The 'official technobable' says that transporters dematerialize the person and beam their molecules to the target, for dematerialization (simple explanation, for comparison).
I came up with a logical explanation for Transports. The transporter beam doesn't dematerialize, it puts the object or person is a bubble of Subspace and moves it to the other location, then phases it back in. That would be a fairly simple outgrowth of warp drive technology and would even explain what we see on screen, in Star Trek.
Posted by Ritten (Member # 417) on :
Works for me.
Except that canon has already established the former...
Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
New form of transporter?
And are the MOLECULES beamed - I thought it was converted to a form of ENERGY... otherwise the molecules might be dispersed... and you can't send molecules along circuitary.
Posted by TheWoozle (Member # 929) on :
I don't think anybody really agrees on exactly how the 'cannon' explination of how it works.
Posted by Aban Rune (Member # 226) on :
The most one screen info probably comes from the Barclay episodes. But even that is likely open to interpretation. One could reference the Tech Manuals, but they aren't necessarily canon.
Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
Matter is an alternate form of energy -- the two are interchangable under the right conditions. The transporter maps and breaks down the transportee at the quantum level (not molecular -- that's a replicator), sends the phased matter stream to the destination, and reconstructs it in its original state.
This requires two things (besides probably a prodigious amount of energy): lots of computer memory and processing power, and a way to circumvent the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
The first problem is somewhat alleviated by having the computer add temporary tags to the quanta as they're phased so they "remember" the quanta they're supposed to be near. Think of it as a person being broken down into one reeeeaally long string, with each quantum element holding hands with its original neighbours. As the person is reformed at the destination the "tags" dissipate once the quanta slot back into place. This saves the computer having to actually map and remember the locations of every quark, muon, meson, boson, etc., in the transportee. Which brings us to...
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that you can never simultaneously know the location and action of a quantum element. The act of observation affects it, and it will either not be where its motion would have indicated, or its action will be redirected from where it is at the time of observation. You can know where it is or where it's going, but not both -- to oversimplify. Trek transporters have something called a Heisenberg Compensator that sidesteps this problem, the exact mechanism of which isn't known, but probably has something to do with the scanning and tagging method described above. But that's bleeding-edge theoretical physics that we're only now scratching the surface of...
--Jonah
P.S. All that said, transporters do have to have subspace fields in the confinement beam so apparant FTL phenomena in the phased matter stream can't "break" relativistic considerations. Note this doesn't actually push the transporter beam into subspace -- that's a subspace transporter -- but works more like the driver coils in a ship's impulse engines.
Posted by TheWoozle (Member # 929) on :
I still like my idea better.
Posted by MarianLH (Member # 1102) on :
quote:Originally posted by TheWoozle: I came up with a logical explanation for Transports. The transporter beam doesn't dematerialize, it puts the object or person is a bubble of Subspace and moves it to the other location, then phases it back in. That would be a fairly simple outgrowth of warp drive technology and would even explain what we see on screen, in Star Trek.
I like it. Original and imaginative, and it avoids some problems the official explanation has--like how people can talk, move their heads, or fire Veron-T disruptors--while supposedly dematerialized.
Marian
Posted by Ritten (Member # 417) on :
and how a guy can run amok on the E-D and transporters can't get a lock.....
Posted by Woodside Kid (Member # 699) on :
Perhaps subspace manipulation is the key to the Heisenberg Compensator. There's a line in Isaac Asimov's novelization of Fantastic Voyage where he tries to give a plausable-sounding explanation for how miniaturization works. Objects being miniaturized are manipulated as three-dimensional images using a form of energy not part of normal spacetime. Subspace might allow the compensator to work in a similar way. Just as a four-dimensional being could see inside and outside of a human being simultaneously, it could be that scanning a person from a higher-dimensional space could sidestep the limitations of the Uncertainty Principle. From the right vantage point outside normal spacetime, an object's subatomic structure and motion might be observable as a seamless whole within a reasonable amount of time.