Could Teleportation Be Achieved Through Matter-Photon Conversion?

[CherryTrooper]

Okay, so I'm just looking at this from a limited nuclear engineering scope: We know that as far as gamma interactions go, in pair production, a photon is converted into a postitron and a electron. So it goes from being light, and having no mass, to suddenly having mass! Mass appears almost 'out of nowhere.' It comes from the massless photon.

So, if this is a natural phenomenon, what if we harnessed this idea: Let's make it work backwards-- let's convert matter to light, beam it wherever, and have the memory of the computer reassemble it and convert light back to matter!

And if theoretically, this were possible -- what would the implications be? If a human was converted to solely photons and reconverted back to human, would the heart still be beating and the consciousness still exist?

 

[ZapperZ]

The "beam it wherever" has a flaw based on a faulty understanding of pair production.

If you look at all the experiments that create e-p pairs (by the way, it is electron and positron, not "negatron" and positron), it requires that the gamma ray passes through a material with a high "Z" (i.e. heavy nuclei). This is due to the requirement of momentum conservation.

Secondly, you simply do not recreate JUST the matter (or particle). You have to also create what STATE it was in. This means that an atom, for example, must be re-created in the exact state that it was in before it was "destroyed". Both the kinetic energy and potential energy state must be preserved. Such information is not carried over.

A lot of these things have been discussed by Penrose in his pop-sci book "The Emperor's New Mind".

Zz.

 

[CherryTrooper]

^^^Thanks. I wasn't implying teleportation BY pair production, I was merely stating that in nature, photons are transferred to mass, so the question is why can we not use this idea.
That's the notion though: If we had a way to create memory of state/location/properties and whatever, then couldn't it theoretically work
And that was my mix-up, haha, I edited it.

 

[Dale]

Okay, so I'm just looking at this from a limited nuclear engineering scope: We know that as far as gamma interactions go, in pair production, a photon is converted into a postitron and a electron.

No, this interaction never happens. It is impossible because:

So it goes from being light, and having no mass, to suddenly having mass! Mass appears almost 'out of nowhere.' It comes from the massless photon.

It doesn't conserve mass or momentum.

What does happen is that a system of two photons can be converted into a system of a positron and an electron. While an individual photon has no mass a system of two or more photons can have mass. This photon-system mass is what gives rise to the mass of the electron/positron system. The mass of the system before is equal to the mass of the system after.

The reverse also happens, much more frequently, in fact. This is the primary reaction for PET imaging.

 

[Lsos]

So, if this is a natural phenomenon, what if we harnessed this idea: Let's make it work backwards-- let's convert matter to light, beam it wherever, and have the memory of the computer reassemble it and convert light back to matter!

And if theoretically, this were possible -- what would the implications be? If a human was converted to solely photons and reconverted back to human, would the heart still be beating and the consciousness still exist?

I'm sure that theoretically this human-to-light-to-human conversion is possible, but that just seems unnecessary complicated. Why not just convert the human into information, email that information somewhere else, and then have that place use this information to create another human? You get the same result without the added complexity of matter-energy-matter conversion.

Seems far fetched but if you think about it something similar is already done every day...just for much simpler parts. I'm an engineer, for example, and I design parts. I make a drawing, and all the information needed to build that part and have it function is contained in that drawing. Hell, I can even contain it all in one small file. I can then just email it to another part of the world, and they can the replicate the, for all intents and purposes, same part. No need to destroy the original part and convert it into energy...but if you want, you can do melt it down just to complete the "teleportation feel". It might not yet be instantaneous enough to be called "teleportation", but with 3-D printing becoming mainstream and the information age already in full swing, we are getting closer and closer to something like it everyday. At least for inanimate objects.

Teleporting a human in this manner would obviously be much more complex. But if you think about it, we can already extract the information required to build a human (from DNA) in a reasonably short time. To rebuild one is a bigger challenge, but cloning has already been done. Yeah, it's not the exact same animal, but would you really complain if in the process of teleporting, you had the side effect of receiving a younger body? Of course, there remains the small matter of transferring the contents of your mind into your clone...but we still have some time.

 

[ZapperZ]

I'm sure that theoretically this human-to-light-to-human conversion is possible,

Actually, I don't even think this is possible, or maybe "reasonable".

For example, let's start with something simple. Say we have a hydrogen atom. The task here is to annihilate this atom into light, then reform this atom back. Sounds "easy" enough, and at first glance, it may even be "possible". But is it really?

