The Theory of Nothing

Could a Star Trek transporter work?

Could a Star Trek transporter work?

This is a question that only a Trekie would appreciate, but it dose present some interesting scientific issues.

The Star Trek transporter is much the same kind of device that is used in the Movie ‘The Fly.’ The technology goes something like this. An object to be transported is broken down to the quantum level and the pattern that the atoms had in the object are transmitted and reconstituted in the transporter receiver. This is accomplished in real time and uses a Heisenberg Compensator to avoid uncertainty. As you know, the Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal is accepted as the basis of quantum physics and it states that one cannot know the position and the energy level of a particle at the same time. The transporter device also uses a computer pattern buffer to enable some leeway in the process. The key point here is that the pattern of the object is stored in a computer.

Actually, the original plot had the Enterprise landing on a planet, but this was considered too difficult to portray so they chose the transporter idea as an easier process to film.

But, would a transporter concept work?

There are several problems with this idea. First of all, a computer that would store the complete quantum patterns of an individual would have be more powerful and have more memory than all of the computers on this planet times a million. However, being that Star Trek is set in the future, this might be possible. Since the computer that could do this would be super as in super large, it may not fit on a spaceship. Again, who knows what they could develop in the future.

The main problem with the transporter idea is--I hate to say this--entropy. It’s easy to destroy things because entropy helps, but putting it back together would require a lot of energy, more energy than a starship could muster. The reason for this is Einstein’s E equals M times C squared. Converting energy to matter would be like exploding a whole bunch of hydrogen bombs at the same time. This same problem would make a replicator hard to make. That’s the device that people on the Enterprise used to make food, coffee and booze by converting energy to matter.

I believe that the most serious problem would be the question of what to do with the person’s soul. In the transporter, you’re essentially replicating a person, reconstituting them from a stored computer database containing their atomic pattern. Would this be the same person or a clone? Would the soul leave the dissembled body and then renter the replicated body? These are serious questions that have no real answers. Remember the first season Star Trek episode ‘The Enemy Within’ in which Kirk is split into two persons during a transport. One personality is evil, and the other is meek. Spock comes to the conclusion that a great leader like the Captain has a personality with both traits. This brings into question: what happened to Kirk’s soul when this split happened?

I’m not sure that I would want to say: “Beam me up Scotty.”

Thanks for reading.