Teleportation

[Zac67]

Imho, teleportation through 'scan, destruct, transmit, recreate' is a dead end.

It seems that our consciousness holds its roots in quantum effects and these would have to be scanned with no (or very little) margin to error in order to be recreated. Quantum mechanics make this impossible, so we'd have to use quantum entanglement to copy the information to the new entity - doing this to a complete (living!) human body would be too complex to be actually done. Since various parts of the body keep moving all the time (heart, blood, electron activity, ...), the scan/entanglement would have to happen instantaneously.

PS: Just read up a bit on 'descriptor theory' - just manipulating some 'global variables' in the universe seems intriguing.
But I'm afraid that theory defies some physical laws... E.g. moving a mass without interaction with the rest of the universe (mass-wise) changes the center of gravity, which is always maintained otherwise.

[Zac67]

Cymric wrote:

This is the famous no-clone theorem in quantum information theory, which states that you cannot create perfect copies of arbitrary and unknown quantum states. And it's all Heisenberg's fault that we cannot know exactly what all quantum states in a given object are. Ergo, by definition the clone cannot be an exact replica of the person going into the transporter.

This may not be entirely true. Of course, due to Heisenberg, you can't measure the quantum state of the body to be transported in order to duplicate it elsewhere. But it may be possible to clone its exact state onto an entangled set of matter (Heisenberg was talking about measuring; as long as you don't actually know the state, it might be transportable).

However, as mentioned earlier, I think this method is far too complex to be feasable with an entire human body, no matter what technology.

[Zac67]

This is one of the (many) weird concepts of quantum mechanics. Today it's only possible on a particle level, though just recently some scientists have managed it with a cloud of atoms. I don't actually claim to understand it, but it's pretty interesting.  :-D

[Zac67]

recidivist wrote:
 I'm not certain but I think Heisenberg or Heidinger cat may have stayed with me;

That was Schrödinger's cat all right - she never actually decided to die after all.  ;-)