A real Starship Enterprise in 20 years?

Do you have any links of this conclusive proof? I'm a bit skeptical since you're citing only split-brain research (in which there's a disconnect of motor control or sensory perception): that doesn't really relate to the medical nominclature of "consciousness". Early surgical procedures for epilepsy were pretty invasive and more often involved callosotomies. Now, neurosurgeons will first evaluate the typology of a patient's brain and will either dissect or stimulate a specific region that was assessed to be causing the epilepsy. Sometimes callosotomies are still performed, but only the anterior portion of the corpus callosum (which btw is not the only interconnection of the hemispheres of the brain).

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_consciousness"]Disorders of consciousness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

 

Gravity curves space time, and gravity is the only thing that curves space-time. And mass is the only thing that creates gravity. So to curve space-time you need a LOT of mass. The sun doesn't have enough gravity to curve space time enough, over a large enough region, to produce effective faster-than-light travel between any two points of significance. Maybe if you had a black hole the mass of the Milky Way in the volume of a space ship, who knows? But in that case, your space ship would be sucked into its own black hole and obliterated.

You read the title as "A real starship Enterprise. I read the title as "A real Starship Enterprise".

The difference is in whether "starship" is a descriptor or part of the name. Since the referenced web page makes it clear that the craft will not have "warp" drive, it is clearly not a "starship." It is merely named "The Starship Enterprise."

What was done on a sub-microscopic scale is not applicable to the macroscopic world, and physicists understand this. Only science reporters who've never studied science fail to understand this.

You neglect to take into account quantum uncertainty. Since you can never know the exact state of the original, you cannot make an exact copy.

Another way to say this is that even if the laws of QM did not make it impossible to actually determine the exact state of the original, a computer capable of processing that much information would be the size of the galaxy.

IOW, it's not science. It's magic. And if we're going to invoke magic, a wand is easier than a transporter pad.

There's also the question of transmitting the information. Assuming we did have a computer capable of processing all that information, it would take more energy to transmit that gogolplex of information than it would take to send the people themselves in a conventional shuttle rocket ship.

 

[ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Wolcott_Sperry]Roger Wolcott Sperry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

is a simplistic start.

Note the following quote:
In his Nobel-winning work, Sperry and Gazzaniga tested four out of ten patients who had undergone an operation developed in 1940 by William Van Wagenen, a neurosurgeon in Rochester, NY.[6] The surgery, designed to treat epileptics with intractable grand mal seizures, involves severing the corpus callosum, the area of the brain used to transfer signals between the right and left hemispheres. Sperry and his colleagues tested these patients with tasks that were known to be dependent on specific hemispheres of the brain and demonstrated that the two halves of the brain may each contain consciousness. In his words, "each hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right, perceiving, thinking, remembering, reasoning, willing, and emoting, all at a characteristically human level, and . . . both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different, even in mutually conflicting, mental experiences that run along in parallel"
—Roger Wolcott Sperry, 1974

However, the real sources are his actual experiments. Unfortunately, I can only refer to books, since that is where I got my info. My prime text is:

Brain Circuits and Functions of the Mind, edited by Colwyn Trevarthen.

Now in all fairness, there is not a universally agreed upon definition of "consciousness" that makes such statements unassailable. But none the less, split brain patients definitely have dual behaviors in one body.

 

So Daniel says: who appears to want to only adhear to relativity theory again and again, and acts like he's the final authority on physics. You can keep your beliefs, but since respected physicists have been expanding our ideas of space-time with ideas like string theory (which expands but doesn't contradict relativity)...I'd rather keep an open mind. Stephen Hawking is pretty good about overviewing different theories of spacetime for lay people such as myself.

 

Sorry Daniel, but that is a totally incorrect statement. You need to read up on the details.

 

I was lucky enough to discover the works of Arthur C Clarke at an early age. His brilliance continues to impress and amaze me.

If we're talking about Heisenberg, then maybe you can. You just can't remember where you put it.

This is very rare for me to argue against you, Daniel, but in one way I disagree with this. I know you won't take it personally, but....I'm going to bring up the esteemed Mr. Clarke again and quote his Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistiguishable from magic."

 

And with the accepted medical nominclature of "consciousness", I wouldn't say that medical science has "conclusively proven" two consciousnesses. It's very hard to quanify how much split-independant thinking is going on with a split-brain patient: I don't think there has been that many people who were truely "split-brain" (completely severed corpus callosum and anterior/posterior commisures). That makes it especially hard to pin point which areas of emotion are crossed between each hemisphere (medical science doesn't have exact answers on which specific tracts go through these three connections). The brain is a pretty complex organ in which there are certain redundancies and variations from person to person. With dissociative identity disorder, most patients have not had brain injuries. Clinical neurologists have fascinating stories of what kind of symptoms patients exhibit after they have had a brain injury. Because there are numerous pathways carrying motor information, sensory information, memory information, and emotions, only certain areas are debilitated with brain injuries. I would think that would be more traumatic for the person, as some perceptions and movements would be consistant while others get lost. Their brain then has to get used to having some consistant signals and some disconnected ones.

 

Having been on the set for ST TNG, and spending time in the Transporter room set, when you look at the control panel, there is a button marked "Heisenberg Compensator" It is there to remove uncertainty from the subatomic measurements, making transporter travel feasible.
Gene Roddenberry was smarter than some people think. He put a lot of thought into his show!

 

Or find a way to avoid it...I think my favorite one was when Worf was asked about the difference with earlier Klingons

 

Because, on the macroscopic level, relativity is the ONLY construct that actually has any evidence to back it up.

String theory, for example, is entirely speculative. There is as yet not a single piece of evidence for it, and the more they work on it, the more ad hoc assumptions they have to throw in to make it work.

This just shows that Rodenbury understood that transporters are not possible, and that in the context of sci-fi he had to offer some "explanation" in the form of a button. Sort of like a button which says "Push this button to make god appear and grant a miracle."

Sorry to disappoint all the ST fans, but nothing you see on ST constitutes evidence of how the world actually works.

Anyway, I prefer Galaxy Quest to Star Trek. That's just my opinion.

 

Well, it's good entertainment, most of the time. The better episodes have some element of real human issues, despite the religious and technological fantasies.

Galaxy Quest was great - a much better spoof than I was expecting.

 

The evidence pointed to for relativity tends to not be on the macroscopic level. And what evidence we have for it has only been discovered fairly recently. When relativity was first postulated, there wasn't "any evidence to back it up". Science works on the principle of ideas being postulated, them being reviewed by the scientific community, and then them being accepted when there's been thorough review or testing. A large number of physicists do accept the idea of quantized spacetime (which allows for warp drive). Just because it's not an accepted law, and deemed fantasy by a PC poster, does not mean that it is theoritically plausible and accepted at a future date (when we have the means to test theories that go beyond relativity). It's also a theory that hasn't been rejected by the scientific community. If we were as closed minded, then mankind wouldn't have thought the world was round until the first satellite went up.

I respect your belief that quantized spacetime is hoey, but believe it or not, Daniel is not the final say as to whether warp drive, shields, or transporters will be possible in the distant future.

 

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