet a soft X ray LASER could be built with a lot
shorter pulse than that, I just hope it can be made short enough that the brain
is not vaporized. Anyway it's just a thought.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.5.5
iQA/AwUBNezLed+WG5eri0QzEQIulACdHk/kwTRw6SR76S/+W5NZSG8L5sIAn1lw
QcMRPXIAjLa0RSthgbRqawac
=5/Nm
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:49:32 MST