Tractor Beam Today, Transporter Tomorrow

[Ben]

Interesting article on "tractor beam" experiments. Given the need to have the transport mechanism enveloped in a (super?) heated medium, I wonder how much energy would be needed and heat produced to move say, a car.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/09/08/tractor-beams-real/?test=latestnews

[AJ Dual]

Actually, the transporter (quantum tunneling, and teleportation) has already been demonstrated in the lab a few years ago.

Unfortunately, these effects are not possible on macro-scaled objects. The amount of energy to heat the air to move something like a person or a car, would just incinerate or destroy it first. And it would be pretty explosive and nasty in the process.

In the same vein as to how the X and gamma-ray pulse from a nuclear bomb moves the air by heating it to a few million degrees...

Another effect is a kind of levitation called optical trapping, where particles can be held in a standing-wave like effect in a laser when the particle size interacts with the wavelength in the right way.

Unfortunately, macro-scale objects don't correspond to the wavelength sizes of anything but very long wave radio emissions.

All these micro-scale and quantum technical marvels, almost none of them scale up to have a direct measurable effect in the larger world. (kicks at the dirt...) Which sucks... 

[Seenterman]

I can haz deflektor shieldz?

[Ben]

Actually, the transporter (quantum tunneling, and teleportation) has already been demonstrated in the lab a few years ago.

Was that straight transport in linear time and all? I thought I saw something a while back about quantum movement experiments at UC Santa Barbara but they were talking space / time shifts. Two places at once, jumping into a parallel /  alternate universe, etc.

I figured the tractor beam heat production would be enormous. Too bad it couldn't work in space (as of now I guess) if enough energy could be produced.

[AJ Dual]

Was that straight transport in linear time and all? I thought I saw something a while back about quantum movement experiments at UC Santa Barbara but they were talking space / time shifts. Two places at once, jumping into a parallel /  alternate universe, etc.

I figured the tractor beam heat production would be enormous. Too bad it couldn't work in space (as of now I guess) if enough energy could be produced.

Well technically, quantum tunneling is probably more akin to what people think of as "teleportation" than what is called quantum teleportation.

Quantum teleportation is really the teleportation of information (a quantum entangled state) at instantaneous/FTL speeds, however the whole system overall is not FTL, because a particle (a photon) that's part of the entangled system still must travel at relativistic light speed.

Tunneling is the attribute that due to the uncertainty principle, a particle can simply "get through" a barrier that it's classical Einsteinian/Newtonian energy could not get it through. So if electrons approach or are next to some kind of barrier that they have insufficient potential of whatever kind, electrical, kinetic etc... they just "get over there" anyway because of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

If you think of an electron not as a a "billiard ball" but as a probability cloud, when that electron approaches a "wall" of some sort, the probability cloud's edge actually passes through the barrier to a degree before it "bounces" or interacts with that wall in whatever way it was going to. But since that probability cloud has X-probability the electron actually is/was in the part of the cloud that passed through the barrier, so did the actual electron.  

It's becoming an issue in IC design, because after a certain lower limit on the size of  microns in the silicon pathways, the electrons can just "jump" through quantum tunneling over to another path, and disrupt the AND/OR gate functions etc. Although, there's some ideas out there that actually might someday attempt to exploit this, allowing circuit paths with no connections at all in some places. Although the industry will probably have to figure out high frequency X or gamma ray lithography or other chip assembly methods to produce structures in the 3nm range where quantum tunneling begins to happen with sufficient regularity.

And yes, it's a probability exercise, but one that can be proven experimentally. And the multiple infinite universes satisfy the quantum randomness, in that all outcomes do happen, just that each one happens in it's own universe.

[Scout26]

^^^^^
OWOWOWOWOWOW


I don't need to know HOW my phaser works. I just want it TO work !!!

[Viking]

I can haz deflektor shieldz?

I can haz phasers set to "disintegrate"?

[Hawkmoon]

I can haz phasers set to "disintegrate"?

No, if memory serves the two options for phasers were "Stun" and "Kill."

[taurusowner]

No, if memory serves the two options for phasers were "Stun" and "Kill."

Au contraire.  Settings 1-3 are for stunning, 4-5 thermal effects, and 6-16 are for disruption/disintegration.

http://www.phasers.net/2360/settings.htm

[Scout26]

From the above link:

The 22nd-century phase pistol, however, had only two settings, "stun" and "kill."

 

[taurusowner]

Ah yes, the Enterprise precursor the the Phaser.  Close, but not quite the same thing 

[kgbsquirrel]

So, what I gleaned from all that was that the instantaneous transfer of matter assorted in a certain fashion (Little Timmy) isn't feasible right now, but we are getting close to a means of FTL communication?

[AJ Dual]

So, what I gleaned from all that was that the instantaneous transfer of matter assorted in a certain fashion (Little Timmy) isn't feasible right now, but we are getting close to a means of FTL communication?

The transfer of the quantum state is instantaneous/FTL, but the particles that interact to create the quantum entanglement still must travel at light speed or less.

It has great applications for quantum computing, which one day could be scary-powerful... but real-time phone calls to your family who went off to settle Alpha Centauri, nope.  

Think of it as an instantaneous email, but you have to save it on a flash-drive and put it in the snail-mail.

[Scout26]

Ah yes, the Enterprise precursor the the Phaser.  Close, but not quite the same thing 

I distinctly recall in several episodes of Kirk ordering Phasers being set to either Stun or Kill.  Never heard him or anyone else state of imply an other settings.



(Oh great, I'm in a nerd fight.)

[AJ Dual]

The old cliche of Star Trek characters setting phasers to 'overload' and blowing stuff up as IED's is one of the few areas where the writers really did explore the ramifications of all the technology they put on the screen.