To annihilate the atom, you need to shoot it with both antiproton (to annihilate the proton nucleus), and positron (to annihilate the single electron). So now you have created two different types/energies of gamma photons. I can guarantee you that these photons have no reasonable possibilities of being emitted in the same direction. This means that if one is planning on reconverting these photons back into their original particles, the BEST that one can do is to reformed a proton at one location, and an electron at another location. This is not what we started with, which was a hydrogen atom.

This scenario falls under the same category as the question on whether something such as a tennis ball can "tunnel" through a wall. Blind and naive application of quantum tunneling appears to make it "reasonable" to say that it is possible. But a closer examination of what is involved shows that that isn't the case, which I've described elsewhere.

Zz.

 

[ZapperZ]

^^^Thanks. I wasn't implying teleportation BY pair production, I was merely stating that in nature, photons are transferred to mass, so the question is why can we not use this idea.

This is puzzling. Photons, at least real ones, just don't normally spontaneously transform itself and produce e-p pair. So I'm not sure what you mean by ".. photons are transferred to mass...". Please cite what physics you are applying here.

Zz.

 

[VantagePoint72]

This scenario falls under the same category as the question on whether something such as a tennis ball can "tunnel" through a wall. Blind and naive application of quantum tunneling appears to make it "reasonable" to say that it is possible. But a closer examination of what is involved shows that that isn't the case, which I've described elsewhere.

I would like to read this analysis. Do you have a link to one of these discussions?

 

[BruceW]

I'm sure that theoretically this human-to-light-to-human conversion is possible, but that just seems unnecessary complicated. Why not just convert the human into information, email that information somewhere else, and then have that place use this information to create another human? You get the same result without the added complexity of matter-energy-matter conversion.

totally agree. Also, you'd need an anti-human to be able to turn the human into light. (if we want to conserve baryon and lepton numbers). So really, it would need to be more like human+antihuman to light to human+antihuman. And of course, this is ridiculously difficult in practice. You could maybe do it with something like an atom, but a whole human is way beyond our technology. It is on the scale of Schrodinger's cat. (i.e. who knows?)

 

[Zentrails]

No, this interaction never happens. It is impossible because:

It doesn't conserve mass or momentum.

What does happen is that a system of two photons can be converted into a system of a positron and an electron. While an individual photon has no mass a system of two or more photons can have mass. This photon-system mass is what gives rise to the mass of the electron/positron system. The mass of the system before is equal to the mass of the system after.

The reverse also happens, much more frequently, in fact. This is the primary reaction for PET imaging.

Not true, a photon does indeed have mass, it just doesn't have a "rest" mass.

 

[Zentrails]

This is puzzling. Photons, at least real ones, just don't normally spontaneously transform itself and produce e-p pair. So I'm not sure what you mean by ".. photons are transferred to mass...". Please cite what physics you are applying here.

Zz.

This did indeed happen in equilibrium very shortly after the Big Bang.
About 10-4 s, IIRC according to the Standard Model.

 

[VantagePoint72]

Not true, a photon does indeed have mass, it just doesn't have a "rest" mass.

The separate concepts of rest and relativistic mass have largely fallen out of favour as being useful and mass, unqualified, should always be taken to refer to the former.

 

[BruceW]

I think both still get used a lot. for example 'Planck mass' used in the context of a measure of energy (in a general way, not just specific to rest mass).

edit: but anyway, not a big deal.

 

[Dale]

Not true, a photon does indeed have mass, it just doesn't have a "rest" mass.

A photon does not have "mass". It has "relativistic mass" which is simply E/c². When scientists today use the unqualified term "mass" they generally refer to the invariant mass, which is 0 for a photon and is sometimes known as "rest mass".

 

[DocPosibility]

Many of you seem to be missing the point here, the question is not whether it would be impractical or not, or what would be easy. The question is:Is it theoretically possible?

Yes it is. Photons changing into mass, humans being changed to energy and reconfigured at another location exactly as they were. With the right focused technology this is theoretically possible. Yes, it is beyond our current technology, yes, it would be "impractical" when a clone would be easier to do, but impracticality and probability are two different things. My only concern would be on quantifying the essence of a person. We could think of it as synapses occurring on the brain, but the whole "soul" if one indulges on those concepts would be the issue. How do you transfer that?

 

[Dale]

The question is:Is it theoretically possible?

Yes it is.

No, it isn't. At least, not by the mechanism mentioned in the OP. As I said in post 4, the interaction described in the OP simply doesn't happen, not ever.

 

[DocPosibility]

Could it be synthesized, made happen?

 

[Vanadium 50]

Asking the question again doesn't change the answer. As DaleSpam said, the interaction described does not happen, not ever.

 

[BruceW]

eh... if you could make an antiperson, then you could do something like person + antiperson = photons... But then the non-cloning theorem means that you can't make the exact antiperson in the first place?