Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Teleportation, Invisibility, and Making the Impossible Possible

I am listening to a very, very intriguing podcast by Microsoft Technologist, Scott Hanselman, where he interviews Futurist and Theoretical Physicist, Michio Kaku. Dr. Kaku talks about the actual work of teleportation (remember Star Trek?) and invisibility (think Harry Potter's cloak, but not with humans) and other things.

Here he discusses his classification of things that are considered impossible, but he believes are actually possible in some realms and theoretically possible in the future. For instance, they have successfully made a photon teleport underneath the Danube River. Essentially what is necessary for this to happen is to reduce the photon to the amount of enough information required to reconstruct the photon. Given this possibility, people theorize that if we could reduce people down to the information they consist of (i.e. DNA) and be able to reconstruct that DNA, then we should someday be able to teleport someone or clone someone. But as philosophers have observed, this makes huge assumptions that people simply consist of information. The Bible is clear, though, that man consists of a soul and body.

Anyone interested in being the first for this laboratory experiment?

Listen to the interview here.

1 comment:

Jim Peet said...

Check out the very creepy move, The Fly.

Teleportation results: "The now-mute "Brundlefly" creature traps Veronica inside Telepod 1, then steps into Telepod 2. However, as the computer's timer counts down to the activation of the fusion sequence, the wounded Stathis manages to shoot the power cables connected to Veronica's telepod with his shotgun, severing Telepod 1's connection to the computer and allowing Veronica to escape unharmed. Seeing this, Brundlefly attempts to break out of its own telepod just as the fusion sequence occurs, and is gruesomely fused with chunks of metal and other components from Telepod 2."