This one has troubled me for quite some time. Without getting into the mass to energy conversion controversies, if you "break down" someone to their constituate particles and reassemble them in a remate location, aren't you ending the life of the person on the transporter pad and creating a duplicate with the exact same memories of the person you just killed. We've seen the Transporter duplicate people on several occasions, which just confirms this in my mind. Wasn't this the reason for McCoy's anxiety about using the Transporter in the early episodes and TMP?
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
I suggest that you find a copy of "Is Data Human?: The Metaphysics of Star Trek" by Richard Hanley. He goes into very good detail and covers that difficult philosophical issue from several interesting angles. (And interestingly for me, the author is also my Philosophy professor at the University of Delaware!)
Basically, it comes down to the question as to whether or not the "duplicate" subject that's created by the transporter is truly identical or not -- and whether it really matters. For if the person who is left on the planet after beaming down is literally identical to the original down to the last subatomic particle, is there truly any difference of consequence? Ultimately, the question relies on whether you believe in an ethereal "soul" that cannot be duplicated by a matter transporter.
However, I think that you are mischaracterizing Doctor McCoy's transporter phobia. He's not having philosophical issues -- he's just afraid that the damn thing will break down.
Posted by Sargon (Member # 1090) on :
quote: after beaming down is literally identical to the original down to the last subatomic particle, is there truly any difference of consequence?
Yes, there is a consequence. You have a duplicate. If we used the Tranporter to duplicate me on the surface of a planet, leaving the original on the ship, then that is not "me" on the planet. He is the same as me, but not me.
It would be a great Sci-Fi concept for stories: Your ship warps up to an unexplored planet, beams down duplicates of your best people, then if anything goes bad, like the disease in Miri or Omega Glory you don't beam them back up. Tough luck dupe', thems the breaks. Locals overwhelmed your 3 Redshirts? No problems, beam down a hundred.
In fact, no matter how well a mission goes, you never beam them back up; they just stay on the planet as ambassadores or colonists or for further scientific study. After all, you don't want any of the messiness that comes from having a ship with 9 Kirks, a dozen Spocks, etc.
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
In recent years there's been loads of SF written about recorded consciousness, the soul, is a copy 'me' etc. You might want to look at Greg Egan's stuff which looks particularly at the latter question. Also, Richard Morgan and Iain M. Banks seem to go along the lines of you remining you regardless of whatever medium you find your consciousness in or the means you took to get there, and I think that we're unlikely to ever see Trek ask these sorts of questions because it would open too many cans of worms. No doubt someone'll emntion the TOS novel "Spock Must Die" at some point. . .
Posted by Aban Rune (Member # 226) on :
Whether this is a philosophical issue to us, or not, it's obviously not one in the Trek universe. To the people using it, the transporter is just a means of getting from point A to point B. It has the possibility of killing you or misplacing you in several odd ways... but it's just a means of transportation. They obviously don't feel that they're existance is being terminated every time they use it.
Posted by Wraith (Member # 779) on :
quote: Richard Morgan
Just discovered him; Altered Carbon was in a 2 for �10 sale . damn good, i thought, as was the second. Although the bookshops can't seem to make up their minds as to whether AC is sci-fi or crime.
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
I also think that this point has been mentioned to the tech people behind the show.
Basically, the transporter doesn't kill you, and then reassemble a duplicate of you. It somehow manages to move the exact same molecules that you are made up of across subspace and reassemble them, at the same time as somehow freezing the mind so that the person doesn't die. A person using the transporter is teleported, not killed, cloned, and assembled.
The dublication process would then mean that SCARY SCIENCE STUFF has caused a persons atoms to actually be cloned during transport. In the case of the Rikers, this means that one of them HAS to be the original, and one a copy.
Posted by Guardian 2000 (Member # 743) on :
quote:Originally posted by Sargon: [QB]
quote: after beaming down is literally identical to the original down to the last subatomic particle, is there truly any difference of consequence?
Yes, there is a consequence. You have a duplicate. If we used the Tranporter to duplicate me on the surface of a planet, leaving the original on the ship, then that is not "me" on the planet. He is the same as me, but not me.
Doesn't work. The general concept of a transporter is that it beams the energy of you down and then makes that energy you again.
Look at it this way: If I remove your arm and then reattach it, is that still your arm?
Okay, now imagine that I do the same thing to a cell of yours, then an individual molecule, then a particular atom. Seems to me that they would still be yours just as much as the arm would.
Now, if I take that atom, whip out E=mc^2, and convert the atom to energy, and then convert it back into its atomic, matter form, and *then* reattach it to you . . . what then? Is it a mere copy? I don't think so. Seems to me that it is the same thing.
