The biggest news of the millennium–OK, potentially–happened the other day. Maybe you missed it. A lot of newspapers, including this one, didn’t bother to mention it. But there it was: the first, crude beam-up. We’re talking beam-up as in Star Trek’s famous transporter.
The story somewhat breathlessly revealed that scientists in Australia had successfully”teleported” a laser beam encoded with data, breaking it up and reconstructing an exact replica a yard away.
No, we don’t really understand it either.
And of course, the scientists were quick to explain that their machine doesn’t transport people. That nifty trick remains a bit beyond our capabilities, according to Lawrence Krauss, a professor of physics and astronomy at Case Western Reserve University, author of a book on the physics of Star Trek. On transporters he wrote: ” . . . building one would require us to heat up matter to a temperature a million times the temperature at the center of the Sun, expend more energy in a single machine than all of humanity presently uses, build telescopes larger than the size of the Earth, improve present computers by a factor of 1,000 billion billion, and avoid the laws of quantum mechanics.”
You scoff now. But remember, Star Trek successfully presaged many of today’s technological marvels: the personal computer, for example, and of course the hand-held communicator (check out your cellular flip phone.)
Just wait . . . a few hundred years. You’ll see.
