The Physics of Star Trek
Krauss (Lawrence M.)
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Back Cover Blurb

  1. Discover the answers to the following and many other fascinating questions as a renowned physicist and dedicated Trekker explores the physics of Star Trek.
    • What warps when you’re traveling at warp speed?
    • What’s the difference between the holodeck and a hologram?
    • What happens when you get beamed up1?
    • What is the difference between a Wormhole and a Black Hole?
    • What is antimatter and why does the Enterprise need it?
    • Are time loops really possible, and can I kill my grandmother before I am born?
  2. From the foreword by Stephen Hawking: ‘‘Today's science fiction is often tomorrow’s science fact. The physics that underlies Star Trek is surely worth investigating. To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.”
  3. This book was not prepared, approved, licensed, or endorsed by any entity involved in creating or producing the Star Trek television series or films.

Contents
    Foreword by Stephen Hawking – xi
    Preface – xv
  1. SECTION ONE: A Cosmic Poker Game, in which the physics of inertial dampers and tractor beams paves the way for time travel, warp speed, deflector shields, wormholes, and other spacetime oddities
    1. Newton Antes – 3
    2. Einstein Raises – 12
    3. Hawking Shows His Hand – 30
    4. Data Ends the Game – 53
  2. SECTION TWO: Matter Matter Everywhere, In which the reader explores transporter beams, warp drives, dilithium crystals, matter-antimatter engines, and the holodeck
    1. "Krauss (Lawrence M.) - The Physics of Star Trek: Atoms or Bits?" – 65
    2. The Most Bang for Your Buck – 84
    3. Holodecks and Holograms – 99
  3. SECTION THREE: The Invisible Universe, or Things That Go Bump in the Night, in which we speak of things that may exist but are not yet seen — extraterrestrial life, multiple dimensions, and an exotic zoo of other physics possibilities and impossibilities
    1. The Search for Spock – 111
    2. The Menagerie of Possibilities – 133
    3. Impossibilities: The Undiscoverable Country – 160
    Epilogue – 173
    Notes – 175
    Acknowledgments – 177
    Index – 181
Book Comment

HarperCollins, 1996. Paperback.


"Krauss (Lawrence M.) - The Physics of Star Trek"

Source: Krauss - The Physics of Star Trek


The residue of the Book after specific Chapters (currently only "Krauss (Lawrence M.) - The Physics of Star Trek: Atoms or Bits?") have been separated out.


"Krauss (Lawrence M.) - The Physics of Star Trek: Atoms or Bits?"

