Quantum trickery to make transporters work?

[The Laughing Vulcan]

Just an idea rolling around in my head...

The thing that always bugs me about the transporter is the conceit that it turns the transported object into its constituent particles, shoots it through a transporter buffer and sprays it in the general direction of the target where it reassembles said object like a fantastic lego kit, all made possible by the wonderful Heisenberg compensators. These compensate for the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that states that at a quantum level, you can know a particle's momentum, or you can know it's position, but not both at the same time.

The idea of compensating for a natural law of the universe just seems hand washing to me.

But then I got to thinking about Heisenberg, about the duality, the uncertainty, and how it underpins quantum mechanics. We have wave particle duality, where any object, from a photon upwards is both a wave and a particle. Even that PC that you're looking at has a wavelength, it's just insignicant compared to its mass. The smaller an object gets, the more that the duality has implications.

There is also the Schrodinger thought experiment that gives weight to observer effects, the cat in the box that is both dead and alive at the same time, until the box is opened, the result observed and the quantum state coalesces.

So I started thinking that the transporter both needs to disassemble its target to get it from A to B, and to keep it intact during the transporting process to ensure its survival. Humans will die if they are reduced to their component atoms. This duality of process, intact and disintegrated sounds very much like a quantum thing.

Maybe the Heisenberg Compensators do no such thing. Maybe what they do is to establish a quantum effect on the macroscopic scale for the transporter process. Anyone or anything being beamed gets 'turned' into a singular quantum state on a macroscopic scale. And during the beaming process the object is simultaneously whole, and particulate.

They're called Heisenberg compensators as disinformation, to stop low-tech societies jumping up two rungs on the technological ladder (Prime Directive thing)

That's what I was thinking anyway.

 

[JarodRussell]

"How do the Heisenberg compensators work?" - "They work just fine, thank you."

 

[StarryEyed]

Very cool idea. It helps explain TNG-Realm of Fear.

 

[Christopher]

It's more likely that the Heisenberg compensator functions analogously to the reference object in real quantum-teleportation experiments. By quantum-entangling the particle or item to be teleported with a reference object, you don't need to know its exact position and momentum; you just need to know the difference between them and the reference object's position and momentum. Then, by entangling the receiving end of the teleportation system with the reference object and inducing the same difference, you get the same position and momentum of the original particle without actually needing to measure them. This actually works in real-life experiments to "teleport" particles (or rather, their quantum information, which in quantum terms is the same thing). It really is a "Heisenberg compensator," a means of getting around the uncertainty principle. So it seems simplest to assume it's the basis of the ST Heisenberg compensator.

There is also the Schrodinger thought experiment that gives weight to observer effects, the cat in the box that is both dead and alive at the same time, until the box is opened, the result observed and the quantum state coalesces.

That's something of a discredited notion these days. It's now understood that the process by which the wave function appears to "collapse" is decoherence: as the twin quantum states of the radioisotope (decayed and undecayed) interact with the ensemble of particles in the trigger that releases the poison capsule that kills the cat, that entangles the particles of the trigger with the respective states of the isotope, and either one state "outcompetes" the other and spreads widely enough through the ensemble of particles that the trigger as a whole reacts to only one state, or the trigger, the poison, the cat, the box, the observer, etc. each split into two states, one entangled with each of the states of the isotope (the Many-Worlds interpretation). Observationally speaking, these are indistinguishable outcomes. And either way, it means that the decoherence of the wavefunction occurs at the trigger. Any macroscopic system of particles is going to exist in one decohered state (per universe, at least) and thus behave classically. So the cat is definitively alive, or dead, whether an observer opens the box or not.

(Besides, the Schroedinger's Cat thought experiment was actually meant to critique the idea of superpositions of quantum states by pointing out that it seemed to lead to an absurdity. Too many people think Schroedinger was saying the cat would be both alive and dead, when his whole point was that it couldn't happen that way and the fact that the theory seemed to lead to such an impossible result was a major flaw in it. And the decoherence model has resolved that flaw.)

So I started thinking that the transporter both needs to disassemble its target to get it from A to B, and to keep it intact during the transporting process to ensure its survival. Humans will die if they are reduced to their component atoms. This duality of process, intact and disintegrated sounds very much like a quantum thing.

Maybe the Heisenberg Compensators do no such thing. Maybe what they do is to establish a quantum effect on the macroscopic scale for the transporter process. Anyone or anything being beamed gets 'turned' into a singular quantum state on a macroscopic scale. And during the beaming process the object is simultaneously whole, and particulate.

