Real life star trek in the making

[geoschmo]

Don't get me wrong, I agree. It's a very exciting prospect.

Actually it might end up in technologies not to far from the replicators on trek. If an object can be deconstructed and copied a distance away in a "transporter", why couldn't that object be deconstructed and recorded, and reconstructed later as many times as wanted. At the atomic level. It's quite mindboggeling to think about. It would radically alter our perceptions of value of materials that's for sure. The Alchemists were not off by much. You can't make gold from lead, but you can make it from the atoms that make up everything around us, including lead.

Geoschmo

[Quikngruvn]

Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made off.

Theoretically, I would think the quantum 'code' of something could be saved in this fashion... assuming there were a storage medium large enough to hold the image. Figure you'd need quintillions of bits just to record the spin of each particle, before even getting into each's position and orientation. (I may be off a couple orders of magnitude, but still!) But were it to become a practical reality... it'd be nothing short of revolutionary.

Incidientally, the spin of quantum particles is also the basis for theories about faster-than-light communication. Suppose you have a particle with positive spin, and its anti-particle is light-years away with its negative spin. If you change your particle's spin to negative, the anti-particle's spin will immediately change to positive, at any distance-- the magic of the law of Conservation of Momentum (quantum mechanical style). How the two particles manage to communicate instantly while so far apart... now that's the trick!

Quikngruvn