In a magnetic storage medium like a floppy disk, information is stored as a series of charges. A copy is made by having one disk head read the original charges that store information, while the head on another disk writes that same information on the other disk, with new energy. A transporter would be more akin to actually converting all of the original magnetic charge to electricity and then using that same energy to write to the new disk. Is that a copy merely because the charges are now at a different spot and didn't move directly there, or is that the new location of the original?
Posted by djewell (Member # 1111) on :
In "The Physics of Star Trek" by Lawrence Krauss, he proposes the idea of informational transport, that is, the transport of your "pattern" to be reduplicated on the surface with new atoms. The old body is destroyed.
This wouldn't work because you have to wonder where the new atoms came from. Do all planets have the Carbon neccesary to rebuild you? Do all places have the correct elements? No. So it has to be as it is described in the TNG: TM.
And, MM, your philosophy proffessor wrote the Metaphysics of Star Trek. Cool. Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
My favorite story along these lines is "Ginnungagap" by Michael Swanwick.
Anyway, we can put aside the thorny continuity-of-consciousness problem for this one. Accurate, believable, or otherwise, we know for a fact that a transportee is conscious throughout their entire trip, and thus are firmly the same person on both sides of the event. (The Wrath of Khan goes so far as to suggest one can maintain a conversation during it, but let's not go there.)
Posted by djewell (Member # 1111) on :
I never really understood how you could talk with your vocal chord being scattered into its constituent atoms...
Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
This sort of topic bugs me almost as much as the notion of lightsabers somehow being optical phenomena. From TOS on, it's been quite clearly the intention that the person after transport is the same person as before transport. No cloning involved, except in unusual story-driven events. No destruction of old body in favor of new. No imprinting of pattern on local matter. Where do these ideas come from?
--Jonah
Posted by MrNeutron (Member # 524) on :
quote:Originally posted by Guardian 2000: Doesn't work. The general concept of a transporter is that it beams the energy of you down and then makes that energy you again.
Hmmmm... But what about Tom Riker? Was he half as massive as Will Riker? What about the good and Evil Kirks? Each had half of Kirk's atoms> And Tuvik...was he the equivalent mass of Tukov and Neelix?
Oy...the transporter always makes my head hurt. No wonder McCoy hated using it!
Posted by djewell (Member # 1111) on :
Peregrinus, these ideas sprung from the futile attempt to explain the transporter phenomena using modern 20th and 21st century scientific knowledge. I personally am inclined to take the TNG:TM as canon and use its explanation as such.
Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
I've been watching Star Trek all my life, and even as a six-year-old I never thought the person stepping into the transporter was disintegrated and copied at the destination. I've been studying physics since age seven, and I always, always knew most of the tech in Trek was based on principles that were theoretical or wildly conjectural for where we were at the time. I had no problem saying "in the future, they have learned how to do this, and any attempt by me to figure out methods using contemporary technology is foolish and against the spirit of the show".
Person steps into transporter at point A and gets zapped straight to point B without passing 'Go' -- got it, that's what it does, don't know how, doesn't matter, let's move on and enjoy the story.
--Jonah
Posted by Aban Rune (Member # 226) on :
*applause*
Posted by Joshua Bell (Member # 327) on :
Somebody should write a FAQ on this or something.
Posted by djewell (Member # 1111) on :
Indeed Peregrinus.
Posted by Bernd (Member # 6) on :
Peregrinus: Your remark and the previous one that persons of the 24th century (with few exceptions) have no problem using the transporter is clearly the only stance that will prevail.
But a few more annotations:
I can't really follow the arguments by Guardian. To me a multitude of atoms may be something special, while one atom is clearly not. One is exactly like the other. It doesn't have any distinguishing marks. You can't even see or notice it in any way. And most of all, it behaves Heisenberg-ishly. In this light, there must be a line or a scale where something becomes unique (may be "alive" and may ultimately have a "soul").
That's why I firmly believe that the transporter decomposes a human being down to a level where individuality is still preserved (with "Second Chances" and "Our Man Bashir" being hard to explain exceptions). I would even go as far as saying that the transporter "pattern" is alive.
This is clearly not the case with atoms or even energy. You could as well send atomic or energy patterns as bit sequences through a communication channel.
Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
Quite. The "matter stream" referred to in the shows and the TNG TM is definitely animate matter. Rick also mentions that not even the processing power of the Enterprise-D's computers can map all the positions and all the motions of all the quanta of a transportee, so as a person is dematerialized, the stream is like one long thread, with each particle "remembering" the ones that were adjacent to it. For those who have seen TRON, the digitizing beam in the laser bay is a good visual aid.