Source: Krauss - The Physics of Star Trek; Chapter 5


Notes – Chapter 5: Atoms or Bits
  1. Introduction
    • Basically, Krauss’s view is that teleportation as envisaged in Star Trek is utterly hopeless.
    • No other piece of Sci-Fi technology abord the Enterprise is as implausible.
    • He’s writing in 1995, so before1 advances in so-called quantum teleportation came along and before the take-off in quantum computing.
    • But these technologies aren’t really relevant as they don’t provide Star Trek-style teleportation in any case.
    • His conclusion is that it’d be far cheaper to invest in landing crafts for the Enterprise than to develop teleporters!
    • He mainly considers the practicalities but also considers some philosophical issues to do with materialism and ethics.
    • See my Notes on:-
      → Teletransportation2
      → Quantum Mechanics3
      → Duplication4
      → Functionalism5
      → Physicalism6
      → Souls7
      → Perdurantism8
      → Logic of Identity9
  2. Atoms or Bits?
    • There are around 1028 atoms arranged in a complex pattern that go to make up a human being. How best to teleport them? It’s clearly easier to transfer the data rather than the matter (just as it’s easier to distribute books electronically rather than physically).
    • Well, there are two problems with teleporting people as information: firstly, you have to extract the information; but – unlike books – people ‘require atoms’.
    • It seems – according to the New Generation Technical Manual that the Star Trek teleporter sends matter as well as information, though there are plot inconsistencies where duplication occurs when sending matter twice would be impossible. However, if only information was beamed up, it might be combined with atoms from a matter store on the Enterprise to make as many copies as required.
    • There’s a multiply incoherent account of Picard being beamed out as ‘pure energy’, to be ‘free of the constraints of matter’. It seems that this is no fun, but Picard is retrieved and his corporeal form is restored from the pattern buffer. Krauss claims that this would be impossible as – if Picard’s matter had been sent out into space – there would be nothing to restore. I have two questions10 about this:-
      1. In what form is Picard supposed to exist in when he’s ‘pure energy’? Does the energy beam stop somewhere and dance around?
      2. Surely Picard can be recreated using matter in the Enterprise? Isn’t this how ‘beaming up’ is supposed to work? Or does it grab the matter back using a ‘tractor beam’, however this might work?
    • As the dramatic situation is obscure, Krauss will look into both the matter and the data possibilities.
  3. What is a Human Being?
    • This question isn’t usually addressed (in Star Trek?). Are we ‘merely’ the sum of our atoms, appropriately configured? If your atoms – identically configured – were reconstituted elsewhere, would you be reconstituted (or at least a functionally-equivalent individual)?
    • Krauss doesn’t address the first question11, but even functional equivalence – which he takes to be common sense – is moot as it depends on materialism. There’s discussion of Star Trek’s assumption that there are life forces, ‘neural energy’ or ‘Katras’ – analogous to souls. Clearly the series doesn’t want to offend religious sensibilities, but – presumably – teleportation would disprove the existence of immaterial elements12 (if it worked). Krauss wants to remain neutral on this debate, though he can’t, really, but takes it as a working assumption for future discussion that all we are is ‘bits and atoms’.
  4. Bits
    • Transferring information is a lot easier than transferring matter. But – Krauss thinks – there’s a problem with ‘disposing of the body’. For some reason I can’t fathom13 – and haven’t heard mentioned elsewhere, he seems to think the body has to be completely destroyed by converting it into energy, which would – for a 50Kg lightweight – emit the energy equivalent to a 1,000 megaton H Bomb.
    • Krauss sees another problem – if this technology works, then replicating people would be trivial or – at any rate – easier than transporting, as destruction of the original would not be required. Indeed, inanimate objects are replicated all the time on the Enterprise.
    • However, Krauss sees ethical problems her (though he doesn’t specify what they are). He say that people would be like computer programs or drafts of a book kept on disk: if one gets damaged or develops a bug, simply revert to a backup copy14.
  5. Atoms
    • So, on both ethical and practical grounds, Krauss thinks it’s better to send the matter rather than just the information. However, sending the matter is difficult because of the huge binding energies involved. We’re given a whistle-stop refresher on atomic theory. There are three levels of ‘binding’: that involving electrical forces (‘chemical’) that involving the strong nuclear force (which are a million times stronger) and finally the forces between the quarks themselves. If we heat nuclei to 1012 degrees (that is , a million times hotter than the centre of the sun) then not only will the quarks dissociate, but the matter will be converted into almost pure energy consuming the equivalent of 10% of their rest mass in the process. Hence, our 50 Kg lightweight would take 10% of its annihilation energy – the equivalent of a 100 megaton H Bomb.
