What does General Clark know?

[The Mighty Thor]

What does General Clark know that we don't?

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60629,00.html

malc

 

[Pyrrho]

A quote:

Then the 58-year-old Arkansas native, who retired from the military three years ago, dropped something of a bombshell on the gathering.

"I still believe in e=mc², but I can't believe that in all of human history, we'll never ever be able to go beyond the speed of light to reach where we want to go," said Clark. "I happen to believe that mankind can do it.

"I've argued with physicists about it, I've argued with best friends about it. I just have to believe it. It's my only faith-based initiative." Clark's comment prompted laughter and applause from the gathering.

Apparently Clark is an idiot, but doesn't know he's an idiot.

 

[Hand Bent Spoon]

I don't see how that statement makes Clark an idiot. Can't a reasonable person guess that at some point in the future a technology might be developed to either break or get around the speed of light limitation? Personally, I believe such a technology will come to exist one day. And when it does come, it will have been because of science, not the paranormal.

 

[shemp]

It's one thing to believe, in general, that one day mankind will find a way to exceed C. It's another to believe that, as president, you can make it happen. I'm not sure which of these he meant, but if it's the latter, I'm a little worried about him.

 

[Yahzi]

If that's his only faith-based initiative, we're lucky to have him.

Although I agree it's strange, h's not saying we can do it now. He's not a woo-woo. He just likes his science-fiction.

I try to explain to these types that even if we could travel to other stars, the planets that support life would almost certainly be useless to us, since their proteins would have evolved completely independently.

 

[Vorticity]

Well, at least he has some interest in science... as opposed to the current administration, which is openly hostile to it.
I don't know how much Clark knows, but it sure would be nice to have a scientifically-literate president. The last one one we had, I believe, was Carter.

 

[SteveGrenard]

I doubt Clark knows anymore than anybody else could know about the status of quantum teleportation but this may be what he is alluding to. It may be 1000s of years before science perfects a means of teleporting anything other than particles
and for humans only a genetic facsimile would be transported if current understanding of how this might possibly be accomplished is correct.

The following directory at Yahoo has a great many links to this subject:

http://dir.yahoo.com/Science/Physics/Quantum_Teleportation/


Experimental and Theoretical Aspects of Quantum Teleportation (PDF) - presents a short summary of the progress achieved at the Center for Engineering Science Advanced Research of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Howstuffworks: How Teleportation Will Work - describes the method of travel, combining properties of telecommunications and transportation.

IBM Announces Quantum Teleportation
Quantum Entanglement and Teleportation - overview of quantum mechanics, entanglement, and computing.

Quantum Optics Group: Quantum Teleportation - tells how the Caltech team succeeded in the first true teleportation of a quantum state.

Quantum Teleportation - introduction from the Quantum Optics and Spectroscopy Group at the Institute for Experimental Physics in Innsbruck.

Quantum Teleportation is a Universal Computational Primitive (PDF) - shows how a generalization of quantum teleportation reduces resources requirements for quantum computation and unifies known protocols for fault-tolerant quantum computation.

Quantum Teleportation of a Polarization State with a Complete Bell State Measurement (PDF) - reporting on a quantum teleportation experiment in which nonlinear interactions are used for the Bell state measurements.

Quantum Teleportation, Information and Cryptography - nonmathematical exploration.

Quantum Teleportation: from Bangor to the World in an Instant - introduction to quantum information processing.

Scientific American Explorations: Beam Me Up - an experiment confirms that teleportation is possible, at least for photons.

Teleportation: Dream or Reality? (PDF) - paper by Lev Vaidman.

Unconditional Quantum Teleportation (PDF) - research article.

 

[Dilettante]

for humans only a genetic facsimile would be transported if current understanding of how this might possibly be accomplished is correct.

OK, so I don't actually get to go to Alpha Centauri (or wherever).
But what if we could communicate that way? Say one day the ol' radio telescope picks up an intelligent pattern from Sirius...can we be sending them personal love notes the next day, or do we have to send a magic machine over first to set up a wormhole or something?

Even if you could just send atomic facsimiles of rocks, plants, etc. (and love letters of course) back and forth, it would be pretty darn neat!

 

[SteveGrenard]

Well you do and you don't sorta get to go to wherever.....

Here is a brief quote from one of the sites listed above that explains it better than I can:

http://www.howstuffworks.com/teleportation.htm

Since the original you would have to die, in a sense, in order for this to work (see last paragraph below) and
then there is always the possibility you will not brought back due to a software glitch or harddrive problem, this sounds pretty iffy. There is some serious research going on by IBM, Univ Austria and at Caltech. I believe they have already teleported large numbers of cesium atoms whereas earlier experiments managed to teleport sub-atomic particles.


Main > Travel > Transportation

How Teleportation Will Work

by Kevin Bonsor

<snipped>

The laws of physics may even make it impossible to create a transporter that enables a person to be sent instantaneously to another location, which would require travel at the speed of light.
For a person to be transported, a machine would have to be built that can pinpoint and analyze all of the 10 to the 28th power atoms that make up the human body. That's more than a trillion trillion atoms. This machine would then have to send this information to another location, where the person's body would be reconstructed with exact precision. Molecules couldn't be even a millimeter out of place, lest the person arrive with some severe neurological or physiological defect.

<snipped>

If such a machine were possible, it's unlikely that the person being transported would actually be "transported." It would work more like a fax machine -- a duplicate of the person would be made at the receiving end, but with much greater precision than a fax machine. But what would happen to the original? One theory suggests that teleportation would combine genetic cloning with digitization.

In this biodigital cloning, tele-travelers would have to die, in a sense. Their original mind and body would no longer exist. Instead, their atomic structure would be recreated in another location, and digitization would recreate the travelers' memories, emotions, hopes and dreams. So the travelers would still exist, but they would do so in a new body, of the same atomic structure as the original body, programmed with the same information.

 

[Chad Noles]

It's my only faith-based initiative." Clark's comment prompted laughter and applause from the gathering.

Perhaps Clark was merely making a crack remark about all the Bush faith based policies.It seems that the audience "got it".

 

[Dilettante]

all of the 1028 atoms that make up the human body

The human body has 1028 atoms?

How do you write 10-to-the-28th in vB code?

 

[SteveGrenard]

Yes, the original text was 10 to the 28th power. Thanks for pointing this out. The text that follows this translates it to more than a trillion trillion atoms, which hopefully clarifies this. Nevertheless I corrected the expression above.

 

[!Xx+-Rational-+xX!]

Originally posted by Pyrrho aka The Most Rational Person Ever
Apparently Clark is an idiot, but doesn't know he's an idiot.

I'm amazed at this valuable contribution to this thread; I would not dare question your objective reasoning used to come up with this conclusion. You win the debate!

 

[Brown]

Apparently Clark is an idiot, but doesn't know he's an idiot.

This assessment probably goes a little too far. Some pretty smart people have had musings similar to Clark's.

As someone (possibly Gene Roddenberry) once remarked, if it IS possible to travel faster than the speed of light, that discovery will probably not be made by someone who has already decided that it's impossible.

 

[Renfield]

A quote:


Apparently Clark is an idiot, but doesn't know he's an idiot.

Or an optimist. Like Brown said, he's not the only one to hold out hope that we might be able to find a way to travel faster then light.

There are physicists working on the problem, for example. Are they idiots as well?

 

[EdipisReks]

A quote:


Apparently Clark is an idiot, but doesn't know he's an idiot.