I know we are still too limited to be able to define life, in the context of how organic molecules can go from being quasi-animate agglomerations of proteins that can make crude copies of themselves... to being an actual life-form, sentient or not, micro- or macroscopic.
I know the electron cloud is responsible for a lot of the properties of matter -- such as the transparancy of the solid made from silicon and oxygen, or the glitter of gold. But how much that may affect "life", I don't know. It's a subject I periodically delve into, doing as much heavy thinking as I can before my nose starts to bleed. If our consciousness is a constantly fading and renewing picture painted by electrical charges across synapses, that's one thing. But I'm curious at the moment to learn what prompts crude proteins to start copying themselves with available free amino acids...
--Jonah
Posted by djewell (Member # 1111) on :
Krauss talks about this subject in "The Physics of Star Trek." He says:
quote:Perhaps the most fascinating question about beaming--one that is usually not even addressed--is, What comprises a human being? Are we merely the sum of all our atoms? More precisely, if I were to re-create each atom in your body, in precisely the same chemical state of excitation as your atoms are in this moment, would I produce a functionally identical person who has exactly your memories, hopes, dreams, and spirit? There is every reason to expect that this would be the case, but it is worth noting that it flies in the face of a great deal of spiritual belief about the existence of a "soul" that is somehow distinct from one's body.
I believe our self-awareness is evidence of a soul. Perhaps, during transport, our soul shuts down. When our bodies are reconstructed, and our heart is coaxed into beating again, they begin operating, creating our soul, much like a virtual machine.
What I mean to say is, the operation of our bodies: electrical synapses and such, cause our soul to exist. We temporarily shut down during transport, although this is contradicted by what we've seen of the Transporter on the screen. ("Realm of Fear," The Wrath of Khan)
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
The problem is that Kraus is trying to explain things with real world physics as much as possible, which states that the cellular information is essentially copied, wheras the Trek tech explanation is pseudo-science, and states that the cells and particles are actually moved.
Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
Exactly. Which is why I couldn't read the rest of the chapter on transporters, or take the rest of the book seriously if he misunderstood that basic a Treknological premise.
--Jonah
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
Uh, the book uses Star Trek as a jumping off point to talk about actual science. Faulting it for not being a "nonfiction" fiction book ala the TNG technical manual is hardly fair.
Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
Well, I've had the physics of Superman book for a while now, and the author of that one treats the subject seriously. He looks at what scenarios would have produced a world like Krypton, a race like the Kryptonians, and how the difference in suns/planets would allow for something like Superman to happen.
Then there are the Star Trek and Star Wars versions, that are very bad. The only redeeming part of the Star Wars book is the chapter on hyperspace. She spends the whole chapter on lightsabers trying to figure out how to get a laser beam to self-terminate a meter from the hilt. GNAAAARR!!! Repeat after me: Lightsabers are NOT optical phenomena. Yeesh.
The Star Trek one does exactly what you say. That's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for one that looks at what might possibly allow for what we see on the show, without falling back on our stone knives and bearskins. Ironically, I much prefer William Fucking Shatner's "I'm Working on That". THAT book treats the subject seriously.
If it's a treatise on contemporary science, then don't use a flawed understanding of Treknology as a springboard. That's just insulting...
--Jonah
Posted by Mountain Man (Member # 1114) on :
The Transporter and the Replicator both had their beginings in an episode of the outer limits.Scotty in fact was in that episode.Any thing could be reduced to a punch card.When energy was given the right pattern solid matter was the result.It worked on living things as well.A dog was killed, the dogs pattern had been stored in a small device by a little girl.When the dogs pattern was fed into the machine the dog was recreated as a living copy of itself,Identical to what it had been at the time the recording was made.In the TOS transporter solid matter was converted to energy.The Hiesenberg compensator made up for any lack of certainty about the measurement and recording of the data.The pattern buffer prevented degradation or corruption of the pattern.Containment fields reduced scattering due to outside influences.Any lost matter/energy was made up by boosting the signal.According to ancient Roman law no man was the same man after seven years because they believed that the body replaced its basic elements during that time.(don't know how they came to that conclusion)The soul is what made the man not the body.That part of man has yet to be defined much less measured.Doesn't give an answer but there it is folks.P.S. A version of the Hiesenberg compensator has been created to duplicate laser light sources by transmission of data around the world.There are machines used to make perfect 3D images using focused multible lasers to heat the surface of a pattern inside a container of liquid plastic.