    • Trying to hide the problem under the rug by adopting one of the less energetic options (sending atoms or nucleons rather than pure energy) causes other problems if we want to send matter at near light-speed. However, it turns out that we’d need to supply energy comparable to15 their rest mass energy – that is, 10 times the energy needed to dissociate the matter into quarks / energy – to do this. There is an advantage in that this is technically easier to do than to achieve the temperatures needed for quark dissociation. Using huge particle accelerators we’ve managed to accelerate protons to near light speed, but not been able to dissociate quarks.
    • So, Krauss sees a choice: Either create a power source that exceeds the total power consumed by the entire earth (in 1995) by a factor of 10,00016 or – to save 90% of this power – find a way of instantaneously raising the temperature of a human being to 1 million times that of the centre of the sun.
  6. Information Storage & Transmission Bandwidth
    • Krauss has a preamble about how computing power had increased in the decade 1985 – 1995: depending on what we’re talking about it had increased approximately 100-fold to 1,000-fold. We might use this to extrapolate17 into the ‘dawn of the 23rd century’ when transporters supposedly begin operating.
    • He also digresses into a data processing bottleneck – which is the human limitations in utilising all this power (in contrast to Star Trek’s Lieutenant Commander Data18, who has no such problems).
    • Anyway, how much data does a human being represent? As we saw, there are around 1028 atoms, with – Krauss estimates – around 1k per atom19 to define its position, internal states and relation to its neighbours. So, we’re talking about around 1028k of data. It is ‘non-trivial’ to store this amount of data, which – according to Krauss’s calculations – is 16 orders of magnitude greater than the data content of all the books ever written. He does some rather out-dated calculations based on old hard drives. Also, retrieving the information at 1995 rates (100 Mbps20) would take 2 x 1013 years (2,000 times the age of the universe).
    • But – as noted – this area may – based on 100-times improvements every 10 years – be soluble within the timeframes envisaged. 21 orders of magnitude21 would be gobbled up in 210 years, though no-one knows how.
    • As noted, Quantum Computers (Krauss posits ‘biological computers22’ to supply the massive parallel-processing) might achieve the processing capabilities fairly shortly, but storage remains an issue. I’m not sure about bandwidth.
  7. That Quantum Stuff
    • Rather than taking QM (entanglement and all that) as the solution to the problem of teleportation, Krauss considers it as adding to the problem.
    • Krauss gives a potted account of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle23. In this context, it means that the closer a look you take at the body you’re ‘scanning’ the less accurate the information you can get out of it. This is an immutable law of QM and not something that future technology can get round, not even the ‘Heisenberg compensators’ (‘how do they work?’ … ‘’Very well, thank you!’). As far as the Star Trek plot is concerned, this low resolution explains why the Enterprise food – replicated by the same technology as teleportation – tastes so bland.
  8. Seeing is Believing
    • The final problem relates to ‘beaming up’ from a planet’s surface. The teleporter has to resolve at atomic levels from a considerable distance (the operating range is supposedly 40,000 kilometres).
    • Krauss explains the resolving power24 – and therefore the size – of telescopes that depends on the aperture and the effects of diffraction.
    • There are other factors – the wavelength of light and the planetary atmosphere. To resolve at the atomic level X-rays or gamma-rays will be needed. However, as the planet is supposedly habitable, its atmosphere would shield it from these, so we’d need to use neutrinos or gravitons, which have their own problems.
    • But – in any case – given that the Enterprise is using a wavelength of a billionth of a centimetre at a distance of 40,000 kilometres, the diameter of the telescope would need to be 40,000 kilometres25.
  9. Summary
    • Teleporters are impossible unless we can26:-
      1. Heat matter to temperatures a million times that at the centre of the Sun.
      2. Expend more energy in a single machine that the whole of mankind currently uses.
      3. Build a telescope the size of the Earth.
      4. Improve computers by a factor of 1,000 billion billion.
      5. Avoid the laws of QM.

