The Star Trek Fantasy ...uh... reality

All I know is when I was young they told me we would all be driving flying cars by the year 2000... I ain't seen no flying car yet.

My guess is we will kill ourselves off before we see any Star Trek stuff.

Inteligent life is on other planets and they have developed warp speed.

They are watching us, and know that we are not ready to know about them.

Warp speed is almost as good as instant speed.

Being at your destination when you leave you point of origination.

Instant speed is faster than warp speed.

When I was young, they promised me a pension. Now things aren't so clear.

Actually, scientists have discovered a way to transport microscopic matter from one place to another. However, the technology is still in it's infancy.

Actually,

Scientists have discovered many ways to transport matter (microscopic or not) from one place to another starting tens of thousands of years ago.... I use my 99 Mazda.

I think what you are referring to is quantum tunneling. I am uncomfortable with the using the term "transport" to describe what is happening since it is grossly oversimplifying what is happening in these experiments.

The same scientific laws that predict and explain quantum tunneling also imply that a Star Trek type transporter will never be possible. It violates the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle.

In Star Trek:TNG they had a device on their ship they referred to from time to time called the "Heisenberg Compensator". This made many of us Physics nerds laugh since it showed that the writers had help from someone who knew Physics.

In the words of the immortal Scotty (<<puts on best fake brogue>>) "Ya' cannot break the laws of Physics Captain!".

ebrown....it's 'theoretical physics'.

That Saying
i'm sure you have all heard that saying "anything is possible".

I am referring to the remarks made by a few of you essentially or even bluntly saying that "its impossible".

Let me remind you all that 1000 years ago most people considered space flight impossible, electricity was an obscene proposal, the earth was flat, and the universe was made from only four elements; fire, earth, water, air.

Welcome pug,

You are, of course, technically correct.

But....

There is a difference between "considered" impossible and "scientifically" impossible. When anyone claims something is impossible, you should know what this claim is based on.

You will find that the claims of 1000 years ago that space flight is impossible were not very rigorous. (Incidently electricity was discovered and accepted by the Greek scholars and scientists knew the Earth was round some 3000-4000 years ago).

Science and mathematics have strict definitions on what it takes to prove something. It is absolutely correct to say that something is impossible based on these axioms I accept as true. I can prove that if the axioms are true then my claim is true.

This is, of course, a big if. It is always possible that the axioms are false.

However, it requires someone who understands the arguments and evidence behind the axioms to judge whether how well a statement has been proven.

Comparing my statement that "a Star Trek type transport is impossible" to previous claims that "the earth is flat" is not good comparison.

I can certainly say that "if the Heisenberg principle is correct then this type of transport is impossible". I can give you a airtight mathematical proof of this.

Of course the question is, how sure are we of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. To make a reasoned judgement about this, you will need a background in Physics to understand the arguments behind this principle and the evidence it is based on.

I will tell you that most Physicists believe that this is impossible because there is very good evidence supporting the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. For example, this principle is crucial to the semiconductors that are the core of the technology you are using to read this message.

Is it possible that modern science has it wrong? Of course. But it is also possible we have got it right.

You can't just lump the claims of modern science with all conjectures made in the past. . Some scientific theories have been backed up with rigorous scientific process, and some haven't. Science, when done well, has been very effective at making predictions and providing useful ways to use them.

If you won't accept that anything can be proven... how do you know the folks who say the Earth is flat weren't right?

If progress continues at the rate of the past 100 years, My guess is limited applications for anti-matter as an energy source by 2014, shields by 2014, a limited holideck by 2014, phasers or a less useful ray gun by 2006, some features of the cloaking device by 2006, some features of the tri-corder by 2006, beginning replicators by 2006 using nano machines, subspace radio/never, photon torpedos/never, transporter/never. warp drive/never, The deep space nine type wheel station, 2099. The cell phone has most of the features of the communicator. Sorry, it is difficult to make good guesses more than ten years into the future. Neil

Hi justthefax: There is some evidence for what you typed, but there is a lot of conflicting evidence, and the de-bunking is quite effective.
If you are not teasing; Please explain your conclusions. Neil

When making these predictions it is interesting to look back...

In a 1949 Gallup poll Americans named those developments which would be in place by the year 2000.

88% believed in a cure for cancer;
63% thought we'd be riding around in atomic powered trains.
But when presented with the notion that "men in rockets will be able to reach the moon within the next 50 years," only 15% agreed.

