Star Trek

Can anyone explain to me how transporters work in full detail? I’ve been having arguments at school with friends about how transporters really work.

If I could I would be locked in a secret laboratory building one so I could get rich.

In Star Trek it is basically downloading all matter and energy of an object into a computer and then sending it as energy and information somewhere else and then converting it back into the matter and energy configuration it had before. One problem is that Heisenberg theorized that one cannot know the exact position, energy and motion vectors of sub-atomic particles that would be necessary to reconstitute the object being transported. In Star Trek they have a device called the Heisenberg compensator (problem magically fixed with a wave of a writers pen). Also, we are talking billions of exabytes of data, not only moved into a buffer, but transmitted to the destination with no data degradation or fragmenting and no room for signal integrity issues. There is not enough computer storage in existence today in the entire world to handle this.

It sounds pretty far fetched, but it was cheaper than the sfx of showing spaceships landing on the series.

The actual process is really quite simple. The details are very hard to explain.

The process by which the transporter works* is this:

1. The person is "converted" to a complex energy pattern
2. Their pattern is sent into the pattern buffer
3. Their pattern is tranferred to the location and changed back into the matter/energy normal person.

*This is the process shown in the show, sometimes other processes are discussed.

Hope that helps - any more specifics I either can’t accurately describe here or are impossible to explain.

A basic tranporter has been built in australia

’Spooky interaction’

The Australian researchers have exploited a phenomenon called "quantum entanglement", which links the properties of two photons of light created at the same time. Einstein called it a "spooky interaction".

What it means is that two photons can be created and sent to different places. It is possible to force one photon into a specific quantum mechanical state and, because the two photons are connected in some way, the other photon will instantaneously take up a complementary state.

At first sight, entanglement offers the prospect of sending a signal faster than the speed of light. But a closer look at what is actually possible shows that this will not work because of the limits of what can be known about quantum mechanical systems and how such information is relayed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2049048.stm

While Quantum Entanglement is very interesting, and maybe even a future transporter, keep in mind it is a totally different process than the one on Star Trek.

Cool. I wonder how many gigabytes a persons moleculer structure takes up?