The Physics of Star Trek (9 page)

The only problem with this picture is that it is inconsistent with what the transporter
sometimes does. On at least two well-known occasions, the transporter has started with one
person and beamed up two. In the famous classic episode “The Enemy Within,” a transporter
malfunction splits Kirk into two different versions of himself, one good and one evil. In
a more interesting, and permanent, twist, in the
Next Generation
episode “Second Chances,” we find out that Lieutenant Riker was earlier split into two
copies during transportation from the planet Nervala IV to the
Potemkin.
One version returned safely to the
Potemkin
and one was reflected back to the planet, where he lived alone for eight years.

If the transporter carries both the matter stream and the information signal, this
splitting phenomenon is impossible. The number of atoms you end up with has to be the same
as the number you began with. There is no possible way to replicate people in this manner.
On the other hand, if only the information were beamed up, one could imagine combining it
with atoms that might be stored aboard a star-ship and making as many copies as you wanted
of an individual.

A similar problem concerning the matter stream faces us when we consider the fate of
objects beamed out into space as “pure energy.” For example, in the
Next Generation
episode “Lonely among Us,” Picard chooses at one point to beam out as pure energy, free
from the constraints of matter. After this proves a dismal and dangerous experience, he
manages to be retrieved, and his corporeal form is restored from the pattern buffer. But
if the matter stream had been sent out into space, there would have been nothing to
restore at the end.

So, the Star Trek manual notwithstanding, I want to take an agnostic viewpoint here and
instead explore the myriad problems and challenges associated with each possibility:
transporting the atoms or the bits.

WHEN A BODY HAS NO BODY: Perhaps the most fascinating question about beamingone that is
usually not even addressedis, What comprises a human being? Are we merely the sum of all
our atoms? More precisely, if I were to re-create each atom in your body, in precisely the
same chemical state of excitation as your atoms are in at this moment, would I produce a
functionally identical person who has exactly all your memories, hopes, dreams, spirit?
There is every reason to expect that this would be the case, but it is worth noting that
it flies in the face of a great deal of spiritual belief about the existence of a “soul”
that is somehow distinct from one's body. What happens when you die, after all? Don't many
religions hold that the “soul” can exist after death? What then happens to the soul during
the transport process? In this sense, the transporter would be a wonderful experiment in
spirituality. If a person were beamed aboard the
Enterprise
and remained intact and observably unchanged, it would provide dramatic evidence that a
human being is no more than the sum of his or her parts, and the demonstration would
directly confront a wealth of spiritual beliefs.

For obvious reasons, this issue is studiously avoided in Star Trek. However, in spite of
the purely physical nature of the dematerialization and transport process, the notion that
some nebulous “life force” exists beyond the confines of the body is a constant theme in
the series. The entire premise of the second and third Star Trek movies,
The Wrath of Khan
and
The Search for Spock,
is that Spock, at least, has a “katra” a living spirit which can exist apart from the
body. More recently, in the
Voyager
series episode “Cathexis,” the “neural energy”akin to a life forceof Chakotay is removed
and wanders around the ship from person to person in an effort to get back “home.”

I don't think you can have it both ways. Either the “soul,” the “katra,” the “life force,”
or whatever you want to call it is part of the body, and we are no more than our material
being, or it isn't. In an effort not to offend religious sensibilities, even a Vulcan's, I
will remain neutral in this debate. Nevertheless, I thought it worth pointing out before
we forge ahead that even the basic premise of the transporterthat the atoms
and
the bits are all there isshould not be taken lightly.

