Conversion of Energy into Matter

Whitestar

I recently read an article on the net about the conversion of energy into matter. Michael Pidwirny, the guy who wrote it claimed that it might one day be a useful means of teleportation like in Star Trek. Here is a direct quote from him:

"In 1998 researchers at Stanford University's Linear Accelerator Center successfully converted energy into matter. This feat was accomplished by using lasers and incredibly strong electromagnetic fields to change ordinary light into matter. The results of this experiment may allow for the development of variety of technological gadgets. One such development could be matter/energy transporters or food replicators that are commonly seen in some of our favorite science fiction programs."

And here is the website: http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/6a.html

Okay, here's my two cents worth. If the mass of a person is converted into energy in an uncontrolled way (eg, collision with a very large amount of antimatter, destroying every proton, neutron and electron in your body) then the information that is encoded on the gamma rays (usually) released will be lost.

In a controlled conversion, you could in principle convert the entire body to energy one particle at a time, and then read off the whole state and transmit it. But there are two problems with this:

1) A tremendous amount of data needs to be sent. In "The Physics of Star Trek" author Lawerence Krauss calculates the approximate amount, about 10,000 light-years to the center of the galaxy!

2) The amount of time this takes.

However, current thought in neuroscience is that the "personailty/consciousness" is not at all QM, and thus there is no need to break someone down to a subatomic level and read their Quantum State. Instead, it is simply enough to know there chemical structure - and copy it at that resolution. This means there are no "no cloning" problems, much less data to handle, and no need to destroy the original (given sufficient technology to do the scanning). This would allow you to create "clones" - you could send copies of yourself "over the radio", while you stay safe at home. (Greg Egan's Diaspora talks about this at an AI level - the AI programs clone themselves and send themselves all over the place)

Now if you turn each person into energy, you get a cloud of gamma rays expanding outwards. There is nothing that would make them spontaneously reform the person - even if you reflected them backwards, they would not neccessarily create the original particles. It is much more likely that teleportation would involve sending the information that can be gleaned from the gamma rays, and then having the information used by a base station to construct the person, more mechanically.

In my view, when your body is destroy, you die. End of story. What comes out of the teleporter is an exact copy, with all your memories etc, and no knowledge that it isn't you, but it isn't. No one would ever notice the problem, so it only affects you when it happens. Unless, if you believe in souls, there are "conservation of souls" problems to deal with - does the same soul follow the body around?

While in an information state, there is no consciousness, no heart to beat - the person is not a person shaped lump of energy, rather they are radio waves carrying info about his state.

What does everybody else thinks?

Whitestar

Mr.Bod

That's really thought provoking stuff. I can't really comment scientifically, but since I'm not a big believer in souls and the like, it seems to me that there is no reason to suggest that the reconstructed/teleported person isn't the same "you" that existed originally.

While we're here, I'll ask a simple physics question. In this energy/mass conversion, does all the energy resulting from mass take the form of gamma rays? What about momentum of particles etcetera?

SkyBoard

I in turn have one concern: as the body of matter becomes one of energy, would not some of that matter be lost by the time the body has undergone rematerialization?

PurplePacifier

starhunter

The trouble is, we don't know what we're getting out of the energy - alot of exotic short-lived particles that have nothing to do with the atoms that compose our bodies. I would not want to try teleportation, it would be a great painless form of capital punishment though!

javier123454321

There is no 100% energy efficient machine, so theoretically wouldn't part of you be wasted?

socratus

I have a question.

Physics law says that no energy can be created or destroyed
but can be changed from one state to the another.

What does " The law of conservation and transformation
energy / mass" mean according to one single electron ?

Jacobas

Energy = Mass times the Speed of Light (C) squared... meaning that if an object is moved at the speed of light... It will become energy. So there is a teleportation theory and a nuclear power statement. The question is how can you reverse this... An object can't move at negative speed, just at different directions...

Slayer501st

plz excuse my poor spelling as it is not my strong point. To who ever wrote the last comment, it stated that they had succsesfully turned energy into matter, and if you could use the newly discovered phase of matter b.e.c. (Bose Einstein Condensation) to slow down light the prosses should be reversed, though thats just a theory. And I theorize that matter is just a mannifested form of energy, so energy would only be matter with fast moving particals that reach a phase where they take on different properties (much like when matter aproaches absolute zero). and i rather turn from using the technology on living things to somthing like changing waste matirials to usable energy or looking at the chemical structure of a vacine and turning it into 1's and zero's so that we could take energy from heat in africa and turn it into matter aranged as the vacine. or supply hospitals or wherever tools that aren readily accesable turn heat from the sun ito oxygen in space or put water on the moon there is alot more to do with this. thats my thoughts, and im glad i had googled my idea and found this thread. plz tell me what you think. another thing id like to add, could energy be a different stage of phases's of matter and could this mean that everthing is in some way connected to each other and the universe is all made of vastly different combinations of a uniform substance.

Conversion of Energy into Matter

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