Posted by Mountain Man (Member # 1114) on :
Hate to double post but the Light saber should be separate.The light saber is a contained laser beam.Conventional Lasers get their power from being reflected back and forth inside a solid transparent rod silvered at each end.One reflective surface is thinner and slightly more light permeable.When the light stream reaches the maximum power it penetrates the less reflective end,emerging as a coherent pulse of energetic photons.The light saber uses force fields instead of solid rods.The beam is contained until the beam touches the material to be cut.Its like the difference between an air chisel and a jigsaw.Similar in principle but different in application.
Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
It's not a laser. It casts a shadow, it blocks another lightsaber blade, it generally behaves like an object with mass, not a massless beam of energetic photons.
There was a wonderful web page that dealt with just this question, but it is currently down. Went through all the possibilities and ended up with the best guess based on observed properties.
That being: a lightsaber blade is a one-dimensional force field spinning at near lightspeed. The spin produces virtual photons that rapidly decay. This is why a lightsaber blade is very bright at the core, but the intensity falls off geometrically as you move out from the core, hence why a lightsaber doesn't illumnate a room or even nearby objects.
The spinning blade also disrupts the electron clouds of the matter it impacts, resulting in heat-like effects without being hot itself, hence cauterized wounds. Metals have more free electrons than non-metals, which is why the lightsaber doesn't have as pronounced an effect on armour or blast doors. Hence glancing off Vader's shoulder armour, and the time it took Qui-Gon to melt through the blast door.
An additional side effect of the rapidly spinning force field is an intense gyroscopic effect. A lightsaber won't want to move, and when you do get it to move, it won't necessarily want to move in the direction you want, or stop where you want it to. This is why the Jedi, with their Force-enhanced strength and dexterity, are about the only ones who can wield them with any skill (Han gutting a tauntaun with a single two-handed swipe doesn't count ).
This is all bleeding-edge theoretical physics coupled with basic Star Wars assumptions (compact power cell, force fields). I don't know where West End Games (the originators of the jewel-focussed blade model) pulled their lightsaber theory from, but it was probably the same place they got the eight-kilometer Super Star Destroyer. None of the original source material mentions gems, jewels, or crystals beyond Lucas' description of the jewel-decorated hilt in his Star Wars novelization -- but the rest of that description used the dropped first-draft saber design (one-handed hilt capped with a ten-centimeter-diameter polished disc) so I don't cling to stringently to it.
There is, however, no problem with using crystals to regulate the output from the power cell to the array of force field generators at the top of the hilt. The more crystals, the more precise you can make the blade. I imagine something to do with the number of crystals regulating pulses and the number and capacity of the field generators are what determine a lightsaber's colour.
And now back to your regularly-scheduled Trek...
--Jonah
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
The Real Physics At Work In Star Trek would be a very short and uninteresting book.
Posted by Mountain Man (Member # 1114) on :
When Star Wars first came out, the Light Saber was explained in the same way that I discribed.The actual effect was produced by Using an electric motor in the handle to spin a rod covered with reflective tape, a light being shone on the spinning rod.the rod was removed and replaced by a stage hand while the actor froze in position while the camera was cut off.The Discription that you have given appears to be a way to explain away the manner in which the prop saber reacts as a physical object rather than a beam of light as originaly planned.The compressed Photon beam might well react in the manner discribed It is still unclear how Photons mannage to move at the speed of light(being light)and still possess mass without breaking Ensteins rule . The intense magnetic field required to contain and reflect an energetic Photon stream would in itself effect whatever it touched like a physical object.My explaination is just the original one.I had not heard of any further attempts to give a scientfic reason for why the blade acts and reacts as a solid blade would.The magnetic fields of this kind are similar to those used to contain plasma in fusion reactors.That technology was not widely known at the time Star Wars came out.The light from the saber does not raditate from the side away from the lamp, and therefore it cast a shadow and does not illuminate anything behind it.The reflector tape is the same type as used on mail boxes and bicyles.One thing I like about that movie is how they got around lack of cash after blowing most of the special effects budget on the space battles.It's full of low cost but very effective stuff like the light saber.
[ September 01, 2003, 01:18 AM: Message edited by: Mountain Man ]
Posted by Cartman (Member # 256) on :
Photons do not possess mass (at least, not rest mass).
Posted by Mountain Man (Member # 1114) on :
Thats always been one of the mysteries.How can an object tranfer energy if it has no mass.Recently they have been talking about the force of gravity being governed by the speed of light.I'm about twenty years behind on the science of all this as it is.Some of the stuff they talk about now(real science,not techno babble)just doesn't seem to match up.Of course that has always been true about any advance in science.Still Photons deliver kinetic energy.Light pressure.No way around that.P.S. when you think about it a Photon can't remain a Photon without motion.It would be something else then.