Anything that could fit in your hand, but was able to produce a beam of energy powerful enough to vaporize an entire humanoid creature, that power source would make a pretty decent bomb too.  

Hell, under the right circumstances, one of today's lithium batteries gone bad can blow apart a flashlight like a small hand grenade or blow off the end cap with force similar to a bullet/slug, and go through walls.

The transporter was born of the fact that Roddenberry could not get the budget for enough plywood and Christmas lights to make the shuttlecraft the first season. That piece of tech became a McGuffin plot device that crippled the show creatively. And it's ramifications were never truly explored. Throwing the ship's garbage, sewage, or the occasional red-shirt crew-member and not re-materializing it would prouce enough energy to run the Enterprise for years, or make one hell of a weapon, on the order of a Death Star.  

[TommyGunn]

.....The transporter was born of the fact that Roddenberry could not get the budget for enough plywood and Christmas lights to make the shuttlecraft the first season. That piece of tech became a McGuffin plot device that crippled the show creatively. And it's ramifications were never truly explored. Throwing the ship's garbage, sewage, or the occasional red-shirt crew-member and not re-materializing it would prouce enough energy to run the Enterprise for years, or make one hell of a weapon, on the order of a Death Star.  

   Enough of the "red shirts" died without being .... "offed."   
I am always entertained by discussions about Star Trek Tech.  One physicist pointed out in some commentary that the tech was inconsistant; some of it was much more highly advanced than others.
Well, Duuuhhhh. United FEDERATION of Planets.  It seems perfectly reasonable to me that would come to pass.

I recall when the show aired .... Roddenberry  and the producers were being swamped with unsolicited manuscripts -- all of which had to be returned ... unread ... unopened.  He finally came up with a gimick called the "STar Trek Writer's Bible" or something like that.  It was how to write Trek.  The "Great Bird of the Galaxy" just wanted to tell fast paced stories (morality plays as he put it).  As the "Bible" explained, Sgt. Friday never stopped to explain how a .38 snubbie worked, it just worked.  Captain Kirk does not 'splain how his phaser works, how the transporter or the tractor beams work, how FTL works.  They just work.   The tech wasn't the point  the story was.
It wasn't really until "the Next Generation" came along that things got so heavy into "technobabble."   
The transporter beam presented a problem as represented by the Hiesenberg Principle, hence the invention of the "Hiesenberg Compensator."  And so forth.   

[AJ Dual]

The tough part though is that the Heisenberg Compensator needs to be made out of non-quantum matter.

You have to sift through about 30k Mt of regular quantum matter to find just one microgram of non-quantum matter.

Running the Fermilab accelerator for ten years only produced about one picogram (10^-12th) of a gram of non-quantum protons, (not even complete atoms) and the Penning trap only held it for a month before testing confirmed it was gone. 

[Antibubba]

Non-quantum matter?   

[seeker_two]

The "Great Bird of the Galaxy" just wanted to tell fast paced stories (morality plays as he put it).  As the "Bible" explained, Sgt. Friday never stopped to explain how a .38 snubbie worked, it just worked.  Captain Kirk does not 'splain how his phaser works, how the transporter or the tractor beams work, how FTL works.  They just work.   The tech wasn't the point  the story was.
It wasn't really until "the Next Generation" came along that things got so heavy into "technobabble."   

This is much of the reason I liked the original ST series and the Star Wars movies....you didn't need a two-minute explanation of the modifications needed to the main deflector dish in order to blast something....you just blasted something... 

Deep Space Nine was better in this regard than the other "next generation" series.....

[Scout26]

As the "Bible" explained, Sgt. Friday never stopped to explain how a .38 snubbie worked, it just worked.  Captain Kirk does not 'splain how his phaser works, how the transporter or the tractor beams work, how FTL works.  They just work.   The tech wasn't the point  the story was.

Hence my quote:

I don't need to know HOW my phaser works. I just want it TO work !!!

I think we've squared this circle. 

[makattak]

Hence my quote:

I think we've squared this circle. 

Nope.

http://www.physorg.com/news203058163.html

Scientists examine possibility of a phonon laser, or 'phaser'

Now we've squared it.

[MechAg94]

The problem I had with the Next Generation is that when they started into the techno-babble, they could do just about anything possible.  Yet they couldn't seem to produce shields that could stand up to their most likely enemies or keep lesser advanced races from inventing some beam that went right through their shields.  Why would you build shields that can be bypassed by destructive beams if the enemy just has a 10 digit code or something? 

[MechAg94]

Au contraire.  Settings 1-3 are for stunning, 4-5 thermal effects, and 6-16 are for disruption/disintegration.

http://www.phasers.net/2360/settings.htm

Unless the enemy they are fighting isn't a wimp and then the highest setting doesn't work at all and more red-shirts get killed. 

The complete lack of marines or infantry equipment on that show is a major gap IMO.

[Ben]

The complete lack of marines or infantry equipment on that show is a major gap IMO.

Though there were no marines in it, one of the better episodes was "Arena" (after the Fredrick Brown short story). When they were under attack at the outpost, they found and used (I forget what they called it) some kind of photon grenade launcher.

Also it was AJ's reference to lithium batteries that reminded me of this episode. The enemy overloads Spock's tricorder and it blows up with a little bang, almost like a laptop would. :)

Speaking of tricorders and Science Fiction becoming reality, there's an App called "Tricorder" out for smartphones. Besides "regular" stuff like giving you distance to cell towers and GPS sat info, it also measures acoustics, magnetic flux, gravity (as acceleration), and some other neat stuff. I find it to be a really cool "everyday" example of how Science Fiction can drive science and technology.

[AJ Dual]

Non-quantum matter?