(culled from the site http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/depts/eh9901.htm This search was prompted by an aging memory.)

Re: The Star Trek Fantasy ...uh... reality


Hi Pug,

Matter and Anti-Matter (created in a lab) already exist and we know they produce a lot of energy when combined, but how we use that energy is a matter of knowledge which we may not have for hundreds of years. For example, consider atomic power. We already know how to extract energy from fission, but with our best current technology, all we do with all that energy is to boil water to produce steam to turn turbines to create electricity. So even if we switched from fission to anti-matter, we still wouldn't be able to do much more than boil water to produce electricity, and that seems like a pretty crude way to run a starship.

So the real challenge here isn't how to get more energy, but what to do with that energy once we get it, and that's where Star Trek leaves us behind. Our physics tells us the spacetime and matterenergy are entwined such that we can't affect one without affecting the other, but in Trek physics, they have apparently learned to disentangle them and manipulate them independently. We don't know how to do this yet, and within our current physics, it cannot be done, ever. We must move beyond our current understanding of physics in order to even approach solving this problem, and this is a limit of understanding rather than energy.

One of the more amazing devices on Star Trek was often overlooked in the scheme of things; the food replicator. The replicator could apparently construct organic matter from raw energy, presumably from the excess energy available from the matter-antimatter conversion. But since matter and energy are the same thing in different forms, you can't get more matter out of the replicator than you put into the matter-antimatter drives, so in essence, the computers had the ability to take matter, deconstruct it into raw energy, and to reconstitute it back into matter in whatever form was required. The reconstuction step implies an incredible level of computational and informational resource, which is beyond our understanding, even if we had unlimited energy to play with in any form.

My point is that the challenges we face in achieving the technology implied by Star Trek are not physics challenges, they are challenges to our understanding of things; physics and information, and as such they might never be solved, or they might be solved at any moment.

Best regards,

Rosborne,

You need to accept the possibility that current physics is right about some things.

You are correct to say that maybe our current understanding of physics is wrong about the limits imposed by Relativistic speed of light or the Heisenberg Uncertainly principle. There might be a way around these "laws" that our descendents will figure out.

But it is also at least possible that these limits, based on our current understanding of physics, are right.

This would mean the speed of light is a hard fast limit of the Universe that can never be broken, and that the Heisenberg prohibition on matter transprtation is just a fact of reality that will last for eternity.

You are right to caution me against assuming that the laws we believe are true today may be challenged and disproven in the future. This will certainly happen in many cases.

But there are laws of the Universe regardless of our understanding. We undoubtably have some understanding of them.

It is not valid to say the only limits are limits of our understanding. There are real laws to the Universe that impose real limits. Yes, we should continue to challenge them as part of our effort to understand our Universe.

But to assume that we will someday find a way to break all of the laws of the Universe is somewhat optimistic.

Hi Ebrown, I think you missed my point...

I didn't mean to imply that our current physics are wrong, but that there may be other methods of accomplishing our goals which don't conflict with physical laws.

For example, I'm certain that we will never push (accelerate by means of adding energy to the systm) any mass beyond the speed of light. And I'm certain the no massive object will ever move through space at a velocity beyond light. However, there may be a way to move a massive object from place to place without moving it through space, and there may be a way to remove the mass signature of an object such that it doesn't interact with spacetime in the way we normally expect. I'm thinking of wormholes, dimensional translation and induced flattening of gravitational fields (all stuff we can't do yet, but which our physics doesn't currently rule out).

That's what I meant by going beyond our physics. I didn't mean that we would learn to break known physical laws.

Does that make more sense?

I think we agree.

I am only pointing out that some of these things are impossible-- not just because we don't understand how to do it yet, but because they break real rock-hard immutable laws of our Universe. This class of things will always be impossible.

Of course we don't know what things will always be impossible, and which we may learn to get around....

But I personally believe that the Heisenberg principle is based on one of the immutable laws. If I am right, then teleportation will always be impossible.

Of course, it is fairly easy to disprove many laws. It is impossible to prove anything with complete certainty.

I still stick with my "never" vote.

We usually do agree. It's tough to get concepts across clearly in posts.

Quantum Entanglement seems to impart "information at a distance" spontaneously. I'm not sure how this happens yet, unless the two things which are entangled are not really separated. Even though objects may be separated by spacetime, they may still be connected through some other dimension, which seems to imply a pathway...