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Teleportation and Sci-Fi Physics
Diggx
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Alright
The other day I was telling someone that matter does not actually make contact (it is only the result of protons repelling each other). They asked how sound is made. The example used was a car accident. How do these repelling protons make noise??? I am very naive when it comes to these things... Can someone please explain in layman terms.
The other day I was telling someone that matter does not actually make contact (it is only the result of protons repelling each other). They asked how sound is made. The example used was a car accident. How do these repelling protons make noise??? I am very naive when it comes to these things... Can someone please explain in layman terms.
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But if you want to get into the general "what causes air to behave that way", then your best bet is going to be the electromagnetic force. The nuclear forces only have much effect on the really small subatomic or nuclear scales, while gravity only has much effect on the large scale. Most of the stuff in between is mostly dependent upon the interaction between charges, such between the electrons and protons in atoms.
Theoretically, if you spent infinity trying to put your hand through your desk, there's a chance the atoms could line up and allow your hand through
shut up, i've been trying for years to run through a wall and now you're telling me there might not be a chance?
asshole
Sound isn't really atoms banging against each other, because things at that scale don't really work the same way as billiard balls. Think about it this way: sound is really just certain frequencies of pressure waves of air that interact with your eardrum and your brain then detects. Stuff banging together (or strumming or vibrating, or whatever) creates these pressure waves in the air.
And it's a general rule that, unless somethings specifically forbidden, it'll probably happen.
Positrons were basically discoverd because Dirac realised that in the E=mc^2... formula that everyone knows is actually E=sqrt(m^2c^4...) so the energy of an electron could be -mc^2.
In short, current theory says, "just keep trying". Maybe if you run extra hard...
The pressure is actually the EM force. It's just that when we deal with it in the bulk scale, it's easier to treat it as billiard balls because the maths is easier.
As such, they can propogate a wave of force just as if they were touching.
Proton A shifts to the left and the force that repels it from Proton B (or whatever) causes B to shift as well.
In actuality I don't think it would mechanically move one after the other like that, but that's the general idea.
Imagine two repelling magnets - motive force you apply to one transfers across the field to the other, and so pushing one causes the other to move, regardless of whether or not they are touching. Force is the key (be it electromagnetic, mechanical, subatomic, whatever), not whether or not things are touching.
Does having two particles 'touch' even have a real meaning?
Well, there's always fusion and quantum overlap. I guess that these are as good an analogy as any in terms of having atoms "touch".
I get this " holy crap " feeling and then smart smart comes!
Plus, heisenberg compensators lolol.
Wow, that's really cool. I've always heard that information traveled through the nervous system as electricity, but the idea that information is carried through our bodies by sound particles sounds much more science-y.
For a nerve, the ionic charge difference is so small and the current produced so tiny it doesn't really go very far at all, so there's a series of bands around the nerve that produce builds ups of the charge that get triggered like circuit boosters when the head of the nerve fires. Nerves without these myelin sheaths don't communicate very fast at all and are the source of the throbbing sensation you get when you burn yourself and the reason it doesn't start throbbing until several seconds afterwards.
You get the initial sharp pain (nerves with myelin sheathes firing and the pain shooting quickly to the brain) and then the throb (the slow ass non myelin sheathed nerves catching up several seconds later).
What I meant really is that if we had nerves that could carry a full potential along its entire length without much resistance, like a copper wire, we could dodge bullets.
Nerves are just the really long tail ends of specialised Neurons and we use identical if shorter versions to do the thunking. So if you want to take it all the way the things we'd be using to feel overwhelmed by would be running at the same speed as the sensory input. Presumably the synapses would be more efficient as well. So no, not really.
This is besides the point though?
If transportation was possible in the sense that all the molecules in your body were dissassembled and then reassembled perfectly in another place, would you still be you?
Not to distract the thread but it's something i've always wondered about. Another one is how does the body transform those molecules pulsing onto your eardrum into such a complex variation of sounds and levels?