Posted by Cartman (Member # 256) on :
"How can an object tranfer energy if it has no mass."
Because photons have an impulse p=E/c, where E=(h*c)/l (the relationship between energy and wavelength). Mass is just another form of energy.
[ September 01, 2003, 12:56 PM: Message edited by: Cartman ]
Posted by Mountain Man (Member # 1114) on :
Like I said this is all greek to me.I did find a website that trys to break it down in laymans terms.Not that they have much chance of that.Anyway the model you use here seems to be the Dirac.I'm still not sure about the whole thing but it seems to be that the momentum and spin give the Photon it's existance.Then it all seems to lead back to Heisenbergs uncertainty.No wonder Trek gets into all the techno babble the real answers are even harder to believe.Wild how the spin is not really a spin.I heard once that Chinese was the only language flexable enough to explain Physics. Maybe they were on to something there.
Posted by Guardian 2000 (Member # 743) on :
The lightsaber page you're thinking of is Bob Brown's. Unfortunately, his predominantly "Movie Purist" stance made him the sworn enemy of some SW fan groups (a condition with which I am familiar). He eventually tired of both the battles and Star Wars, and shut down his site in February.
Anywho, here's a "Wayback Machine" version of that page:
Man that dude has really put a lot of thought into reverse engineering the Light Saber.Really though it was originally meant to be a laser sword just as I discribed.The special effects that had been planned for it just did not work out in practice.Personally I like the less is more approach to special effects.Seeing a good job done under adverse conditions makes the whole thing that much more enjoyable.Shoveling money at a problem ends up with every thing being remembered as a white elephant like "Cleopatra" or any Kevin Costner Movie.As long as you don't end up with another "Plan 9" or "Robot Monster" you are ahead of the game.
Posted by Bernd (Member # 6) on :
quote:The problem is that Kraus is trying to explain things with real world physics as much as possible, which states that the cellular information is essentially copied, wheras the Trek tech explanation is pseudo-science, and states that the cells and particles are actually moved.
Exactly. But it's not that the Trek approach is necessarily less realistic. Krauss makes a very fundamental error when he assumes that all particles are actually stored. We know that they are not (the exception of "Our Man Bashir" came later). No one less than Rick Sternbach once wrote in a newsgroup that the transporter is working like a TV broadcast, not like a video recorder. And I may add, not like a *digital* video recorder, which is exactly what Krauss assumes.
BTW, even if Krauss were right with his assumption, I can't follow his argument where he ridicules the principle by stating that light years of staggered hard disks would be needed for that purpose. But a memory cell may and will be as small as one atom some day. The pattern tank, if it really were something like a computer memory, has an absolutely realistic size to store one or a few human atomic patterns.
Posted by Mountain Man (Member # 1114) on :
In one of the TOS novels part of the crew were sent on what was basicly a suicide mission. None of the original matter survived transport but the pattern with missing parts filled in from the logs was used to rebuild them as complete people. It was disscussed as to whether they were actually the same person and in this story at least they were accepted to be the same. The pattern was considered to be the person. Not sure if that makes any sense or not and it was never really explained to my satisfaction. They seem to have meant for this to be used as another Dues Ex Machina to resurect characters lost along the way.
Posted by CaptainMike20X6 (Member # 709) on :
of course, that novel has nothing to do with the way it actually happens on Star Trek. it was just a non-canon novel
*sorry
Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
Not so much that, as it was one of the lame early-to-mid novels in the TOS line. They've had some clinkers in there...
--Jonah
P.S. My all-time "goat" award goes to David Bischoff for the TNG novel "Grounded", where not only do none of the characters sound right, but he has Picard impatiently waiting outside the main shuttlebay for the doors to close and the bay to repressurize. And yes, this is after the TNG TM was published.
Posted by Ultra Magnus (Member # 239) on :
Whoa, nelly. Hold on.
Lame Star Trek Novels?!!?
Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
*chuckle* Hard as it may be to believe, Magnus.
Careful, I think someone's left your sarcasm valve open a bit too far in recent weeks. Hate to see you have a meltdown.
--Jonah
Posted by CaptainMike20X6 (Member # 709) on :
i'm not trying to be negative, anyone who reads my site knows i'm a big supporter of extra-canonical trek.. but its ridiculous concepts like those old novels that make people not want to follow them in the first place, since they have nothing in common with the source material, desite saying STAR TREK on the cover...
Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
. damn good, i thought, as was the second. Although the bookshops can't seem to make up their minds as to whether AC is sci-fi or crime.
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
).