THE PROBLEM WITH BITS: Many of the problems I will soon discuss could be avoided if one
were to give up the requirement of transporting the atoms along with the information.
After all, anyone with access to the Internet knows how easy it is to transport a data
stream containing, say, the detailed plans for a new car, along with photographs. Moving
the actual car around, however, is nowhere near as easy. Nevertheless, two rather
formidable problems arise even in transporting the bits. The first is a familiar quandary,
faced, for example, by the last people to see Jimmy Hoffa alive: How are we to dispose of
the body? If just the information is to be transported, then the atoms at the point of
origin must be dispensed with and a new set collected at the reception point. This problem
is quite severe. If you want to zap 10
28
atoms, you have quite a challenge on your hands. Say, for example, that you simply want to
turn all this material into pure energy. How much energy would result? Well, Einstein's
formula
E = mc
2
tells us. If one suddenly transformed 50 kilograms (a light adult) of material into
energy, one would release the energy equivalent of somewhere in excess of a thousand
1-megaton hydrogen bombs. It is hard to imagine how to do this in an environmentally
friendly fashion.

There is, of course, another problem with this procedure. If it is possible, then
replicating people would be trivial. Indeed, it would be much easier than transporting
them, since the destruction of the original subject would then not be necessary.
Replication of inanimate objects in this manner is something one can live with, and indeed
the crew members aboard starships do seem to live with this. However, replicating living
human beings would certainly be cause for trouble (ˆ la Riker in “Second Chances”).
Indeed, if recombinant DNA research today has raised a host of ethical issues, the mind
boggles at those which would be raised if complete individuals, including memory and
personality, could be replicated at will. People would be like computer programs, or
drafts of a book kept on disk. If one of them gets damaged or has a bug, you could simply
call up a backup version.

OK, KEEP THE ATOMS: The preceding arguments suggest that on both practical and ethical
grounds it might be better to imagine a transporter that carries a matter stream along
with the signal, just as we are told the Star Trek transporters do. The problem then
becomes, How do you move the atoms? Again, the challenge turns out to be energetics,
although in a somewhat more subtle way.

What would be required to “dematerialize” something in the transporter? To answer this, we
have to consider a

little more carefully a simpler question: What is matter? All normal matter is made up of
atoms, which are in turn made up of very dense central nuclei surrounded by a cloud of
electrons. As you may recall from high school chemistry or physics, most of the volume of
an atom is empty space. The region occupied by the outer electrons is about ten thousand
times larger than the region occupied by the nucleus.

Why, if atoms are mostly empty space, doesn't matter pass through other matter? The answer
to this is that what makes a wall solid is not the existence of the particles but of the
electric fields between the particles. My hand is stopped from going through my desk when
I slam it down primarily because of the electric repulsion felt by the electrons in the
atoms in my hand due to the presence of the electrons in the atoms of the desk and
not
because of the lack of available space for the electrons to move through.

These electric fields not only make matter corporeal, in the sense of stopping objects
from passing through one

another, but they also hold the matter together. To alter this normal situation, one must
therefore overcome the electric forces between atoms. Overcoming these forces will require
work, which takes energy. Indeed, this is how all chemical reactions work. The
configuration of individual sets of atoms and their binding to one another are altered
through the exchange of energy. For example, if one injects some energy into a mixture of
ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, the molecules of the two materials can rearrange, and in
the process the “binding energy” holding the original materials can be released. This
release, if fast enough, will cause a large explosion.

The binding energy between atoms is, however, minuscule compared to the binding energy of
the particles protons and neutrons that make up the incredibly dense nuclei of atoms. The
forces holding these particles together in a nucleus result in binding energies that are
millions of times stronger than the atomic binding energies. Nuclear reactions therefore
release significantly more energy than chemical reactions, which is why nuclear weapons
are so powerful.

Finally, the binding energy that holds together the elementary particles, called quarks,
which make up the protons and neutrons themselves is yet larger than that holding together
the protons and neutrons in nuclei. In fact, it is currently believedbased on all
calculations we can perform with the theory describing the interactions of quarks that it
would take an infinite amount of energy to completely separate the quarks making up each
proton or neutron.

