Mods, move this to off-topic if you deem it appropriate. As this pertains to an integral technology in Star Trek, I figured I'd post it here.
So, the science-minded folks who worked on TNG, DS9, Voyager, the various films through the '80s and '90s, wrote the TNG and DS9 Technical Manuals (and the unpublished one for Voyager) ran into all the problems of the stated process -- converting matter to entergy, transmitting that energy pattern over distance, and converting it back to matter in its original form. Everything from the energy required (roughly an atomic explosion for every single one of the trillions of subatomic bonds in your body and clothes) to good old quantum indeterminacy.
Sidebar: I've always hated the people who misunderstand what transporters were stated to be all the way back to TOS, and have decided the transporter scans the original, makes a copy at the destination, and then destroys the original. Nope. Pay attention tot he source material.
Anyway. I saw something in the Ask Science subreddit that caught my attention. Here's the link. The original post is a good question in its own right, but read through the whole comment thread. Some quantum physics background needs to get spelled out before an understandable answer can be given. Ultra-ultra-simplifying things... Many on here probably know a laymen's version of the Uncertainty Principle -- that you can't know both the position and direction of an atom. That's... not wrong, but also fails to convey what's actually going on. It's more that subatomic particles pop out of one place and in at another, without really traversing the intervening distance. The act of observing on our macro scale messes with the probability that those quanta will be where they might have been if we weren't. There's a lot more to it, hence my recommending folks visit that link.
I've known a lot of that to one degree or another for a few years. But the way things were phrased in some of the responses in that thread sparked a thought. If we're effecting subatomic positioning probabilities just through observation, might we be able to affect those probabilities more if we set out to do so deliberately? And, over a few centuries, might we be able to amplify both the effect and it's range to, say, suppress the probability of all the these associated quanta existing here and increase the probability of them existing there until some threshold is crossed and the macro object(s) do on a large scale what the quanta do on their usual scale -- tunnel from point A to point B without necessarily traversing the intervening distance? I'm not sure what equipment would be needed to do this, or how much energy it would take, but I'm willing to be it wouldn't rely on supernova-levels of energy at each end of the process to make it go...
Discuss.
--Jonah
So, the science-minded folks who worked on TNG, DS9, Voyager, the various films through the '80s and '90s, wrote the TNG and DS9 Technical Manuals (and the unpublished one for Voyager) ran into all the problems of the stated process -- converting matter to entergy, transmitting that energy pattern over distance, and converting it back to matter in its original form. Everything from the energy required (roughly an atomic explosion for every single one of the trillions of subatomic bonds in your body and clothes) to good old quantum indeterminacy.
Sidebar: I've always hated the people who misunderstand what transporters were stated to be all the way back to TOS, and have decided the transporter scans the original, makes a copy at the destination, and then destroys the original. Nope. Pay attention tot he source material.
Anyway. I saw something in the Ask Science subreddit that caught my attention. Here's the link. The original post is a good question in its own right, but read through the whole comment thread. Some quantum physics background needs to get spelled out before an understandable answer can be given. Ultra-ultra-simplifying things... Many on here probably know a laymen's version of the Uncertainty Principle -- that you can't know both the position and direction of an atom. That's... not wrong, but also fails to convey what's actually going on. It's more that subatomic particles pop out of one place and in at another, without really traversing the intervening distance. The act of observing on our macro scale messes with the probability that those quanta will be where they might have been if we weren't. There's a lot more to it, hence my recommending folks visit that link.
I've known a lot of that to one degree or another for a few years. But the way things were phrased in some of the responses in that thread sparked a thought. If we're effecting subatomic positioning probabilities just through observation, might we be able to affect those probabilities more if we set out to do so deliberately? And, over a few centuries, might we be able to amplify both the effect and it's range to, say, suppress the probability of all the these associated quanta existing here and increase the probability of them existing there until some threshold is crossed and the macro object(s) do on a large scale what the quanta do on their usual scale -- tunnel from point A to point B without necessarily traversing the intervening distance? I'm not sure what equipment would be needed to do this, or how much energy it would take, but I'm willing to be it wouldn't rely on supernova-levels of energy at each end of the process to make it go...
Discuss.
--Jonah