Paper Comment

Printout of my Summary is held in "Various - Papers on Desktop".



In-Page Footnotes ("Krauss (Lawrence M.) - The Physics of Star Trek: Atoms or Bits?")

Footnote 1:
  • Give references to the other papers I’ve read on this topic, and sequence the dates.
Footnote 10:
  • Does Wikipedia: Lonely Among Us will enlighten us? Well, no. It gives the plot reasoning behind Picard’s decision to beam himself out as pure energy (it’s to get rid of an ‘energy entity’ that has infiltrated him).
  • The metaphysics of it all are obscure: just what is ‘Picard’s essence’?
Footnote 11:
  • None of the ‘scientific’ sources consider the logic of identity as an equivalence relation (though they sometimes consider duplication to be a social nuisance).
  • I suppose reduplication objections can easily be side-stepped by invoking perdurantism, not that this is mentioned.
Footnote 12:
  • Presumably it depends what we mean by ‘matter’; maybe if this ’extra’ is some extra energy of some sort – rather than an immaterial substance – it could be beamed?
Footnote 13:
  • Why can’t the body be disposed of conventionally (by dissociating its atoms, and storing them for assembling the teleportee on his return)?
  • Failing that, wouldn’t this energy come in useful; presumably the technology would be up to it?
Footnote 14:
  • This idea – troubling though it is in itself – seems to ignore the fact that people are concrete particulars – hardware and not software. The ‘restored copy’ (however recreated) is exactly similar to (bar a bit of experience since the backup took place) the original, but is not identical to it.
Footnote 15:
  • is there some wriggle-room here? I ought to be able to do the calculations using the Maclaurin or binomial expansion of γ, but with β = v/c nearing 1 it doesn’t converge rapidly.
Footnote 16:
  • I was completely lost at this point. Where did this figure come from?
  • Apparently, the global power usage is currently 15 terawatts (ie 15 x 1012 watts). This is power, not energy. A megaton is approximately 4 x 1015 Joules.
  • So, the factor depends on the duration of the energy ‘burst’.
  • We’re talking about 1,000 megatons, so the time to supply 4 x 1018 Joules would be 4/15 x 106 seconds.
  • So, taking our 10,000 factor into account, that would be 4 / 15 x 100 seconds; so, something under half a minute, which might just be acceptable, if a bit slow in an emergency!
Footnote 17:
  • We need to compare with Moore’s Law (really a rule of thumb: see Wikipedia: Moore's Law), which has a doubling every 2 years, which would lead only to a 32-fold increase over 10 years.
  • There are issues with Moore’s Law: it has migrated to a ‘bang for buck’ law, so it no longer means a doubling of raw power.
  • There are technological limits to current technology – though this applies to storage, memory and processing power, rather than bandwidth.
  • For processing power, Quantum Computing, if it really takes off, could be a game-changer.
Footnote 18: Footnote 19:
  • Krauss states that this estimate is ‘conservative’, but I’m not sure what this means, in this context: is it a reasonable minimum or maximum?
Footnote 20:
  • In 2023, speeds of 10Gbps seem possible, ie. 100 times faster. So, still 20 times the age of the universe!
Footnote 21:
  • I’m not sure where this figure comes from. The transporter has to work quickly if someone is to be whisked away from a life-critical situation (say, before they are shot).
  • 1028k of data would take 1021 seconds based on 1995 rates (107 Mega Bytes / second).
  • So, if ‘one second’ is the reaction time, that’s where our 21 orders of magnitude comes from.
Footnote 22:
  • See Wikipedia: Biological computing.
  • As noted, Quantum Computers (see Wikipedia: Quantum computing) seem a much better bet, especially as it’s difficult to see biological computers performing at the speeds required (sub-second responses) no matter how parallel their processing.
  • However, Krauss is hopeful – given that the human brain is a biological computer ‘light years ahead’ of any current digital one (though – I might add – in what sense).
Footnote 23: Footnote 24: Footnote 25:
  • This comes out of the air.
  • Rayleigh’s formula is D = 1.22 x λ / θ where λ is the wavelength and θ is the angle to be resolved.
  • Let’s see:
    → λ = 10-11 metres (but cancels out, as the wavelength is chosen to be smaller than the size of the atoms to be resolved).
    → θ = 2π x λ / distance.
  • So, D is approximately 40,000 kilometres (or the distance from the person to be beamed up).
Footnote 26:
  • I got tired of cross-checking at this point, as there are various options and some – to my mind – false assumptions.
  • But I agree that it’s effectively impossible.

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