Based on this argument, you might expect that breaking matter completely apart into
quarks, its fundamental constituents, would be impossibleand it is, at least at room
temperature. However, the same theory that describes the interactions of quarks inside
protons and neutrons tells us that if we were to heat up the nuclei to about 1000 billion
degrees (about a million times hotter than the temperature at the core of the Sun), then
not only would the quarks inside lose their binding energies but at around this
temperature matter will suddenly lose almost all of its mass. Matter will turn into
radiationor, in the language of our transporter, matter will dematerialize.

So, all you have to do to overcome the binding energy of matter at its most fundamental
level (indeed, at the level referred to in the Star Trek technical manual) is to heat it
up to 1000 billion degrees. In energy units, this implies providing about 10 percent of
the rest mass of protons and neutrons in the form of heat. To heat up a sample the size of
a human being to this level would require therefore, about 10 percent of the energy needed
to annihilate the materialor the energy equivalent of a hundred 1-megaton hydrogen bombs.

One might suggest, given this daunting requirement, that the scenario I have just
described is overkill. Perhaps we don't have to break down matter to the quark level.
Perhaps a dematerialization at the proton and neutron level, or maybe even the atomic
level, is sufficient for the purposes of the transporter. Certainly the energy
requirements in this case would be vastly less, even if formidable. Unfortunately, hiding
this problem under the rug exposes one that is more severe. For once you have the matter
stream, made now of individual protons and neutrons and electrons, or perhaps whole atoms,
you have to transport itpresumably at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

Now, in order to get particles like protons and neutrons to move near the speed of light,
one must give them an energy comparable to their rest-mass energy. This turns out to be
about ten times larger than the amount of energy required to heat up and “dissolve” the
protons into quarks. Nevertheless, even though it takes more energy per particle to
accelerate the protons to near light speed, this is still easier to accomplish than to
deposit

and store enough energy inside the protons for long enough to heat them up and dissolve
them into quarks. This is why today we can build, albeit at great cost, enormous particle
acceleratorslike Fermilab's Tevatron, in Batavia, Illinoiswhich can accelerate individual
protons up to more than 99.9 percent of the speed of light but we have not yet managed to
build an accelerator that can bombard protons with enough energy to “melt” them into their
constituent quarks. In fact, it is one of the goals of physicists designing the next
generation of large acceleratorsincluding one device being built at Brookhaven National
Laboratory, on Long Islandto actually achieve this “melting” of matter.

Yet again I am impressed with the apt choice of terminology by the Star Trek writers. The
melting of protons into quarks is what we call in physics a phase transition. And lo and
behold, if one scours the
Next Generation Technical Manual
for the name of the transporter instruments that dematerialize matter, one finds that they
are called “phase transition coils.”

So the future designers of transporters will have a choice. Either they must find an
energy source that will temporarily produce a power that exceeds the total power consumed
on the entire Earth today by a factor of about 10,000, in which case they could make an
atomic “matter stream” capable of moving along with the information at near the speed of
light, or they could reduce the total energy requirements by a factor of 10 and discover a
way to heat up a human being instantaneously to roughly a million times the temperature at
the center of the Sun.

IF THIS IS THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY, WE'D BETTER GET IN THE FAST LANE: As I write this
on my Power PC-based home computer, I marvel at the speed with which this technology has
developed since I bought my first Macintosh a little over a decade ago. I remember that
the internal memory in that machine was 128 kilobytes, as opposed to the 16 megabytes in
my current machine and the 128 megabytes in the fast workstation I have in my office in
Case Western Reserve's Physics Department. Thus, in a decade my computer internal-memory
capabilities have increased by a factor of 1000! This increase has been matched by an
increase in the capacity of my hard-drive memory. My first machine had no hard drive at
all and thus had to work from floppy disks, which held 400 kilobytes of information. My
present home machine has a 500-megabyte hard driveagain, an increase of more than a factor
of 1000 in my storage capabilities. The speed of my home system has also greatly increased
in the last decade. For doing actual detailed numerical calculations, I estimate that my
present machine is almost a hundred times faster than my first Macintosh. My office
workstation is perhaps ten times faster still, performing close to half a billion
instructions per second!