It's not really a 'sound particle' as much as a discrete packet of energy. The energy creates a vibration in what you'd think of as particles, but it's not a particle itself.
i feel like we've been over this before
as in, disregarded it as a gross misunderstanding of the original research
Point to the specific reference?
I'm confused as to what you're arguing against.
Oh, sorry - i was referring just to the stuff about nerves transmitting information via phonons or solitons and so on. The rest is cool.
I can't really comment on how the brain might for soliton waves at the cellular level between nerves, but I believe phonons are still the correct term for the energy transfer.
A phonon isn't necessarily sound, it can be heat as well.
It's energy on the lowest end of the spectrum.
Actually, no - tunnelling is a different concept. On a macroscopic level like a hand going through a desk, it's just a matter of the probability of the arrangements of atoms (or even just molecules) being such that they don't affect each other enough.
It's certainly possible (well, not necessarily "perfectly," as is claimed in Star Trek, I believe, by compensating for the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle, but close enough that nobody could tell the difference). But whether it's you depends on what you consider "counts" as "you." Lots of definition of terms needed there.
Use the analogy of ship - if a ship leaves port and on its long journey replaces every piece of wood it's made of, is it still the same ship when it docks back in the original port again? It also depends on whether "you" as an "observer" is really something moving through spacetime through the arrangement of molecules that constitute your body will count as the same observer if that specific arrangement of molecules is or isn't contiguous in three dimensions. My unproveable and somewhat based in pseudo-science and metaphysics and somewhat based in "real science" is yes. It gets even blurrier if you wonder what would happen if you WEREN'T broken down and the other body was still there - would "you" be in two places at once, or would you have a perfect clone who just has all "your" memories and you your seperate ways? There's a lot about the nature of the "oberver" that, as far as I know, has not been established with any real certainty, and involves too much metaphysics and not enough real physics (so far).
It's one of those "really good questions" that still stumps pretty much everybody, and probably will until it's no longer a hypothetical situation and can be conducted experimentally. Heck, we might even live to see it, at the rate technology is improving and lifespan is increasing - some people living today might "never" die (well, at least never die of anything short of being atomized).
All the particles in your body are replaced every seven years or so it's already happened to you a bunch or times.
Really? Even the brain and heart?
According to New Scientist the average age of your body is 15 and a half years, and regenerating brain cells have been observed.
Your heart cells are replaced just like any other muscle in your body, though I have no article for you on that one.
On the subject of transportation/teleportation/whatever I would say it is entirely possible so long as the body could be reconstructed EXACTLY as it was and that would mean maintaining charges, pressures and motions.
In other words it's impossible according to the uncertainty principle.
One thing it's important to remember is that there's no such thing as a particle or a wave. Nobodys ever SEEN one. They are only models that have been developed that fit observation and enable predictions to be made. The map is not the territory. The simple fact that current science states that "sometimes light acts as particle and other times as waves and it's more useful to use one or the other in various settings" makes it pretty obvious to me that quantum theory, particles/waves, ect are just abstract conceptualizations to predict the behavior of something more fundamental that we haven't wrapped our brains around yet.
It's why the mainstream is warming up to string theory, at least as a conceptual model. It incorporates aspects of both systems, and falls more in line with the mathematics used to describe them both, even if it hasn't seen rigorous testing. A string would be the shortest distance between adjacent points (0.9R = 1), hence an indivisible infinitesimal.
As for quantum teleportation... if they told you that the teleportation required the creation of a perfect clone of you on the far side of the teleportation gate, and that after the 'magic' had occurred the original was vaporized... would you still go through with it?
What if you'd already been teleported and hadn't known this was the standard operating procedure? And you were thousands of lightyears away by the fastest conventional spaceship. Would you be able to step back in through the gate to see your friends and family, knowing that it would only be a perfect clone of you on the other side?
Did someone just watch The Prestige?
Ages ago.
Although the question itself is much older than that movie.