Well, there you're talking about a coherent superposition at the macroscopic level, the particles simultaneously being in two different position and momentum states at once (not to mention different states of bonding energy in their respective electron shells, etc.). It seems to me if the transporter could do that, it could just define the two states as "on the ship" and "on the planet" and engineer a quantum-tunneling effect from one to the other. So if the system could do what you're suggesting... it wouldn't have to. Because the same effect could be applied more directly as the means of teleportation in itself.

As far as creating macroscopic superpositions, that is something that quantum-computing researchers are experimenting with, and I've read that something along those lines -- putting a whole naked-eye macroscopic object into a coherent quantum superposition -- could be achieved within the next couple of years. Although it's more likely to be used as a way of storing information for quantum computers than for teleportation.

 

[JarodRussell]

There is also the Schrodinger thought experiment that gives weight to observer effects, the cat in the box that is both dead and alive at the same time, until the box is opened, the result observed and the quantum state coalesces.

That's something of a discredited notion these days. It's now understood that the process by which the wave function appears to "collapse" is decoherence: as the twin quantum states of the radioisotope (decayed and undecayed) interact with the ensemble of particles in the trigger that releases the poison capsule that kills the cat, that entangles the particles of the trigger with the respective states of the isotope, and either one state "outcompetes" the other and spreads widely enough through the ensemble of particles that the trigger as a whole reacts to only one state, or the trigger, the poison, the cat, the box, the observer, etc. each split into two states, one entangled with each of the states of the isotope (the Many-Worlds interpretation). Observationally speaking, these are indistinguishable outcomes. And either way, it means that the decoherence of the wavefunction occurs at the trigger. Any macroscopic system of particles is going to exist in one decohered state (per universe, at least) and thus behave classically. So the cat is definitively alive, or dead, whether an observer opens the box or not.

It's definately alive... or dead.

So despite the technobabble, it's still uncertain, no? Wasn't that the point of the thought experiment?

 

[Christopher]

It's definately alive... or dead.

So despite the technobabble, it's still uncertain, no? Wasn't that the point of the thought experiment?

No. The point is that it is definitively one or the other, not a mix of both at once. The paradox the Schroedinger posited was that since the radioisotope could be both decayed and undecayed at the same time (not just because of observer uncertainty but as an actual fact), it could lead to a situation where the cat was both alive and dead at the same time, something which just doesn't happen. We now know that that isn't the case. Decoherence occurs well before the interaction reaches the cat, so that the cat ends up in only one of the two possible states. In some trials, it would be definitively alive, and in others, it would be definitively dead, just as you'd expect from classical physics.

 

[SpyOne]

These compensate for the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that states that at a quantum level, you can know a particle's momentum, or you can know it's position, but not both at the same time.

This pretty much sums up how I understood the Uncertainty Principle ... until a few weeks ago when I had cause to brush up on it.
First, what it actually says is that measurement of those two qualities will have an accuracy that is inversely proportional. That is, the more accurate your measurement of the one, the less accurate your measurement of the other.
Think about it: when you measure the particle's momentum, you must have some idea of it's location, even if just "it's somewhere in this room". What Heisenberg said is that the more certain you are of that momentum, the less certain you are of its exact position.

Second, it is not limited to just position and momentum: "Any two variables that do not commute cannot be measured simultaneously—the more precisely one is known, the less precisely the other can be known." (quote from wikipedia)

Another example of such a pair is energy and time. This is interpreted to mean that something that exists for a very short time cannot have a definite energy. And since mass and energy are two forms of the same thing, a particle that decays very quickly cannot have a definite mass. And the longer it stays around for, the more precisely its mass can be known.

I'm just pointing out that the Heisenberg Compensator could be fixing other things than the position/momentum uncertainty. In fact, it kinda has to be.

But, yeah, it kinda has to be magic: it is far easier to get around fundamental laws of the physical universe by saying "guess what: we found out he was wrong about that" than by designing a device to "compensate" for it. Einstein didn't build a "Newtonian Compensator", he figured out where Newton was wrong and came up with a new system of explanations that embraced Newton's observations but also explained the things that Newton could not.

Now for my run at the Marvel no-Prize for explaining what the Heisenberg Compensator does:
One of the cool things that came out of Chaos Theory was the observation that it is impossible to know all of the variables that affect a given event. "Will it rain tomorrow?" relies on knowing things about ... well, famously about the beating of a single butterfly's wings. One of the cool things to come out of that was the discovery that we could actually make some of our computer models of complex phenomena more accurate if we used random numbers in the place of certain variables.
So maybe the Heisenberg Compensator does something like that: makes an astoundingly accurate guess about the things it cannot know for certain.

 

[Meredith]

Don't take an active tricorder into a transporter beam or it will record the position of your molecules and the transporter will "smear" you across space halfway to your destination.